All articles tagged with #planetary science
NASA’s Dragonfly, a $3.3‑billion nuclear-powered rotorcraft, will hop across Titan’s methane sky to sample its surface and investigate potential subsurface habitats for signs of life. Planned to launch in 2028 and perform a two‑hour descent to Titan’s surface in 2034, the mission represents one of NASA’s last large planetary explorations amid ongoing budget pressures and shifting priorities.
Lawrence Livermore researchers used laser-driven shocks on tiny diamond samples to reproduce the extreme pressures and temperatures found deep in Neptune and Uranus, melting diamond while recording its atomic structure, temperature, density and reflectivity. The work suggests slower initial shocks could improve fuel compressibility and boost energy yield in inertial confinement fusion, offering new atomic-scale benchmarks for modeling ice-giant atmospheres and guiding fusion experiments.
Solar eclipses occur when a moon passes between a planet and the Sun, casting a shadow that researchers use to study motion, atmospheres, and gravity. The article notes Io's frequent shadow on Jupiter as an example, recounts Earth's historic use of eclipses and the 1919 test of general relativity, highlights the 1973 Concorde flight that extended totality to 74 minutes for coronal observations, and describes Phobos transits on Mars used to measure orbital decay—demonstrating the same geometric rules govern eclipses across the solar system.
Earth and Venus are nearly the same size and gravity, but Venus may host a radar-bright highland coating of lead- and bismuth-sulfide compounds—metallic frost that is not yet confirmed. The mystery ties into how two similar worlds evolved such different climates and histories, and NASA’s DAVINCI and VERITAS missions will probe Venus’s atmosphere and surface to constrain its past water, atmospheric chemistry, and surface composition, while leaving the timing and exact path of their divergence unresolved.
After a billion-kilometre journey aboard Cassini, the Huygens probe touched down on Titan in 2005 with a gentle contact, denting the surface about 12 cm, then bouncing, sliding roughly 30–40 cm, and wobbling five times over about 10 seconds. No outside camera captured the moment, so researchers rebuilt the sequence from the probe’s instruments, computer simulations, and a ground drop test. The result suggests Titan’s surface acts like snow frozen on top: firm under light pressure but yielding under heavier pressure, with a small plume of dry organic dust hinting at a long dry interval with no recent methane/ethane rain.
Mars’s inner moon Phobos is spiraling inward at about 1.8 centimeters per year due to tidal interactions; models suggest the moon’s weak interior could break apart in roughly 20–40 million years, spreading material into a temporary ring around Mars that might last from 1 million to 100 million years before debris either falls to the planet or disperses. Whether Phobos stays intact depends on its internal strength, with a stronger, more coherent interior potentially surviving closer to Mars while weaker material would disintegrate sooner.
Mercury hides a massive metallic core that takes up roughly 85% of the planet’s radius, leaving a thin rocky shell whose cooling has contracted and buckled the surface into long lobate scarps hundreds of kilometres long. Data from NASA’s MESSENGER mission show a layered interior with a partly molten core, and while the full formation story remains debated, the observed contraction (up to about 7 km in radius since formation) records Mercury’s slow cooling. The upcoming BepiColombo mission, arriving in 2026, should refine estimates of the core and shell, and reveal whether there is any ongoing tectonic activity.
A new analysis of NASA’s New Horizons images of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia suggests liquid nitrogen may have recently flowed beneath the dwarf planet’s heart-shaped glacier, producing dark surface patterns. While Pluto’s thin atmosphere today makes liquid-nitrogen rain impossible, simulations show underground liquid nitrogen could travel through conduits and remain liquid long enough to form the observed features, indicating a time‑variable process on astronomical timescales and underscoring the need for future observations.
New Horizons data and Earth-based stellar occultations show Pluto’s atmospheric pressure rose from 1988 to 2015, stayed roughly constant until about 2021, and then declined by as much as 16% by 2022 as the dwarf planet moved farther from the Sun, potentially signaling the first signs of atmospheric collapse that had been anticipated for decades; continued observations over the coming years will be needed to confirm the trend, with Pluto not returning closer to the Sun until 2114.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft, using its Microwave Radiometer, measured Io’s subsurface temperatures for the first time and found a sharp, 40+ degree Fahrenheit rise within feet of the surface. The results from two close flybys (2023–2024) suggest heat moving through Io’s crust by conduction or stemming from buried lava flows, offering a new way to study tidal heating and heat transport on rocky worlds and potentially informing heat dynamics on other moons.
A new study suggests Venus’s surface features resemble giant marine signatures, indicating oceans may have covered up to about 90% of the planet and held around 40% as much water as Earth’s oceans. The researchers point to polygonal fault patterns, vast submarine-like channels, and salt-deposit evidence as clues; while not conclusive, the findings imply Venus once had a global sea before a runaway greenhouse effect ended it within the last billion years, a hypothesis future missions EnVision and VERITAS could test.
Scientists report a garnet-rich rock fragment inside Martian meteorite NWA 8171, providing the first evidence garnet may have formed in Mars’ crust and hinting at a new rock type or metamorphic process on the Red Planet; while Martian origin is supported by pyroxene chemistry and oxygen isotope signatures, confirming it will require direct isotope analysis of the garnet-bearing piece.
James Webb Space Telescope observations of Neptune’s inner moons and rings found phyllosilicate clay that formed only with liquid water, implying these materials were shed from a larger body long ago. The most plausible scenario is that Neptune once hosted larger moons that were destroyed when Triton was captured, leaving the current small inner moons and rings. Researchers also spotted a mysterious unidentified mineral that could be a new material, highlighting the potential for further discoveries from a dedicated Neptune mission.
Mercury has cooled enough to shrink its radius by roughly 1–7 kilometers, leaving long lobate scarps that wrinkle the planet’s surface; recent analyses place the amount of contraction near 6.3 km when wrinkle ridges are counted and about 1.2 km when they’re excluded, highlighting a debate over whether the deformation records global shrinkage or mainly local faulting. The upcoming ESA–JAXA’s BepiColombo mission, arriving in 2026–27, is expected to help resolve how much of Mercury’s contraction is global versus localized.
ANU seismologists in 2023 provided evidence that Earth contains an innermost inner core—a roughly 1,300-km-diameter iron sphere with crystal orientation different from the surrounding inner core—reconstructed from global seismic echoes after large earthquakes. This fifth, hidden layer tightens the picture of Earth's deep structure and may reflect an early-formed core or a different iron phase; the same seismic approach is now used to study rocky planets like Mars.