Stories

The thought that alien fishes, sharks and squids could be chasing each other in the pitch black waters of Jupiter’s moon Europa has astrobiologists like Steve Vance itching to get a good look below the ice.

This series follows an oceanographic expedition to the Mid-Cayman Rise and NASA’s efforts to plan a future mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa. In part five, scientists use high-tech submersibles to explore the seafloor and bring intriguing samples up to the surface.

When the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft visited Jupiter’s moons Io and Europa, scientists were faced with the exciting possibility that these strange worlds might host exotic forms of life.

The chemosynthetic life that thrives at hydrothermal vents might give us clues to how life arose in the first place. They also might be the same sort of life that could possibly exist on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa.

Before 1977, textbooks claimed that to sustain a living ecosystem, you needed energy from the Sun. Then the deep sea submersible Alvin discovered life teeming at hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. This led scientists to wonder if similar life could be found on Europa.

This series follows an oceanographic expedition to the Mid-Cayman Rise, and NASA’s efforts to plan a future mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Researchers are moving a step closer to solving one of the greatest murder mysteries of all time. It happened roughly 200 million years ago, marking the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, and the crime scene was the entire planet. In their quest to

Microbialites, strange carbonate structures that line the bottom of Pavilion Lake in British Columbia, Canada, come in many shapes and sizes. No-one knows why. But scientists in the Pavilion Lake Research Project hope to learn more by studying nearby Kelly Lake and making some comparisons.

Spaceward Bound and the DREAMS project recently launched a weather balloon in the Mojave Desert. The balloon´s payload contained scientific experiments designed to shed light on the search for life on Mars.

NASA´s IceBite project is in Antarctica testing a drill for possible use on a future mission to Mars. In a recent trial of the drill´s remote-operations software, the operators were a bit younger than usual: they were fifth-grade students, controlling the drill from a classroom