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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have demonstrated for the first time how an asteroid or comet could have caused the mega crater on Phobos without completely destroying the Martian moon. Credit: Image courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Mars’ largest moon Phobos has captured public imagination and been shrouded in mystery for decades. But numerical simulations recently conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shed some light on the enigmatic satellite. The dominant feature on the surface of Phobos (22-kilometers across) is Stickney crater (9-km across), a mega crater that spans nearly half the moon. The crater lends Phobos a physical resemblance to the planet-destroying Death Star in the film “Star Wars...

Illustration shows how a robot could assemble the trusses that would support a massive telescope mirror. Credit: Sergio Pellegrino/Caltech

Seeing deep into space requires large telescopes. The larger the telescope, the more light it collects, and the sharper the image it provides. Eg, NASA’s Kepler space observatory, with a mirror diameter of <1 meter, is searching for exoplanets orbiting stars up to 3,000 light-years away. By contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope, with a 2.4-meter mirror, has studied stars more than 10 billion light-years away.

Now Caltech’s Sergio Pellegrino and colleagues are proposing a space observatory that would have a primary mirror with a diameter of 100 meters – 40 times larger than Hubble’s...

Enhanced color image of Mercury. The bright, circular deposit in the upper center of the image is an enormous effusive volcanic deposit, situated within the largest impact crater on the planet, the Caloris basin. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab/Carnegie Institution of Washington

New research from North Carolina State University add insight into the geological evolution of Mercury in particular, and what happens when rocky planets cool and contract in general. There are two types of volcanic activity: effusive and explosive. Explosive volcanism is often a violent event that results in large ash and debris eruptions, such as the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980...

Image illustrating the concept of the sleep homeostat. Credit: Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour/ University of Oxford

Oxford University researchers have discovered what causes a switch to flip in our brains and wake us up. Sleep is governed by 2 systems – the circadian clock and the sleep homeostat. While the circadian clock is quite well understood, very little is known about the sleep homeostat. Professor Gero Miesenböck explained: ‘The circadian clock allows us to anticipate predictable changes in our environment that are caused by the Earth’s rotation. As such, it makes sure we do our sleeping when it hurts us least, but it doesn’t speak to the mystery of why we need to sleep in the first place.

‘That explanation will likely come from understanding the second controller – slee...