Enlarge / The polygons of Sputnik Planitium. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI ) Expectations for active geology on Pluto were pretty low prior to the arrival of the New Horizons probe. But the photos that came back from the dwarf planet revealed a world of mountains, ridges, and… strange lumpy things that don’t have an obvious Earthly analog. […]
Enlarge / InSight places a wind shield over its seismometer. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA’s InSight lander installed a seismograph on Mars, and the marsquakes it detected have helped us map the planet’s interior. This data provides the big picture of Mars’ internals—how big the core is, whether anything is molten, and so on. But it doesn’t […]
Enlarge / The ice age weather (left) gave way to one that slowly warmed until industrial times. (credit: Matthew Osman) The climate “hockey stick” refers to a reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1, 000 years. The data shows flattish temperatures over the last millennium , like the handle of a Hockey stick, ending in […]
Enlarge / Some seismic waves bounce off Mars’ core before reaching the InSight lander. (credit: Chris Bickel / Science ) We’ve learned a lot about our planet’s interior simply by tracking how the seismic energy released by earthquakes moves through or reflects off the different layers present beneath Earth’s surface. For over a Martian year, […]