Last time, we discussed how NASA’s recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will spend the next two years surveying nearly the entire sky to search for planets orbiting nearby stars, up to about 100 light years distant. TESS’s four wide-field cameras will spend a month at a time staring at swaths of the […]
Mars
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Men (and Women) are from Mars … Maybe
Suppose, just suppose, we found life on Mars: microscopic critters happily wiggling and metabolizing under the polar ice, or swimming around in an underground pool of water on the warm flanks of Olympus Mons. What would we find when we examined them close up? In particular, how would they reproduce? Would they be like life […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Air on Mars
That last breath you took? You can thank the Earth’s magnetic field for it. Without the field, researchers believe that solar wind (energetic protons and electrons streaming out from the sun) would have stripped much of the air from our planet long ago. For the field, you can thank the giant, molten ball of iron […]