Atmosphere
Millions of Satellites Could Have a Profound Effect on the Earth’s Ionosphere
Hardly a day goes by where a story hits the headlines about our abuse of the Earth’s precious environment be…
ESA’s Ariel Mission is Approved to Begin Construction
We're about to learn a lot more about exoplanets. The ESA has just approved the construction of its Ariel mission,…
Wow. JWST Just Found Methane in an Exoplanet Atmosphere
If there's one chemical that causes excitement in the search for biosignatures on other worlds, it's methane. It's not a…
Take a Plunge Into the Ice Giants
Our Solar System's ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, have been largely left out of the planetary probe game. While all…
Life Might Be Easiest to Find on Planets that Match an Earlier Earth
We're inching closer and closer to reliably detecting biosignatures on distant planets. Much of the focus is on determining which…
Spaceflight is Polluting the Atmosphere with Metal
Humans can't seem to interact with the environment at all without fouling it in some way. From plastic bags in…
Is it Life, or is it Volcanoes?
Astronomers are working hard to understand biosignatures and how they indicate life's presence on an exoplanet. But each planet we…
Engineers Want to Make Methanol by Pulling Carbon Right Out of the Air
Methanol is one of our most extensively used raw materials. It's used as a solvent, a pesticide, and in combination…
Astronomers are Watching a Planet Get its Atmosphere Blasted Away into Space
What do you get when a hot young world orbits a wildly unstable young red dwarf? For AU Microsopii b,…
A Practical Use for Space Power: Beaming Energy to Probes on Venus
A few weeks ago, a team of scientists from Caltech announced that they had successfully transmitted energy from an orbiting…