lab
Nonprofit research institute whose scientists study planetary science topics, including lunar and planetary missions, geology, and space exploration policy.
NASA picked a Planetary Science Institute team to test whether the Moon's Marius Hills pit opens into a lava tube, with a commercial lander and rover. PSI says such a cave could one day shelter astronauts from radiation and extreme temperature swings.
Reality
NASA selected three PRISM science payloads to fly on commercial CLPS landers and survey lunar ice, a possible lava tube and surface hazards for Moon Base. Their findings are meant to shape where and how crews live at an outpost NASA is already planning.
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Planetary scientist Mark Sykes rebuilt 15 years of NASA research and analysis spending from FOIA data and found it flat, down 30% in real value since FY2011. He says the shortfall is costing NASA scientists and ideas, a claim his dollar figures support only indirectly.
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Chang'e-7 launches Aug. 24 with an orbiter, a rover and a six-legged hopper meant to jump into permanently dark craters. What it measures will constrain where anyone builds a base.
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Tidal modelling published in Icarus says Uranus's moon Ariel needed a past ocean, possibly more than 170 km deep, to form its giant fractures. How deep depends on how eccentric Ariel's orbit once was, and surface maps alone cannot tell the two apart.
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A Planetary Science Institute team scored early Earth for both impact sterilization and impact-built hydrothermal systems. The habitability optimum falls at 4.33 billion years ago, roughly 130 million years before LUCA.
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Amanda Sickafoose's team ran every Pluto stellar occultation from 1988 to 2023 through one analysis, so a change in the record could not be an artifact of who processed it. The 2022 and 2023 data show pressure falling.
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