Topic
Research on the composition, origin and evolution of planets, moons and ring systems.
Researchers led by Frank Postberg found sharply different salt mixtures across 961 Cassini spectra of salty Enceladus grains. Tokyo freezing experiments suggest each grain is a shard of a slowly frozen droplet, so the ocean's makeup shows in how often each salt appears.
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University of Washington researchers put the dust in Mars's north polar surface ice near 3% by mass, down from earlier estimates as high as 25%. Cleaner ice is brighter and should vaporize more slowly, so the figure bears on Mars climate models.
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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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Institute of Science Tokyo researchers found that salts separate inside 200-micrometre lab droplets frozen at about 10 K a minute or slower. Slow freezing in the vents could explain Cassini's oddly varied Enceladus grains, though the droplets held salts and organics remain untested.
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Anna Mittelholz of ETH Zurich and colleagues say a 60-km volcanic body under the Moon's Dewar swirl cooled in a field of at least 11.4 microteslas. They credit a core dynamo like Earth's, since the site's location makes an impact origin unlikely.
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JWST found water-altered clay minerals on two of Neptune's small inner moons and its rings, with no water ice. The likely source is the shattered interior of a much larger lost moon.
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Frank Postberg's team finds that Enceladus plume droplets freeze slowly, sorting salts and organics into separate grains a few micrometers across. A probe would need to check many grains to find one holding microbial material, though that grain should be easy to read.
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Stephen Kane checked his tidal code against the measured Earth-Moon system, then ran Venus with moons of half to ten lunar masses, and most of those runs ended with the moon on the surface. Whether Venus ever had one remains open.
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Work presented at the European Geosciences Union assembly in Vienna models whether compressed rock sits beneath Phobos' largest crater, part of an effort to read the little moon's interior before Japan's MMX mission goes there to sample it.
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Stephen Kane let hypothetical moons evolve around a Venus that turns once every 243 Earth days, and in most runs they spiralled inward and hit the planet. He says Venus needed no catastrophe to end up moonless.
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The evidence for seeping nitrogen on Sputnik Planitia is a resemblance to wet ice in Landsat 9 images of Greenland, backed by simulations in which nitrogen ice several kilometers down melts and rises.
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A Max Planck team calibrated infrared readings against laboratory glasses of known composition and came out with less silicon dioxide on Mercury's surface than earlier estimates. How much less depends on how the release's 25 percent is read.
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Kyoto University's analysis of two grains puts nitrogen chemistry in the last fluid to dry inside Ryugu's parent body, and the team is careful to say it inferred that sequence rather than watched it happen.
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Experiments at Liege and KU Leuven reproduced Mercury's core formation and produced a graphite crust 40 to 120 metres thick above a core holding under 0.5% carbon, far too little to explain the planet's density deficit.
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The first paper built on ESA Hera's Deimos flyby argues a single roughly 320-metre impactor did both jobs, and that the moon is porous and fragile. JAXA's MMX inherits that finding.
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About a hundred SPH runs at the University of Bern converge on a single non-destructive strike as the source of Deimos's south-polar depression and its global regolith. The surface is ejecta, and it is weak.
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