Early planetary migration in the solar system has been long established, and there are myriad theories that have been put forward to explain where the planets were coming from. Theories such as the Grand Tack Hypothesis an the Nice Model show how important that migration is to the current state of our solar system. Now, a team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has come up with a novel way of trying to understand planetary migration patterns: by looking at meteorite compositions.

The researchers, led by postdoc Jan Render, had three key realizations. First, that almost all the meteorites that have fallen to Earth originated from the asteroid belt. Second, that the asteroid belt is known to have formed by sweeping material up from all over the solar system. And third, and perhaps most importantly, that they could analyze the isotopic signatures in meteorites to help determine where a given asteroid had formed in the solar system.

With that knowledge, they could then extrapolate out to other asteroids of the same type. There are approximately 100 different types of asteroids, with different isotopic signatures, in the asteroid belt.

In recent years, satellites have become smaller, cheaper, and easier to make with commercial off the shelf parts. Some even weigh as little as one gram. This means more people can afford to send them into orbit. Now, satellite operators have started launching mega-constellations—groups of hundreds or even thousands of small satellites working together—into orbit around Earth.

Instead of one large satellite, groups of small satellites can provide coverage of the entire planet at once. Civil, military and private operators are increasingly using constellations to create global and continuous coverage of the Earth. Constellations can provide a variety of functions, including climate monitoring, disaster management or digital connectivity, like satellite broadband.

But to provide coverage of the entire planet with small satellites requires a lot of them. On top of this, they have to orbit close to Earth's surface to reduce interruption of coverage and communication delays. This means they take up an already busy area of space called low Earth orbit, the space 100 to 2,000km above the Earth's surface.

In September, a team led by astronomers in the United Kingdom announced that they had detected the chemical phosphine in the thick clouds of Venus. The team's reported detection, based on observations by two Earth-based radio telescopes, surprised many Venus experts. Earth's atmosphere contains small amounts of phosphine, which may be produced by life. Phosphine on Venus generated buzz that the planet, often succinctly touted as a "hellscape," could somehow harbor life within its acidic clouds.

Since that initial claim, other science teams have cast doubt on the reliability of the phosphine detection. Now, a team led by researchers at the University of Washington has used a robust model of the conditions within the atmosphere of Venus to revisit and comprehensively reinterpret the radio telescope observations underlying the initial phosphine claim.