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Blue Origin Plans A Pair Of Low-Flying Prospectors Around The Lunar South Pole
The water locked up in the Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) of the Moon’s south pole is a critical resource if we are ever going to get a permanent lunar presence off the ground. But while we know the water ice there exists, we don’t really know how much. We have to move from general estimates
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JAXA Plans To Bring Back Pristine Early Solar System Samples From A Comet
Japan’s space agency, JAXA, has been knocking it out of the park with small-body exploration missions for decades. They had historic successes with both Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, and they are going to visit the Martian Moons soon with the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. But after that, they are aiming for something much more pristine
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The Outer Solar System Contributed Nothing To Earth
Piecing together the history of Earth’s formation leans heavily on evidence from meteorites. Since the vast majority of meteorites come from asteroids, that means understanding asteroids can also lead to an understanding of Earth’s formation. Together, asteroids and meteorites make up the population of debris left over after the rocky planets formed. Asteroids and meteorites
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SuperCDM Experiment Reaches Critical Temperature, Bringing it One Step Closer to Detecting Dark Matter
Scientists at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have reached a milestone with the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment. Located deep underground at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory (SNOLAB) in Canada, the world’s deepest underground laboratory, this experiment is designed to detect the Universe’s unseen mass, aka. Dark Matter. The
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Meet Orpheus – A Hopper Mission Built To Hunt For Life In Martian Volcanoes
We’ve spent decades scratching the surface of Mars trying to uncover life there. But we’ve been searching a barren wasteland bombarded by radiation and bathed in toxic perchlorates. The entire time, it’s likely that it’s been too hostile to harbor extant life. So if we want a better shot at finding currently living life on
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A New Class of Star: Merger Remnant
Sometimes it can seem like science has Nature all figured out. In mainstream press, that idea is hard to avoid, even if it’s never stated overtly. But scientists, and maybe astronomers especially, see things differently. When you’re a scientist you understand better than most that our names for things like types of stars or stellar
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A Mercury Rover Could Explore the Planet by Sticking to the Terminator
The closest planet to our Sun, Mercury, experiences extreme temperature variations. Since the planet has no atmosphere to speak of, it is in a constant cycle of where one side is extremely hot and the other extremely cold. On the Sun-facing side, temperatures reach a scorching 427 °C (800 °F), enough to melt tin and
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Webb’s Picture of the Month Features Two Planet-Forming Disks and a Possible Planet
The James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) picture of the month shows Tau 042021 (left) and Oph 163131 (right), two protoplanetary disks located about 450 and 480 light-years from Earth in the constellations Taurus and Ophiuchus (respectively). These disks are composed of material left over from the formation of new stars, which coalesce into planetesimals that
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