Category Astronomy/Space

Poor old Venera 9, the Soviet Union’s Venus lander, separated from its orbiter and made a hot, violent descent through the dense Venusian atmosphere on October 22, 1975, landing hard on a circular shield designed to crumple and absorb the impact. It only survived the intense surface conditions for 53 minutes, transmitting data regarding clouds, light irradiance, temperature and atmospheric chemistry, as well as the first image ever taken of the surface of another planet. And then it died. But its findings were significant because Venus and Earth are similar terrestrial planets believed to have formed through similar processes.

It’s fair to say that while Earth and Venus are siblings, with comparable size and composition, they are vastly different in...

A team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with a colleague at the U...

In a recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, an international team of researchers led by the University of Cologne in Germany examined how solar flares erupted by the TRAPPIST-1 star could affect the interior heating of its orbiting exoplanets.

This study holds the potential to help us better understand how solar flares affect planetary evolution. The TRAPPIST-1 system is an exoplanetary system located approximately 39 light-years from Earth with at least seven potentially rocky exoplanets in orbit around a star that has 12 times less mass than our own sun. Since the parent star is much smaller than our own sun, then the the planetary orbits within the TRAPPIST-1 system are much smaller than our own solar system, as well...

The Chang’e-5 mission touched down in the Mons Rümker region of the northern Oceanus Procellarum of the moon and returned 1.731 kg of lunar regolith. Recognizing exotic clasts (i.e., non-Chang’e-5 locally derived materials) in the Chang’e-5 regolith could provide critical information about the lithological diversity and regolith gardening process in the young mare region of the moon.

Recently, Dr. Zeng Xiaojia, Prof. Li Xiongyao and Prof. Liu Jianzhong from the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGCAS) have identified seven exotic igneous clasts in Chang’e-5 samples from more than 3,000 of Chang’e-5 regolith particles.

This work was published in Nature Astronomy on ...