Lifeboat Foundation

Mosses are among Earth’s great terraformers, turning barren rock into fertile soils, and now a team of scientists is proposing these non-vascular plants could do the same on Mars.

Whether we should introduce life from Earth onto our red neighbor is another question – we don’t have a great track record with this on our own planet.

But if we decide it’s worth messing with soil on Mars to create a second home for us Earthlings, ecologist Xiaoshuang Li and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a candidate that they think should do just the trick.

NASA’s Juno orbiter has returned its latest batch of images of giant Jupiter, which are as impressive as ever.

Despite suffering from radiation damage earlier this year, its JunoCam camera—boasting just a two-megapixel resolution—continues to take and return arresting images of the planet’s cloud tops.

In recent months, Juno has been sending back images of Io, the closest of Jupiter’s large Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede) and the most volcanic world in the solar system.

NASA is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Chandra X-ray Observatory launch by sharing never-before-seen photos of the largest known spiral galaxy in the universe.

The Chandra X-ray observatory was launched on July 23, 1999. Since then, it has scoured the universe to look for X-ray emissions from exploded stars, clusters of galaxies and more, according to NASA. The observatory returns data to the Chandra X-ray Center at Harvard University’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

To most people, the sun is a steady, never-changing source of heat and light. But to scientists, it’s a dynamic star, constantly in flux, sending energy out into space. Experts say the sun is now in its most active period in two decades, causing potential disruptions to radio and satellite communications. John Yang speaks with Bill Murtagh of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center to learn more.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Constructing spatial maps from sensory inputs is challenging in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Gornet and Thomson show that as an agent navigates an environment, a self-attention neural network using predictive coding can recover the environment’s map in its latent space.

Did life ever exist on Mars, and if so, how did it get there? This is the goal of NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has traversed Gale Crater on Mars since 2012. But a recent finding by the car-sized robotic explorer could help bring scientists one step closer to answering these questions as Curiosity sent back images of yellow crystals revealed to be deposits of elemental sulfur, along with an entire field of them. This finding was accidentally “un-earthed” as Curiosity drove over them during its excursions. While scientists didn’t anticipate finding elemental sulfur in this region, this finding could hold the potential to help piece together the geologic history of Gale Crater and whether life once existed there.

Recent image of elemental sulfur crystals obtained by NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems)

“Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, who is a project scientist on Curiosity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”

How many Earth-like planets exist throughout the universe? This is what recent talk given at the National Astronomy Meeting 2024 hopes to address as Dr. David Brown, who is a scientist on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission, provided an update on the mission and the goals it hopes to achieve. This comes as PLATO is currently scheduled to launch in December 2026 with the goal of finding Earth-like planets throughout the universe, which could greatly expand our knowledge of exoplanets, as well.

“PLATO’s goal is to search for exoplanets around stars similar to the Sun and at orbital periods long enough for them to be in the habitable zone,” said Dr. Brown. “One of the main mission objectives is to find another Earth-Sun equivalent pair, but it is also designed to carefully and precisely characterize the exoplanets that it finds (i.e. work out their masses, radii, and bulk density).”

Scientists made a game-changing discovery about energy conversion in space.

Astronomers, led by Caltech’s Kareem El-Badry, have identified what could be 21 neutron stars orbiting stars similar to our sun—a rare discovery in the universe where most stars are found in pairs.