Scientists have discovered nearly all “extinction-scale” Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs (asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter) and determined they pose no risk of impact in the near future. But there are still thousands of smaller NEOs that pose a potential danger.
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) coordinates the detection… Read more
When 51 Pegasi b was the first planet orbiting a Sun-like star discovered outside our solar system in 1995, the question of whether life exists in other corners of our galaxy shifted from, “Do exoplanets exist?” to “How do we recognize whether an exoplanet can support life?”
Since then, NASA’s Kepler mission and ground-based surveys of exoplanets have revealed… Read more
Nov. 14, 2018
In November 2017, a team of scientists pointed NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope toward a comet-like object known as ’Oumuamua—the first interstellar body ever found in our solar system—but the object proved too faint for the infrared telescope to detect.
Though initially disappointing, this non-detection of ’Oumuamua eventually provided new information about the cosmic interloper, according to a new… Read more
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Colonizing Mars as a backup planet for Earth has been a theme in both science fiction and popular science for decades, and NASA plans to send human explorers to the Red Planet within the next 20 years.
But how feasible is it for humans to explore or colonize Mars? With an average daily… Read more
Much research in the field of astrobiology—the study of life in the universe—focuses on the habitability of extraterrestrial environments in our solar system and beyond. NASA’s Planetary Science and Technology from Analog Research (PSTAR) program sponsors research exploring the Earth’s extreme environments to develop a sound basis for conducting astrobiological research on other solar system bodies. By identifying, exploring and characterizing terrestrial… Read more
NAU assistant professor of planetary science Christopher Edwards co-authored a paper recently published in Nature Geoscience that has generated interest among scientists in the field as well as in mainstream science news, such as Science Dailyand Outer Places.
The researchers analyzed remote-sensing data from two lunar missions and concluded that water appears to be evenly spread across the surface of the moon, not confined to a particular region or type of terrain as… Read more