Roger Jay Phillips, American geophysicist, planetary scientist and professor emeritus at the Washington University in St. Louis, passed away on November 19, 2020. Phillips served as the Director of the Lunar […]
The uranium-bearing mineral zircon is an abundant constituent of Earth’s continental crust, providing information about the age and origin of the continents, while Mars’ crust is compositionally more similar to […]
Evidence for impact events can be found in the mineralogy and appearance of lunar samples and meteorites that originate from other bodies in the solar system. This shock metamorphism is […]
Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites preserve volatiles and carbonaceous matter, the key ingredients of life, from the early solar system. These meteorites show spectral similarities to the C-type asteroids that are also […]
In the earliest periods of solar system formation, the protoplanetary disk was a hot environment full of gas and dust. As the disk cooled, various elemental species condensed out of […]
Episode 37: November 24 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time. Please join us as we welcome Dr. Melissa Trainer, a Deputy Principal Investigator (PI) for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon […]
VEXAG (NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group) is seeking four new volunteers for the VEXAG Steering Committee to replace Members at Large, who have successfully completed their service to the Venus […]
In 2017, the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover reached a locality in Gale crater informally named Vera Rubin ridge. The 6.5-kilometer-long and approximately 250-meter-wide Vera Rubin ridge was […]
The surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa mostly consists of water ice mixed with a variety of salts that ultimately originate from its subsurface ocean. New experiments by Murthy Gudipati from […]
The next Planetary Advisory Committee meeting will be held, via WebEx, on November 30, 2020, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST. This meeting will be held for the purpose […]
The 24th Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) meeting will be virtual on January 26 – 27, 2021. We have two opportunities at this upcoming SBAG meeting specifically for the early […]
Episode 36: Aired on October 29, 2020 Featuring an AbGradCon panel discussion Hosted by Dr. Graham Lau (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science) This was a special panel episode featuring […]
The Bridge to Faculty (B2F) program is a university-level initiative to increase the pipeline toward faculty diversity at University of Illinois at Chicago by attracting and retaining promising scholars from different backgrounds, with […]
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate announces the second solicitation for Concepts for Ocean Worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) technologies. This time the focus is on three specific technologies relevant to future […]
The leading model for the primary differentiation of Earth and other rocky planets and moons holds that these bodies had global oceans of magma that crystallized to form central cores, […]
In 2004, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Rosetta probe, accompanied by the Philae lander, to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Almost 11 years after launch from Earth, Philae separated from Rosetta […]
Estimated Release of draft AO …………………………….. October 2021 (target) Estimated Release of final AO……………………………… October 2022 (target) Estimated Proposal due date ………………………………. 90 days after AO release This community announcement […]
The Lunar and Planetary Institute seeks extraordinary students to join us for the 2021 Summer Undergraduate Program for Planetary Research (SUPPR). The eight-week program will run from June to August […]
The Mercury Exploration Assessment Group (MExAG) is circulating the first issue of The Mercury Newsletter. This new quarterly community newsletter can be accessed online at https://www.lpi.usra.edu/mexag/newsletter/. In this newsletter, we introduce MExAG and its […]
The conventional understanding that the Moon is completely dry has been challenged multiple times in the past. Samples collected by the Apollo missions showed up to a few thousand parts […]