Next year, the private space company Rocket Lab is going to drop a probe into the atmosphere of Venus to look for life. Yes, seriously. And they’re funding it all themselves, too. The as-yet-unnamed mission is planned for a May 2023 launch to rendezvous with Venus in October, five months later. A backup launch window is January 2025, when Earth and Venus swing back into the right orbital positions ..read more

Since it landed on Mars in February 2021, the rover Perseverance has been exploring Jezero Crater, a 50-kilometer-wide impact feature. The mission’s purpose is to look for evidence that Mars once had or maybe still has areas that can support life.  ..read more

In the last days of 1984, a team of meteorite hunters spotted a dark rock in the ice of Antarctica. Fifteen centimeters long and tipping the scale at nearly 2 kilos, it’s a big space rock, and analysis of gases trapped in bubbles in the rock showed beyond doubt that it came from Mars.  ..read more

We don’t know exactly how life arose on Earth. For one thing it was a long time ago: Roughly 3.8 billion years in the past, give or take, and records of anything that happened from that period in Earth’s very ancient history are spotty. For another, we don’t know the chemical path life took. Surely simple molecules built up into more complex ones, eventually becoming able to store information and self-replicate. And then, abracadabra, DNA popped up and the rest is biological history ..read more

Earth and Mars are not terribly alike. Mars is incredibly cold, the air is incredibly thin, and the chemistry on the surface is incredibly different than what you’d find anywhere here.  Well, almost anywhere here ..read more

Well, this is very cool news: Astronomers have pretty much confirmed the presence of sodium chloride — table salt — on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa ..read more

“Life, uh… finds a way.” Except maybe not in the clouds of Venus. Sure, our sister planet makes Dante’s vision of Hell look like a tropical paradise. I mean, a greenhouse-driven surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, a crushing atmospheric pressure equal to being a kilometer under the ocean, and clouds made of sulfuric acid; it’s not clear to me what would kill you first if you tried to take a stroll on Venus but I’m very sure it wouldn’t take long ..read more

Hypothetical microbes that exist beyond Earth may or may not be life as we know it, but if they are some type of life-form we recognize, they might give off a rainbow of signals ..read more

We know that Mars had liquid water on its surface long ago.  ..read more

Why would you ever search for life on a planet which is surrounded by clouds of lethal sulfuric acid above a surface hot enough to melt lead ..read more