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Building the Psyche Asteroid Explorer

If all goes well (an often perilous assumption, as JWST so frequently reminds us), NASA's Psyche mission to the intriguing asteroid of the same name will lift off in about two years. We're now moving out of the design and planning stage into manufacturing the...

A Catalog of Celestial Exotica

Harmonizing with yesterday's post about a NASA grant to study technosignatures is word from Breakthrough Listen, which has released a catalog of what it calls 'exotica' or, to cite the accompanying paper: "an 865 entry collection of 737 distinct targets intended to...

HD 158259: 6 Planets, Slightly Off-Tune

What an exceptional system the one around HD 158259 is! Here we have six planets, uncovered with the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory in the south of France, with the innermost world also confirmed through space-based TESS observations. Multiple...

On Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson's response to the perplexity of our existence was not purely scientific. A polymath by nature, he responded deeply to art and literature and often framed life's dilemmas through their lens. Always thinking of himself as a mathematician first, he unified...

Trident: Firming up the Triton Flyby

It's not a Triton, or even a Neptune orbiter, but Trident is still an exciting mission, a Triton flyby that would take a close look at the active resurfacing going on on this remarkable moon. Trident has recently been selected by NASA's Discovery Program as one of...

A Deep Dive into Tidal Lock

Mention red dwarf habitable zones and tidal lock invariably comes up. If a planet is close enough to a dim red star to maintain temperatures suitable for life, wouldn't it keep one face turned toward it in perpetuity? But tidal lock, as Ashley Baldwin explains in the...

Spectroscopic Evidence of a Possible Exomoon

It shouldn’t surprise us that first discoveries can be extreme. Consider that the first main sequence exoplanets we detected were ‘hot Jupiters.’ Nobody expected these (unless you discount John Barnes and Buzz Aldrin in Encounter with Tiber, and Greg Matloff, who...