planetary science

BOSTON —Droplets of Venus’ clouds may someday come to Earth. Researchers are testing a device that can gather mist from our planetary neighbor’s atmosphere and deliver it to scientists so they can test the samples for signs of life.

Venus is not an obvious place to look for life. Its globe-spanning cloud decks are made of sulfuric acid, “a feature that was long believed to be sterile for any organic chemistry,” said MIT planetary scientist Iaroslav Iakubivskyi in a Feb. 15 talk at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But in the last few years, lab experiments by Iakubivskyi and colleagues have suggested that sulfuric acid can support the organic chemistry that gives rise to stable nucleic and amino acids — the building blocks of DNA and proteins. Together, the data suggest that “rather than being a disruptive force, sulfuric acid might actually serve as a potential solvent for life-essential molecules,” he said. “Still, we have to go to Venus to test it.”

A future mission to Venus could include floating a cloud-catching device from a giant balloon in the planet’s sulfuric acid atmosphere, as shown in this illustration.W. Buchanan

Iakubivskyi’s team is working with the private spaceflight company Rocket Lab on a series of Venus probes called the Morning Star Missions. The first, a probe that will fall through Venus’ atmosphere and measure the sizes of sulfuric acid droplets, is slated to launch in 2026. A later mission would use a two-ton rocket to launch samples into Venus’ orbit to be picked up by a spacecraft returning to Earth. If successful, Morning Star would be the first private mission to another planet.

Inspired by fog-catching plants in the Atacama desert, the team built a prototype cloud catcher from four layers of wire mesh. The wires can be charged to ionize atmospheric droplets and attract them to the mesh. More

Frigid water helped paint Mars red and may have shaped a vast coastline, two new studies into the planet’s history reveal.

Scientists have detected a possible ancient beach in Mars’ northern hemisphere and identified a water-containing mineral responsible for the planet’s rosy hue. The findings reveal details about conditions on Mars when the planet last contained large volumes of liquid water more than 3 billion years ago.

“Early Mars has historically been thought of as either ‘cold and dry’ or ‘warm and wet,’” says Alberto Fairén, an astrobiologist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid and at Cornell University who was not involved in the new work. “The two new studies, together, resolve the second part of the equation: Early Mars was wet; it was never dry.” More

A giant impact 3.8 billion years ago sent a curtain of rock flying away from a point near the moon’s south pole. When that curtain fell, its rocks plunged up to 3.5 kilometers into the lunar surface with energies 130 times greater than the global inventory of nuclear weapons, new calculations show.

And that’s how a hailstorm of boulders carved out two gargantuan canyons on the moon in less than 10 minutes.

“They landed in a staccato fashion, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang,” says planetary geologist David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who reports the finding February 4 in Nature Communications. More

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD. — For the first time, astronomers have taken a direct look at an exoplanet’s insides.

An exoplanet about 800 light-years away is spilling its guts into space, and new observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, have let astronomers read the entrails, astronomers report this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

“If this is true, it’s super cool,” says astronomer Mercedez López-Morales of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the new work. “For the first time you can study directly what the interior of an exoplanet is made of. That’s exciting.” More

Pluto and Charon’s meet-cute may have started with a kiss. New computer simulations of the dwarf planet and its largest moon suggest that the pair got together in a “kiss-and-capture” collision, where the two bodies briefly joined up before settling into their current positions.

“It’s a U-Haul situation,” says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who reports the results January 6 in Nature Geoscience. “They kiss and they say, ‘Yeah, this is it. I want to build a system together with you.’ And then they do.” More

WASHINGTON D.C. — The Perseverance Rover on Mars may have stumbled upon the oldest rocks humans have ever seen and, possibly, evidence of a new setting that ancient Martian organisms could have inhabited, if they ever existed.

“This is really one of the most exciting things that this mission is going to do, is to be looking at rocks that were formed so early in the history of the solar system,” said Caltech geochemist Kenneth Farley during a December 12 news briefing at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “Almost the dawn of the solar system.” More

Mars’ moons could be the remains of an ill-starred asteroid that got too close to the Red Planet.

A shredded asteroid origin could help explain mysterious features of the small, odd-shaped moons, scientists suggest in the January issue of Icarus.

Where most moons are big round orbs, Mars’ Phobos and Deimos are small lumpy potatoes.

There are two main ideas for how the moons formed. One is that the moons actually were asteroids that were caught by Mars’s gravity. But that idea doesn’t explain the moons’ circular, stable orbits around Mars’ equator. More

The first samples from the farside of the moon contain signs of surprising volcanic activity near the lunar south pole.

Two separate analyses of lunar rocks brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e-6 spacecraft show the rocks formed from cooling magma relatively recently, about 2.8 billion years ago, according to papers published November 15 in Science and Nature. The measurements may help solve the mystery of why the moon’s farside is so different from its nearside, but also raise new questions about the history of lunar volcanism. More