NASA periodically transmits cultural content into space. From music to a recording of the human heartbeat on Voyager’s golden record, who we are as a planet spanning civilization periodically gets beamed to the stars. And the variety of what is getting sent out just got a bit more hip to the beat. For reasons I can’t explain, NASA pointed its Deep Space Network at the planet Venus and transmitted the Lyrics to Missy Elliott’s song “The Rain”. Venus, by the way, is Missy Elliott’s favorite planet. Because of how radio beams spread out as they travel, some of this signal will have...
Lucy finds a moonmoon
Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL Last episode, we brought you some early science results from the Lucy mission, which is out exploring asteroids in the main belt on the way to hanging out amongst Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The biggest piece of news was the...
Mars quakes, ices, and places for …biosignatures?
Credit: NASA While asteroids are proving themselves more complicated than we expected, Mars, in a fit of publications, is also demanding attention for all its icy complexity. Back in May 2022, the Insight lander recorded a Marsquake with a magnitude of 4.7. While not...
Lucy Sends Science Home
Credit: NASA Back in October 2021, a mission called Lucy lifted off on a multi-year journey to visit Jupiter’s two collections of Trojan Asteroids. Today, it is making its way through the asteroid belt before circling back to use the Earth to get a gravitational...
Beating up rocks reveals possible origin of Ceres organics
Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Once upon a time, we thought asteroids were just bland rocks. Turns out, if you actually look at them from up close, they are complex and interesting. When the Dawn mission visited the largest...
It’s a world, it’s a math error, it’s … new physics?
Credit Katherine Brown & Harsh Mathur When I was little, I was totally into all those “In Search of…” shows. There are so many cool mysteries in history waiting to be solved, and I love that I’ve gotten to see some of these great mysteries get solved. The giant...
(Big-)Moonless worlds have unstable tilts
Modern-day Mars experiences cyclical changes in climate and, consequently, ice distribution. Unlike Earth, the obliquity (or tilt) of Mars changes substantially on timescales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. At present day obliquity of about 25-degree...
Perseverance collects a River of Science
Jezero Crater as Seen by ESA's Mars Express Orbiter: This image shows the remains of an ancient delta in Mars' Jezero Crater, which NASA's Perseverance Mars rover will explore for signs of fossilized microbial life. Credit: NASA The remnants of ancient dunes aren’t...
How Rivers Flow: Here, Mars & Titan
This false-color image shows Titan’s second-largest body of liquid, Ligeia Mare, in the moon’s northern hemisphere. Scientists think that rivers flowing into large bodies of liquids like this one should form deltas. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell New research...
Geoarchaeology: Protecting humanities record of exploration
Apollo 15 lunar module with Mons Hadley in the background. Credit: NASA / JSC / ASU / Andy Saunders I don’t know about you, but there have been a lot of random times when I or someone near me has said, “Someday archaeologists are going to have a field day with…” as we...