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      How ‘Our Moon’ shaped life on Earth and human history

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      Our MoonRebecca BoyleRandom House, $28.99

      Science journalist Rebecca Boyle has an intergenerational connection with the moon. Her grandfather Pfc. John J. Corcoran was involved in the 1943 Battle of Tarawa on the namesake atoll in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. The United States’ narrow victory against Japan came at heavy human cost. One reason: A weak high tide forced American soldiers to wade through the ocean into Japanese gunfire rather than sail their boats to meet their enemies. More

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      Saturn’s ‘Death Star’ moon might contain a hidden ocean

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      An uncanny resemblance to the Death Star might not be the only intriguing thing about Saturn’s moon Mimas. It could also harbor a vast ocean of liquid water beneath its pockmarked exterior.

      A new look at data from NASA’s Cassini probe reveals that the point in Mimas’ orbit where it comes closest to Saturn changed slightly over 13 years, researchers report February 7 in Nature. Because Mimas’ internal composition affects the gravitational dance between the moon and its planet, these orbital dynamics, along with some previously seen moon wobbles, point to a liquid interior, astronomer Valéry Lainey of the Paris Observatory and colleagues say. More

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      An asteroid may have exploded over Antarctica about 2.5 million years ago

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      Around 2.5 million years ago, an asteroid may have exploded over Antarctica. 

      The evidence comes from a chemical analysis of more than 100 tiny pieces of rock entrained within the White Continent’s ice, researchers report in the Feb. 1 Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The timing makes the midair detonation the oldest known airburst, the team says. Only two other ancient airburst events are known in the geologic record, dating to 480,000 and 430,000 years ago (SN: 3/31/21).   More

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      Bacteria that can make humans sick could survive on Mars

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      Future interplanetary explorers beware: Hitchhiking bacteria brought to Mars on human bodies might not only survive the harsh conditions on the Red Planet’s surface but also potentially thrive.

      Recent experiments exposed four common disease-causing microbes to a simulated Mars-like environment, with its lack of water, scant atmospheric pressure, deadly ultraviolet radiation and toxic salts. The bacteria remained alive for various periods of time and, in some cases, even grew in the imitation Martian sands, researchers report in the January Astrobiology. More

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      NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter officially ends its mission on Mars

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      After nearly three years, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, the first spacecraft to undertake a powered flight on another world, has ended its mission. Officials at the agency confirmed on January 25 that the history-making quad-copter has sustained damage to one of its rotor blades and is no longer capable of flying.

      “While we knew this day was inevitable, it doesn’t make it any easier,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s planetary science division director, during a news conference on the status of the quad-copter. More

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      Astronomers are puzzled over an enigmatic companion to a pulsar

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      Circling around a pulsar in our galaxy is a mysterious entity that is either a very heavy neutron star, one of the lightest black holes ever discovered, or an exotic and never-before-seen quasi-stellar object.

      The new finding comes from the MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa, which carefully monitored 13 millisecond pulsars in a dense cluster of stars 40,000 light years from Earth. These pulsars are a type of neutron star that quickly spin, rotating in fractions of a second, while sending out powerful beams of radiation like a cosmic lighthouse. More

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      The strongest known fast radio burst has been traced to a 7-galaxy pileup

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      NEW ORLEANS — A mind-bogglingly strong spurt of electromagnetic energy has for the first time been traced back to a cluster of seven merging galaxies. The finding could bolster the hypothesis that such mysterious flareups, known as fast radio bursts, originate from bizarre, highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars.

      Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are fleeting explosive events: They last fractions of a second but release as much energy as the sun does in a month. It remains unclear what causes these strange spectacles, first discovered in 2007 (SN: 7/25/14). More

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      Salt may have carved out Mercury’s terrains, including glacierlike features

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      Mercury’s surface might not be quite so terra firma, at least on geologic timescales.

      The closest planet to the sun is a world sculpted by volatiles — ephemeral compounds that can freeze, flow or float into space over time, analogous to water on Earth. Salt, the primary volatile on Mercury, appears to have reshuffled the planet’s landscape over billions of years and might even flow — very slowly — in glacierlike landforms, researchers report in the November Planetary Science Journal. The volatile could possibly even form habitable niches deep underground, the authors speculate. More