One of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life is Jupiter’s moon, Europa, an icy world with a slushy, salty, subsurface ocean. Old data has turned up new evidence of water plumes spraying through the icy shell into space.
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One particularly active area of robotics research involves the exploration of soft parts, which are opening up new possibilities and making machines safer for humans to work around. Now they are gaining a helping hand from the amazing adhesive properties of the gecko.
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Just 40 light-years away, TRAPPIST-1 is one of the clearest case studies into how other planetary systems work. New research has calculated the densities and atmospheres of the planets, giving us a better understanding of how they might look and how much water might be there.
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Curiosity has had quite a journey since it touched down on Mars in August 2012. From its perch on a ridge partway up Mount Sharp, Curiosity has snapped a panorama of Gale Crater, capturing many of the geological features the rover has explored and investigated over the years.
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The Great Red Spot, a storm bigger than Earth, has been raging on Jupiter for centuries. We’ve known its 2D size for a long time, but after a close flyover in July, Juno has finally revealed how deep into the atmosphere the storm’s roots run.
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After almost four decades of dormancy, NASA has ordered the Voyager 1 deep space probe to fire a set of thrusters that have been inactive for 37 years. It's part of an effort to keep the unmanned explorer functional for up to an additional three years as it speeds into interstellar space.
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NASA's Mars 2020 mission is well into the testing phase, and now the organization has successfully conducted the first test of a supersonic parachute that will (hopefully) allow the craft to safely touchdown on Mars in early 2021.
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The precise instruments at the LIGO and Virgo facilities were responsible for past detections of gravitational waves, but now astronomers plan to look for ripples from supermassive black hole collisions using natural detectors in space: pulsars, the “cosmic lighthouses” of the sky.
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A NASA study has analyzed data gathered by the OCO-2 satellite and pinpointed the cause of an unprecedented spike in atmospheric CO2 in 2015 and 2016: the El Nino weather effect caused certain tropical regions to release far more CO2 than they normally would.
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While a lot of attention has been focused on Mars thanks to the rovers that are heading out there in 2020, the Red Planet's tiny moon Phobos has been relatively overlooked. Now the THEMIS camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has captured a heat map of what a day looks like on the oddly-shaped moon.
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