I had the pleasure of reporting and writing the Many Worlds column — sponsored by NASA’s NExSS initiative and the Lunar & Planetary Institute — for almost eight years. But the run came to an end in October. Now an archive of the more than 400 columns is easily available at http://www.manyworlds.space. The stories focus on astrobiology writ large, but also include profiles, more general astronomy and planetology columns, origin-of-life stories and many pieces about NASA and other space agency missions past, current and future. You can find specific stories via the “Categories” feature on th ..read more

Billions of exoplanets orbit their Suns in our galaxy and more than a few are likely to be habitable. But are any inhabited? The Habitable World Observatory is not being designed and developed to give our best answer to that question. (PHL@UPR Arecibo, ESA/Hubble, NASA) In a solar system far, far away, life of some sort is just waiting to be found.  Or so the world of astrobiology sure hopes it is. The new player in the astrobiology world, now called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is planned to launch in the 2040s if all goes well.  While it’s possible that some sign of extr ..read more

Billions of exoplanets orbit their Suns in our galaxy and more than a few are likely to be habitable. But are any inhabited? The Habitable World Observatory is not being designed and developed to give our best answer to that question. (PHL@UPR Arecibo, ESA/Hubble, NASA) In a solar system far, far away, life of some sort is just waiting to be found.  Or so the world of astrobiology sure hopes it is. The new player in the astrobiology world, now called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is planned to launch in the 2040s if all goes well.  While it’s possible that some sign of ex ..read more

This artist’s concept shows what exoplanet K2-18 b could look like based on new observation. The exoplanet, of a size between Earth and Neptune, orbits the cool dwarf star K2-18. A new investigation of the planet with the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules in the atmosphere, including methane and carbon dioxide. (NASA, CSA, ESA, J. Olmsted (STScI), Science: N. Madhusudhan (Cambridge University) Beware easy answers to the question of whether life exists beyond Earth. Be they “alien” skeletons in Mexico City, interstellar probes that briefly pass t ..read more

A replica of the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule descends under parachute during a dress rehearsal Aug. 30 in Utah. (NASA/Keegan Barber) Bits of pebbles and dust from the asteriod Bennu that were collected during the long journey of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft should be landing in the Utah desert later this month. The delivery will be a first for NASA — its first sample return from an asteroid and one of a very small handful of space objects ever brought to Earth by humans from anywhere but the moon. The roughly two ounces (60 grams) of regolith collected from the surface of Bennu — a 4.5 bil ..read more

Researchers and policy-makers are homing in on sites for the Artemis Base Camp that feature long-duration access to sunlight, direct-to-Earth communication and gentle slopes, and also offer access to permanently shadowed regions that may contain water ice.  (NASA) An Indian spacecraft landed on the moon this month and a pioneering Japanese lunar  lander is awaiting an imminent launch.  A Russian craft trying to land in the same area — the southern polar region — recently crashed, as did a private effort by a joint Japanese-United Arab Emirates group and one by several Israeli ..read more

This artist’s concept shows an icy  Earth-mass rogue planet drifting through space alone, without any relationship to a star. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) In our Earthling minds, planets exist in solar systems with a Sun in the middle and objects large and small orbiting around it.   This is hardly surprising since planets are pretty much exclusively illustrated in solar systems and, until the onset of the 21st century, no other kind of planet had been identified. That changed in the last two decades with the discovery of “rogue planets” very large and now quite small ..read more

Optical SETI searches for distant laser bursts as possible signs of technologial socieites in very far away solar systems. (SETI) The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began decades ago as an effort to pick up radio signals from distant civilizations.  The effort was centered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and was by today’s standards quite rudimentary. A much broader search for distant radio signals remains very much at the core of SETI but the effort has also expanded to be an increasingly rigorous search for “technosignatures.” These include radio signal ..read more

Images from the Cassini mission show river networks draining into lakes in Titan’s north polar region. False color was used to make the features more visible. (NASA/JPL/USGS There are three planets or moons in our solar system known to now have, or once had, surface rivers, lakes, deltas and a hydrologic system.  There’s Earth, of course, Mars long ago when it was warmer and wetter, and the so different yet so similar rivers of hydrocarbons on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Understanding the dynamics of rivers in particular is crucial to understanding the workings of a planet or moon.  That ..read more

The TRAPPIST-1 system, with its seven rocky planets orbiting close to their red dwarf Sun, is of great interest to planetary scientists and astrobiologists. Several early exoplanet James Webb Space Telescope observations have focused on the system and whether its planets have atmospheres.  So far, the results are less than promising, but the habitable zone TRAPPIST-1 planets have yet to be characterized. {NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, T. Pyle (IPAC)} Among the most eagerly awaited results from the early observations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is whether or not the seven rocky ..read more