Planet hunting and the origins of life
George Ricker and his team at the MIT Kavli Institute are mapping the entire sky for signs of life.
Mix-and-match kit could enable astronauts to build a menagerie of lunar exploration bots
Robotic parts could be assembled into nimble spider bots for exploring lava tubes or heavy-duty elephant bots for transporting solar panels.
Study: Smoke particles from wildfires can erode the ozone layer
MIT chemists show the Australian wildfires widened the ozone hole by 10 percent in 2020.
3Q: What we learned from the asteroid-smashing DART mission
Saverio Cambioni discusses new results revealing the redirected asteroid Dimorphos to be a dust-trailing rubble-pile.
School of Science appoints 10 faculty to named professorships
Those selected for these positions receive additional support to pursue their research and develop their careers.
Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new study finds
Scientists have confirmed that a “stabilizing feedback” on 100,000-year timescales keeps global temperatures in check.
Method for decoding asteroid interiors could help aim asteroid-deflecting missions
Astronomers have found a way to determine an asteroid’s interior structure based on how its spin changes during a close encounter with Earth.
Saturn’s rings and tilt could be the product of an ancient, missing moon
A “grazing encounter” may have smashed the moon to bits to form Saturn’s rings, a new study suggests.
Study: Astronomers risk misinterpreting planetary signals in JWST data
Refining current opacity models will be key to unearthing details of exoplanet properties — and signs of life — in data from the powerful new telescope.
MIT’s MOXIE experiment reliably produces oxygen on Mars
Day and night, and across seasons, the instrument generates breathable oxygen from the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere.
Porosity of the moon’s crust reveals bombardment history
The moon sustained twice as many impacts as can be seen on its surface, scientists find.
Astronomers discover a multiplanet system nearby
Just 33 light-years from Earth, the system appears to host two rocky, Earth-sized planets.
New maps of asteroid Psyche reveal an ancient world of metal and rock
The varied surface suggests a dynamic history, which could include metallic eruptions, asteroid-shaking impacts, and a lost rocky mantle.
Magma beneath tectonic collision zones is wetter than previously thought
New findings may help explain how Earth’s crust forms, the location of ore deposits, and why some volcanoes are more explosive than others.
Look! Up in the sky! Is it a planet? Nope, just a star
Among thousands of known exoplanets, MIT astronomers flag three that are actually stars.