Enceladus is blasting water into space from the jets at its southern pole. This makes it the ideal place to send a dedicated mission, flying the spacecraft through the plumes with life-detection instruments s. A new study suggests that a spacecraft must proceed carefully through the plumes, keeping its speed below 4.2 km/second (2,236 miles…

I love this… it’s a direct riff on Freeman Dyson’s idea that our SETI work should be looking for freeze dried fish in orbit around these moons. Since that discovery, mission planners and amateur enthusiasts alike have proposed flying a probe through those plumes to collect samples of those ice grains and bring them back…

Astronomers at the University of Arizona have discovered excephosphorus, a critical ingredient for life as we know it, in an unexpected location: the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy. According to conventional wisdom, the element is produced by fusion processes inside very massive stars, which are not believed to exist in the outer reaches of…

“The universe therefore appears to be expanding faster in our vicinity — that is, up to a distance of around three billion light years — than in its entirety,” explained astrophysicist and University of Bonn professor Pavel Kroupa, coauthor of a new paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in the statement. https://futurism.com/the-byte/galaxy-void-cosmos-hubble-constant

A rare form of atmospheric phenomena known as a Transient Luminous Event (TLE) was successfully captured in imagery obtained during a recent experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The observations were made as a part of the Thor-Davis experiment, an effort designed to observe storm phenomena in the upper atmosphere and their relationship to…

Stratolaunch yesterday completed the captive carry flight with the first powered Talon-A hypersonic vehicle, or TA-1, over Southern California. This was the twelfth flight for the Roc launch platform and saw the Talon-A filled with live liquid oxygen (LOx) fuel for its rocket engine. The flight lasted three hours and 22 minutes. It was, according…

Since 1979, when the Voyager probes flew past Jupiter and its system of moons, scientists have speculated about the possibility of life within Europa. Based on planetary modeling, Europa is believed to be differentiated between a rocky and metallic core, an icy crust and mantle, and a warm water ocean up to 100 km (62…

“Yes, we should send humans to Venus,” Dr. Paul Byrne, who is an Associate Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, tells Universe Today. “But first, let’s talk about what ‘sending humans to Venus’ actually means. The surface of Venus is hellish, so nobody would last long there nor volunteer…