Elizabeth Tasker's Blog

Can We Trust a Handful of Grains to Tell Us About the Early Earth? A Look at the Hayabusa2 Asteroid Sample

The Hayabusa2 sample return capsule returning to Earth. The bright streak in the sky is the capsule, shock heated as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The bright lights on the ground are buildings. (JAXA)

In the early hours of December 6, 2020, what appeared to be a shooting star blazed across the sky above the Woomera desert in South Australia. The source was the sample return capsule from JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission, which contained precious material from a near-Earth asteroid known as...

The Surface of Venus Was Thought to Be Stagnant. But This May Not Be True

An oblique radar view of the largest “pack ice” block in the Venus lowlands identified by Byrne et al. (Paul Byrne, based on original NASA/JPL imagery).

The two Earth-sized planets in our solar system have taken wildly different evolutionary routes. The surface of the Earth became a temperate utopia for a liquid water and a myriad of life. But while similar in both size and mass, the surface of the neighboring Venus is hot enough to melt lead.

These differences are the key to understanding...

And Then There Were Three: ESA Follows NASA in Selecting a Mission to Venus

Artist illustration of the EnVision orbiter at Venus (ESA/VR2Planets/DamiaBouic)

It was quite a week for Venus scientists. Just seven days after NASA announced the selection of two Venus missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that a third Venus mission had been chosen for the agency’s medium-class mission category.

(See last week’s post here on Many Worlds about DAVINCI+ and VERITAS)

The new mission is named EnVision, and will be ESA’s second Venus miss...

Return to Hell: NASA Selects Two Missions to Venus to Explore the Pathway to Habitability

Artists’ renderings show the VERITAS spacecraft (left) and DAVINCI+ probe (right) as they arrive at Venus (Lockheed Martin).

For NASA scientists, Venus missions must feel like buses. You wait thirty years for one, and then two come along at once.

Last week, NASA selected two Venus missions for the space agency’s Discovery Program; solar system exploration missions that can tuck under a lower cost cap than candidates for NASA’s New Horizons or Flagship categories. The first of these is DAVI...

The Directly Imaged World Around α Centauri?

Optical and X-ray (cut-out) image of the Alpha Centauri binary stars (Optical: Zdenek Bardon; X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Colorado/T. Ayres et al.)

There is something terribly exciting about actually seeing an exoplanet. While we have discovered over 4,000 planets outside the solar system, the majority of these worlds have been identified through their influence on their star, either via a dimming of the star’s light as the planet transits across its surface, or the wobble of the star from the p...

The Directly Imaged World Around α Centauri

Optical and X-ray (cut-out) image of the Alpha Centauri binary stars (Optical: Zdenek Bardon; X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Colorado/T. Ayres et al.)

There is something terribly exciting about actually seeing an exoplanet. While we have discovered over 4,000 planets outside the solar system, the majority of these worlds have been identified through their influence on their star, either via a dimming of the star’s light as the planet transits across its surface, or the wobble of the star from the p...

Japan’s Hayabusa2 Mission Returns to Earth

Fireball created by the Hayabusa2 re-entry capsule as it passes through the Earths atmosphere towards the ground (JAXA).

In the mission control room in Japan, all eyes were fixed on one of the large screens that ran along the far wall. The display showed the night sky, with stars twinkling in the blackness. We were waiting for a delivery from space.

Japans Hayabusa2 mission launched from the Tanegashima Space Center on December 3, 2014. The spacecraft was headed to asteroid Ryugu, with the...

The Planet Larger Than Its Star

Artist animation of WD 1856 b orbiting the white dwarf. Due to the tiny size of the white dwarf and close orbit of the planet, the animation is to scale. The slightly inclined orbit means that the planet does not entirely block the white dwarf’s light as it transits (Tasker).

It has been an exciting month for planets. Just days after the announcement of a detection of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, another first in planet discoveries was declared. The new find is the first planet observe...

Could Life Exist in the Clouds of Venus?

Nightside of Venus captured with the IR2 (infrared) camera on JAXA’s Akatsuki climate orbiter (JAXA).

On September 14 at 3pm GMT, an embargo lifted on a research paper reporting evidence for biological activity on Venus. Speculation about the discovery had been spreading rapidly through social media for several days, proving that scientists are incapable of keeping secrets.

With a surface temperature sufficient to melt lead, Venus is not the usual candidate for extraterrestrial life. Howev...

Standing on an Asteroid: Could the Future of Research and Education be Virtual Reality?

Scenes from the virtual reality talk on Hayabusa2 with students from the Yokohama International School. Each student has a robot avatar they can use to look around the scene, talk with other people and interact with objects. (OmniScope)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stand on an asteroid? A rugged terrain of boulders and craters beneath your feed, while the airless sky above you opens onto the star-spangled blackness of space.

It sounds like the opening scene for a science...