Windswept piles of dust, or layers of ice? ESA’s Mars Express has revisited one of Mars’s most mysterious features to clarify its composition. Its findings suggest layers of water ice stretching several kilometres below ground – the most water ever found in this part of the planet.

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ESA astronaut and commander of Expedition 70 Andreas Mogensen has some advice for Marcus Wandt, ESA’s first project astronaut, who will join him on the International Space Station on his Muninn mission. It will be the first time two Scandinavians are in space together, which fits perfectly with their mission names, Huginn and Muninn.

Golden CO (SPX) Jan 17, 2024
Nearly 75 percent of the U.S. could experience damaging earthquake shaking, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey-led team of 50+ scientists and engineers. This was one of several key findings from the latest USGS National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM). The model was used to create a color-coded map that pinpoints where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur based on insights from se

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 17, 2024
Diamonds could form in the relatively shallow interiors of planets like Neptune and Uranus and travel downward, driving the ice giants' magnetic fields, according to new research from an international team of scientists including Carnegie's Alexander Goncharov and Eric Edmund. Published in Nature Astronomy, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory-led team's findings used the European XFEL

Boston MA (SPX) Jan 16, 2024
"Zwitterionic" might not be a word you come across every day, but for Professor Patrick Doyle of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, it's a word that's central to the technology his group is developing to remove micropollutants from water. Derived from the German word "zwitter," meaning "hybrid," "zwitterionic" molecules are those with an equal number of positive and negative charges.

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jan 17, 2024
The powerful gravity fields of black holes can devour whole planets' worth of matter - often so violently that they expel streams of particles traveling near the speed of light in formations known as jets. Scientists understand that these high-speed jets can accelerate these particles, called cosmic rays, but little is definitively known about that process. Recent findings by researchers u

Upton NY (SPX) Jan 17, 2024
A unique "passenger" is joining an upcoming mission to the moon. In 2026, physicists are planning to operate a radio telescope on the far side of the moon-an unforgiving environment that poses tremendous challenges for research equipment to survive, but also the promise of enormous scientific payoff. Called LuSEE-Night, the project aims to access lingering radio waves from the universe's ancient

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 17, 2024
Earth planning date: Friday, January 12, 2024: Cracking up - not Curiosity, but the rocks! It is all about the cracks and fractures in the workspace for this 4-sol plan. We have observed resistant, polygonal fractures/ridges in many recent bedrock blocks. There is much speculation among the team as to the origin of these features. Hypotheses have different implications for past environments, and

Tokyo (AFP) Jan 17, 2024
Japan, whose unmanned "sniper" probe will attempt a lunar landing on Saturday, is one of many countries and private companies launching new missions to the Moon. It is a feat so far only achieved by four nations - the United States, the Soviet Union, China and most recently India - with spacecraft often losing communication or crash-landing. The modern lunar exploration programmes incl

Istanbul (AFP) Jan 17, 2024
When Turkey's first astronaut blasts off for the International Space Station (ISS) this week, he will embody his country's pride and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's outsized geopolitical ambitions. Alper Gezeravci, a 43-year-old fighter pilot and colonel in Turkey's air force, is due to take off on Wednesday from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a two-week mission.