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ESA

MARS: Are There Dozens of Lakes Buried on Mars?

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Martian Lakes - ESA

Much more liquid water may lie beneath the south pole of Mars than scientists had thought — or there may be something going on down there that they don’t fully understand. In 2018, researchers analyzing radar data gathered by Europe’s Mars Express spacecraft announced they’d found evidence of a big subsurface lake in the Red Planet’s south polar region. The lake appears to be about 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide, and it lies about 1 mile (1.6 km) beneath the dry, frigid surface, the scientists reported. The same core research team soon followed up on the find, using the same … Read more

Water Bears On the Sun!

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Solar Tardigrade - ESA

Regular followers of the QSF blog know we have a soft spot for tardigrades – also called “water bears,” and we live for space news. So we HAD to share this one with you! From Live Science: No, tardigrades haven’t colonized the sun. But a tardigrade-shaped speck on a solar mission’s images recently led to some joking about the unlikely solar presence of a wee water bear. Today (July 16), when the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA unveiled the latest images captured by the agencies’ Solar Orbiter mission, some sharp-eyed viewers were quick to point out a small, dark blotch on … Read more

SPACE: Answering the Big and Small Questions of the Universe

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space - ESA

Our universe is incredibly vast, mostly mysterious, and generally confusing. We’re surrounded by perplexing questions on scales both great and small. We have some answers, for sure, like the Standard Model of particle physics, that help us (physicists, at least) understand fundamental subatomic interactions, and the Big Bang theory of how the universe began, which weaves together a cosmic story over the past 13.8 billion years. But despite the successes of these models, we still have plenty of work to do. For example, what in the world is dark energy, the name we give to the driving force behind the … Read more

SPACE: There’s a Hairy Blue Spider on Mars (Sort Of)

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David Bowie sang about his sci-fi persona Ziggy Stardust performing with the Spiders from Mars, and now it turns out there’s a “spider” on Mars after all. An image captured by a European Space Agency (ESA) orbiter recently showed what appears to be a very hairy, blue spider extending its “legs” across the Martian landscape. But in reality, the so-called spider is a sprawling pattern left behind on a ridge by a frenzy of dust devils, when hundreds or even thousands of whirling tornadoes formed in the area, ESA representatives said yesterday (March 14) in a statement The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars … Read more