Dry Martian Meteorite Reveals Early Water in Mars's Crust

Billions of years ago, Mars was hypothesized to have been a habitable world with flowing liquid water and the potential for life. But directly studying its ancient past is currently limited to orbiters and rovers, as scientists have yet to obtain direct samples from Mars. However, meteorites have been found on Earth to have potentially originated from Mars during large impacts that flung chunks of the Red Planet into space, eventually being grabbed by Earth’s gravity and crashing into the Earth’s surface.

The CosmoQuest Satellite Will Listen to the Early Universe From the Far Side of the Moon

A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: what happened in the roughly 150 million years of cosmic dark ages, before the universe’s first stars appeared?

Strange Signals Called Long-period Radio Transits Come From Cataclysmic Variables

Long-period Radio Transients are sources that emit repeating radio and x-ray signals. The signals are polarized and coherent, and are similar to pulsars in some respects. But the type of astrophysical object responsible for them has been vigorously debated. New research says that at least one of them comes from a cataclysmic variable, a binary star where a white dwarf and a red dwarf orbit closely.

New Solar System Models Show Earth Is No Fluke

Astrobiologists use new starting points to produce ‘organic’ models of our solar system’s formation.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, With Some Help From a Korean Spacecraft

A SpaceX Falcon upper stage crashed into the Moon on August 5th. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the crash site from different viewing angles and with different sunlight angles. The images showed that the crater is about 18 meters wide and about 3 meters deep. SpaceX says the crash was an accident.

Mars's Funky Moon Deimos was Shaped by an Impact

Mars' moon Deimos has a large crater on its southern pole. It's also covered by a layer of regolith so deep it buries many other, smaller craters. New research shows that an impact is responsible for both, and that the moon is rather fragile and porous, like a rubble pile asteroid.

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 4: Looking For Us

Some signs of an alien civilization are easier to spot than signs of life itself. On technosignatures, from CFCs and industrial gases to the pandemic dip in pollution, and why Earth's most detectable moment might be right now.