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17 December 2015
Ceres vs. The Death Star
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
15 December 2015
Big bad space wolf
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Space Engineers
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
18 September 2015
Titan’s “bucket brigade” brings liquid to moon’s north pole
Researchers think they have found a veritable bucket brigade that has been slowly but surely drenching the north pole of Saturn’s moon Titan – the only world in the solar system, other than Earth, to have lakes, seas and rainy weather.
29 May 2015
A shrinking Mercury is contracting in unexpected ways
A global survey of the largest, most prominent fault scarps has revealed some unexpected wrinkles in the way Mercury has contracted.
12 March 2015
Researchers study methane-rich plumes from Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has measured a curious abundance of methane spewing into the atmosphere of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. A team of American and French scientists published findings in Geophysical Research Letters suggesting two scenarios that could explain the methane abundance observed in the plumes.
15 January 2015
New studies give clues where alien life may flourish
Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars, but bigger and older than our home planet, stand out as prime candidates to harbor complex life, according to new research.
22 December 2014
Veteran geophysical tool preps for new horizons at Europa
Jupiter’s moon Europa has tantalized scientists with its potential for harboring life ever since Galileo first spotted the icy satellite in 1610. If living matter is bubbling anywhere in our solar system, they suspect, it would be below the moon’s icy shell, where a presumed ocean of salty water meets a mineral-rich interior. But because scientists can’t peer beneath the ice, they must rely on data beamed back by passing spacecraft. A proposed NASA mission called Europa Clipper could be sent to the moon in the next decade—and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA want their instrument to be onboard.
19 December 2014
Lightning strikes Venus
Scientists have detected electromagnetic signals emanating from Venus’s thick cloud layer, bolstering the case for lightning on the planet. The Venus Express spacecraft, which recently ended its mission after eight years, recorded electromagnetic pulses about 217 miles (300 kilometers) above the planet’s surface, said Richard Hart, a graduate student at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Sterilizing for Mars
“Leave no trace.” It’s a central ethic of wilderness exploration. Pack your supplies in, pack your waste out, and leave the natural landscape unspoiled. But when it comes to the newest frontier of exploration—visiting alien worlds to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life—the challenge of avoiding contamination with traces of life from Earth is a huge challenge.
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.