A shallow soda lake in Canada could resemble Darwin's 'warm little ponds' found on the primordial Earth that had the right chemistry for life to get started.
We’ve all been there: You’re getting some peanut butter, or looking to nosh a nice pickle, when you find your wrist strength is insufficient to get at the jar’s delicious contents. That’s more or less NASA’s vexing issue with the OSIRIS-REx asteroid samples—though, of course, that canister’s contents aren’t for eating.
Researchers have long suspected that the Moon was formed after a Mars-sized protoplanet dubbed Theia smashed into the primordial Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. The literally Earth-shattering event caused huge amounts of debris to become dislodged, forming our planet's lonely satellite. Globs of the stuff may have also melted into the surface of the […]
During the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 - the last time people walked on the moon - U.S. astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan collected about 243 pounds (110.4 kg) of soil and rock samples that were returned to Earth for further study. A half century later, crystals of the mineral zircon inside a coarse-grained igneous rock fragment collected by Schmitt are giving scientists a deeper understanding about the moon's formation and the precise age of Earth's celestial partner. The moon is about 40 million years older than previously thought - forming more than 4.46 billion years ago, within 110 million years after the solar system's birth, scientists said on Monday, based on analyses of the crystals.