Moon

2023 - 1 - 10

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Image courtesy of "Forbes"

Jupiter's Moon Europa Could Contain Sea Life From A Comet Strike ... (Forbes)

A comet or asteroid that crashed into its surface could have brought life to the liquid water ocean hiding under Europa's icy shell, suggests a study.

The results are intriguing because they show that a comet wouldn’t have to penetrate the ice shell to make contact with the ocean beneath. [Titan](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2019/04/30/welcome-to-titan-saturns-deranged-earth-like-moon-beginning-to-show-signs-of-life/) ( [recently imaged](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2022/12/02/in-photos-webb-telescopes-first-look-at-titan-saturns-giant-moon-that-may-once-have-have-hosted-life) by the [James Webb Space Telescope](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2022/11/19/its-official-webb-telescope-made-a-staggering-discovery-a-day-after-being-switched-on/)) and [Enceladus](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/01/09/this-is-how-we-find-life-on-saturns-snowball-moon-enceladus-say-scientists/) at Saturn. “Once you get enough water, you’re just going to sink.” The model will now be applied to the other icy bodies in the solar system thought to have ocean of liquid water hidden under ice shells, including the moons [published](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL100287) in Geophysical Research Letters researchers at the University of Texas at Austin developed a computer model to observe what happens after a comet or asteroid strikes Europa’s icy shell. The complex building blocks of life could have been created on interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth as part of a comet or asteroid that crashed into its surface, goes the theory.

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Image courtesy of "The Washington Post"

A woman on the moon: How has one small step taken so long? (The Washington Post)

Here's an anecdote I always assumed was apocryphal: Sally Ride was going to space, the first American woman to do so. Down on Earth, the NASA engineers in ...

That’s what the missionto put a woman on the moonis about. The ultimate goal of the program is to prepare to go to Mars. Figuring out how to put a woman on the moon is not just a symbolic mission, it’s a way of finding out what other questions you weren’t asking. The moon — and I’m probably not supposed to say this — seems like a sucky place to visit. But putting a woman on the moon is a question that is about more than science and technology. Two anatomically correct “radiotherapy phantoms,” named Helga and Zohar, are equipped to ride in the passenger seats of the Orion spacecraft. “We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American,” wrote the director of the cosmonaut program in his diary. It seemed a reasonable requirement, but it eliminated half the population: Women could not be military test pilots, and thus they could not be astronauts. NASA is now several years into the Artemis spaceflight program, which plans to be the first series of missions since Apollo in the 1960s-1970s to land astronauts on the moon. “America will demonstrate a new level of global space leadership,” read the official Artemis plans. Down on Earth, the NASA engineers in charge of equipment wondered about a possible scenario — what if Ride got her period while on the Challenger? You could give NASA the benefit of the doubt.

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