On September 8, 2012, NASA’s Dawn mission held Hasta La Vesta, a celebration of the successful exploration of giant asteroid Vesta. As part of the event, Dawn mission scientists and engineers shared mission stories and answered questions in a live, interactive Google+ Hangout video event moderated by Dawn science team liaison, Dr. Britney Schmidt, research…
Planetary Sciences News Archive
The European Space Agency recently announced that it will send a space probe to Jupiter and its large icy moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, including Don Blankenship, senior research scientist, are part of the science team designing and operating a radar instrument for the…
by Thomas Minor Jack Holt, research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), is currently researching Amazonian ice deposits on Mars, both at the polar caps and at the middle latitudes. Holt offered an update on his research in the Nov. 22, 2011 UTIG weekly seminar, “A New View of Ice on Mars: Viscous Fluid,…
Watch animation of how lakes form inside Europa’s icy shell. In a significant finding in the search for life beyond Earth, scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have discovered what appears to be a body of liquid water the volume of the North American Great Lakes locked inside the icy shell…
Wired, Jun. 21, 2011 Featuring: Lorena Moscardelli
Recently, there’s been a fair amount of interest and excitement about whether or not there is actually water on the moon. And it’s true, water has been detected on the moon’s surface through remote sensing. However, researchers at the University of New Mexico, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin and Los Alamos National Laboratory, have…
Earth, Universe Today, May 26-27, 2010 Featuring: Jack Holt & Isaac Smith
Scientists have reconstructed the formation of two curious features in the northern ice cap of Mars—a chasm larger than the Grand Canyon and a series of spiral troughs—solving a pair of mysteries dating back four decades while finding new evidence of climate change on Mars. In a pair of papers to be published in the…
Interpreting what’s below the surface of Mars is no easy task. There are many potential sources of noise in radar data received by the Shallow Subsurface Radar instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The prime troublemaker is surface clutter, which occurs when some of the waves reflect from surface features off to the side of…
It turns out that the newly discovered deposits of water ice on Mars, called lobate debris aprons, are very similar to rock covered glaciers in Antarctica. In 2000, Jack Holt and Don Blankenship, also an ice sheet expert at the Institute, were in Antarctica testing a new radar developed by NASA as a prototype for…
