Latest Planetary geology Stories
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Water molecules discovered in soil samples collected from the moon could have indirectly originated from the sun, claim the authors of a new study published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience. The researchers studied soil samples brought back from the lunar surface during the Apollo missions, and discovered that they contained compounds known as hydroxyls, which are essentially substructures of an H2O molecule, according to...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online We have even hardly begun to scratch the surface of Mars, yet scientists are already trying to find ways to be eco-friendly on the Red Planet. Scientists are looking to regolith, or alien dirt, to determine whether it can be used to help build shielding for ground stations. Chiara La Tessa is manager of experiments in biophysics at GSI. She said the need for this research is to help shave off some of the weight associated with...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An image taken by the ESA's Mars Express has revealed an area on the Red Planet that has quite a complex history. The orbiter snapped a photo at the Melas Dorsa region on Mars on April 17 with its high-resolution stereo camera. The area is found in the famous Valles Marineris canyon, and sits in the volcanic highlands of Mars between Sinai and Thaumasia Plana. The image shows wrinkled ridges, some unusual intersecting faults, and...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Researchers from the University of Colorado in Boulder have cataloged over 635,000 Martian craters. The research team just recently finished up counting, outlining and cataloging the 635,000 impact craters on Mars that are roughly a half-mile in diameter. “This database is a giant tool that will be helpful in scores of future Mars studies ranging from age-dating and erosion to planetary habitability and to other applications we have not even thought of...
University of London researchers report they have found evidence that Mars experiences "marsquakes" in the same way Earth does with an earthquake. The researchers said the existence of marsquakes is an indication that conditions on Mars could include liquid water. The team from the University of London used High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) imagery to examine a fault system known as Cerberus Fossae. They analyzed the way boulders had fallen and rolled during...
In a rough-and-tumble wonderland of plunging canyons and towering buttes, some of the still-raw bluffs are lined with soaring, six-sided stone columns so orderly and trim, they could almost pass as relics of a colossal temple. The secret of how these columns, packed in edge to edge, formed en masse from a sea of molten rock is encrypted in details as tiny as the cracks running across their faces. To add to this mystery's allure, decoding it might do more than reveal the life story of some...
The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth's deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change. New experiments and supercomputer computations discovered that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth's lower mantle, ferropericlase. The finding, published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review...
One of the supposedly best understood and least interesting landscapes on Mars is hiding something that could rewrite the planet’s history. Or not. In fact, about all that is certain is that decades of assumptions regarding the wide, flat Hesperia Planum are not holding up very well under renewed scrutiny with higher-resolution, more recent spacecraft data. "Most scientists don't want to work on the flat things," noted geologist Tracy Gregg of The University at Buffalo, State University...
ESA's Mars Express has returned new views of pedestal craters in the Red Planet's eastern Arabia Terra.Craters are perhaps the quintessential planetary geological feature. So much so that early planetary geologists expended a lot of effort to understand them. You could say they put craters on a pedestal. This latest image of Mars shows how the Red Planet does it in reality.Craters are the result of impacts by asteroids, comets and meteorites. In a pedestal crater, the surrounding terrain is...
By Louis Bergeron, Stanford UniversityA new method of capturing detailed, three-dimensional images of minute samples of material under extreme pressures is shedding light on the evolution of the Earth's interior. Early results suggest that the early Earth did not have to be entirely molten to separate into the rocky crust and iron-rich core it has today. Researchers at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are leading the group pioneering the technique, which could lead...
Latest Planetary geology Reference Libraries
Harrison Schmitt was a NASA astronaut, and is also an American geologist. He was born Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt on July 3, 1935 in Santa Rita, New Mexico. After high school, he went to the California Institute of Technology and received a B.S. degree in science in 1957. He then went to Norway to study geology at the University of Oslo. In 1964, Schmitt earned a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University. After receiving his doctorate, he worked at the U.S. Geological Survey's...
The Planet Venus -- in astronomy, 2d planet from the sun; it is often called the evening star or morning star and is brighter than any object in the sky except the sun and the moon. Because its orbit lies between the sun and the orbit of the earth, Venus passes through phases like those of the moon, varying from a large bright crescent when the planet is near inferior conjunction (nearest the earth) to a smaller silvery disk when it is at superior conjunction (farthest from the earth)....
