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21 November 2017
Moon’s Crust Underwent Resurfacing after Forming from Magma Ocean
A research team took to the lab to recreate the magmatic melt that once formed the lunar surface and uncovered new insights on how the modern moonscape came to be. Their study found found that one of the great mysteries of the lunar body’s formation – how it could develop a crust composed largely of just one mineral – cannot be explained by the initial crust formation and must have been the result of some secondary event.
23 August 2017
Elevated zinc and germanium levels bolster evidence for habitable environments on Mars
New data gathered by the Mars Curiosity rover indicates a potential history of hydrothermal activity at Gale Crater on the red planet, broadening the variety of habitable conditions once present there, scientists report in a new study. Researchers found concentrations of the elements zinc and germanium to be 10 to 100 times greater in sedimentary rocks in Gale Crater compared to the typical Martian crust.
18 April 2017
Mercury’s craters offer clues to planet’s contraction
Craters serve as time-markers for the faults because they can be dated by how degraded they appear. The more degraded looking craters are older. Those that have sharper features are younger, and those with bright rays of debris radiating around them are youngest of all.
22 March 2017
Ice in Ceres’ shadowed craters linked to tilt history
Researchers from NASA’s Dawn mission find that the axial tilt of Ceres — the angle at which it spins as it journeys around the sun — varies widely over the course of about 24,500 years. Astronomers consider this to be a surprisingly short period of time for such dramatic deviations.
27 December 2016
Random temperature fluctuations may have made Earth habitable
Random temperature fluctuations in the mantle and on the planet’s surface could be the reason Earth is a habitable world with moving tectonic plates while other terrestrial planets in the solar system are inhospitable worlds, according to new research.
29 September 2016
Research suggests Saturn’s moon Dione may harbor a subsurface ocean
A subsurface ocean could lie deep within Saturn’s moon Dione, according to a new study using publicly available data from the Cassini mission to Saturn. In 2013, images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft hinted that Dione had a subsurface ocean when the moon formed, but the new study suggests the ocean could still exist today.
1 September 2016
Sulfur, sulfur dioxide and graphitized carbon observed on asteroid for first time
Hubble Space Telescope observations of the dwarf planet Ceres have discovered the first evidence of sulfur, sulfur dioxide and graphitized carbon found on an asteroid. The sulfur species are likely associated with regions of recent activity, according to the authors of a new study detailing the findings.
11 August 2016
Climate modeling suggests Venus may have been habitable
Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to 2 billion years of its early history, according to computer modeling of the planet’s ancient climate by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
15 June 2016
New study questions source of rare Earth metals that provide clues to life’s origins
A new study is reviving a decades-old debate about how Earth’s rarest elements came to exist on our planet – theories that have implications for the origin of life.
17 December 2015
Beware the Icebergs of Pluto
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
GeoSpace is a blog on Earth and space science, managed by AGU’s Public Information staff. The blog features posts by AGU writers and guest contributors on all sorts of relevant science topics, but with a focus on new research and geo and space sciences-related stories that are currently in the news.