You are browsing the archive for planets Archives - Page 2 of 3 - GeoSpace.
18 April 2019
The Moon’s crust is really cracked
The bombardment of asteroids and meteoroids that pockmarked the Moon’s surface over the eons also created fractures reaching deep into the lunar crust, report researchers in a new study in AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
18 July 2018
Martian atmosphere behaves as one
New research using a decade of data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission has found clear signs of the complex Martian atmosphere acting as a single, interconnected system, with processes occurring at low and mid levels significantly affecting those seen higher up.
31 May 2018
Which Mars rocks are most likely to harbor signs of life?
Iron-rich rocks near ancient lake sites on Mars could hold vital clues that show life once existed there, research suggests. These rocks – which formed in lake beds – are the best place to seek fossil evidence of life from billions of years ago, according to the researchers.
5 September 2017
Discovery of boron on Mars adds to evidence for habitability
The discovery of boron on Mars gives scientists more clues about whether life could have ever existed on the planet, according to a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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.
24 January 2017
Bursts of methane may have warmed early Mars
In a new study, researchers suggest early Mars may have been warmed intermittently by a powerful greenhouse effect. They found interactions between methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen in the early Martian atmosphere may have created warm periods when the planet could support liquid water on the surface.
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.
22 June 2016
Research bolsters case for a present-day subsurface ocean on Pluto
An updated thermal model for Pluto suggests that liquid water beneath the dwarf planet’s ice shell may not be frozen yet.
17 June 2016
Scientists shed light on electrostatic dust transport in reshaping airless planetary bodies
New laboratory experiments may bring closure to a long-standing issue of electrostatic dust transport, explaining a variety of unusual phenomena on the surfaces of airless planetary bodies, including observations of the moon from the Apollo era and the recent Rosetta mission to comet 67P.
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.
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.