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Ocean's worth of water may be buried within Mars — but can we get to it?
By Keith Cooper published
"We haven't found any evidence for life on Mars, but at least we have identified a place that should, in principle, be able to sustain life."

Airplane contrails are a tricky, and surprising, contributor to global warming
By Samantha Mathewson published
Commercial airplanes have made strides in reducing carbon emissions, but it turns out the exhaust clouds trailing behind them can have long-term impacts on the environment.

NASA satellite data adds key pollutant to national environmental justice database
By Sharmila Kuthunur published
"Having access to this accurate and localized NO2 data allows organizations like ours to understand the air quality challenges we encounter, and to advocate more effectively for the health and well-being of community residents."

New Mars terraforming idea: engineered, heat-absorbing dust nanoparticles
By Keith Cooper published
Metal particles made from Martian dust could be released into the sky to raise temperatures on the Red Planet by over 50 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), a new study suggests.

Mars orbiter hears the siren song of a salty Red Planet 'mermaid'
By Victoria Corless published
The European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spied a salt deposit on Mars that likely indicates water once flowed there, in a region known as the "Sea of the Sirens."

Sun unleashes X-class solar flare, blasts 3rd coronal mass ejection toward Earth in a week (video)
By Meredith Garofalo published
Active sunspot AR3777 fired off the strongest of its three solar flares this week, sending another CME to impact Earth this weekend with a possible geomagnetic storm.

Mars Express orbiter takes a deep dive into ancient Red Planet lake (images)
By Victoria Corless published
The Mars Express spacecraft has taken a "deep dive" into Caralis Chaos, an ancient lake on the Red Planet believed to have been larger than any body of water on Earth.

Over 350 asteroids have hidden moons, Gaia space telescope finds
By Robert Lea published
By precisely tracking the orbit of over 156,000 asteroids, the ESA star-surveying satellite Gaia has potentially found over 350 previously undiscovered asteroid-moon binaries.

'World's oldest calendar' discovered carved into ancient monument
By Elizabeth Howell published
A controversial comet strike theory has been circulating for 20 years. Now a group of researchers say they have found new evidence for it in ancient carvings at Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey.

Newborn moon may have had many mini-siblings in Earth orbit long ago
By Charles Q. Choi published
When Earth and our moon were much closer together than they are now, the duo could have had tiny companions, or a disk revolving around them in orbits around the pair's poles, a new study finds.
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