Planetary Science

Planetary Science News

NASA will soon find out if the Perseverance rover can really persevere on Mars
12-19-2025
Ars Technica — When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now. EAPS's Briony Horgan was quoted in the article.

Inside NASA's Prep for the Moon, Mars, and the Search for Life
12-11-2025
NASA on YouTube — NASA experts take you behind the scenes in Iceland, where they study icy volcanoes, lava fields, hydrothermal vents, and other extreme environments that mimic other worlds. EAPS Assistant Professor Ali Bramson and her research team are working to figure out how astronauts can find and characterize water/ice and what is needed to prepare them for these activities.

The evolutionary history of kissing, moss in space, and the origins of the moon
12-11-2025
NPR Short Wave Podcast— Now, a new paper in the journal Science is attempting to figure out what this object Theia was made out of and where in the solar system it came from. EAPS's Kelsey Prissel made an appearance on the podcast.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Found Evidence of Tropical Storms on Mars
12-10-2025
Vice — In a new study published in Communications Earth and Environment, led by Adrian Broz of Purdue University EAPS, researchers report that these aluminum-rich rocks scattered around Jezero Crater have the same chemical signature as kaolinite formed in Earth’s tropical climates after millions of years of water slowly stripping minerals from rock.

Mars May Have Lightning, Scientists Find
10-10-2025
Scientific American — For years scientists have suspected that there is electrical activity on Mars. A study now confirms it: particles in the dusty Martian atmosphere rub against one another, building up electrical charge that discharges in the form of tiny lightning arcs. Aside from Earth, lightning and electrical activity were only known to occur on Saturn and Jupiter. EAPS's Roger Wiens was quoted in the article.

Findings suggest red planet was warmer, wetter billions of years ago
12-10-2025
Rocks that stood out as light-colored dots on the reddish-orange surface of Mars now are the latest evidence that areas of the small planet may have once supported wet oases with humid climates and heavy rainfall comparable to tropical climates on Earth.

Scientists say Bennu samples hold a trove of life-building ingredients
12-10-2025
MSN — Work led by planetary scientists at Purdue University describes Bennu as a carbonaceous asteroid whose composition fits with scenarios in which such bodies helped in seeding the early Earth with both water and carbon. In that picture, brine-filled pores and fractures on the parent body would have acted as miniature chemical reactors, cycling organics through different temperatures and concentrations.

Mars Sample That May Contain Evidence of Life Might Never Come Home
11-19-2025
Scientific American — Right now one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever built is scouring the surface of Mars. Supported by a team of hundreds of scientists back on Earth, the Perseverance rover has traveled nearly the distance of a marathon to answer some of the biggest questions about our neighboring world. EAPS's Briony Horgan was quoted in the article.

NASA rover spots something on Mars that doesn't belong there
11-17-2025
Mashable — NASA's Perseverance rover has identified an exotic rock on Mars that may be an iron-nickel meteorite, according to scientists on the mission team. EAPS's Candice Bedford was quoted in the article.

Registration open for Nov. 11 Westwood Lecture on the effects of space weathering: Insights from asteroid Bennu
10-28-2025
Michelle Thompson, associate professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences in the College of Science, will present “A Time Machine to the Early Solar System: Analyzing Samples from Asteroid Bennu Returned by the NASA OSIRIS-REx Mission” from 4:30-5:30 p.m. at Westwood, the Purdue president’s residence.

Which planets are the youngest and oldest in our solar system?
10-13-2025
Live Science — About 4.6 billion years ago, a celestial cloud collapsed, paving the way for our solar system to form. Then, a nebula with strong gravitational pull took shape, kick-starting the birth of the sun. But after that, the details leave more room for debate about which planets formed first. Purdue EAPS's Cauê Borlina was quoted in the article.

Purdue University professor helping discover ancient life on Mars
09-18-2025
WTHR — The Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater in February 2021 to explore the ancient Neretva Vallis River Valley. Last summer, it drilled the Sapphire Canyon sample from a rock called Cheyava Falls. Scientists believe the leopard spots found on it may have been made by ancient life, NASA said. The SuperCam is just one of seven instruments on Perseverance. EAPS's Roger Wiens can operate it from online software right in his Purdue office.

Planetary scientist decodes clues in Bennu’s surface composition to make sense of far-flung asteroids  
08-27-2025
Space weathering expert Michelle Thompson of the College of Science and OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, reveals why some gray asteroids reflect light at different wavelengths, like red or blue, more strongly. These results help shed light onto the evolution of rocky bodies in the solar system.

Some asteroids are more ‘colorful’ than others. Here’s why.
08-27-2025
Popular Science — New research on the Bennu asteroid explains why some look red, blue, or grey. EAPS's Michelle Thompson was quoted in the article along with her research.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Spots Bizarre Helmet-Shaped Rock and Mysterious Megaripples
08-25-2025
Scitechdaily — On Mars, the story of the past is preserved in solid rock, but the planet’s present is being shaped in shifting sand. Just last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover studied a set of inactive megaripples to better understand how winds continue to sculpt the Martian surface today. This article was written by Athanasios Klidaras in EAPS.

Asteroid Bennu: A time capsule of materials bearing witness to its origin and transformation over billions of years
08-25-2025
Phys — Asteroid Bennu is a mixture of materials from throughout, and even beyond, our solar system. Over the past few billion years, its unique and varied contents have been transformed by interactions with water and the harsh space environment. EAPS's Michelle Thompson was named in the article along with her research.

Mars boffins probe mysterious new mineral
08-21-2025
The Northern Miner — Scientists have spotted on Mars what could be a previously unknown mineral linked to the kind of sulphaty gunk that clogs tailings ponds on Earth. EAPS's Roger Wiens was mentioned in this article.

Saturn’s moon Mimas may have a vast hidden ocean
08-13-2025
PNAS — At first glance, Saturn’s moon Mimas appears dead and boring, with nothing to make it shine. Other moons—such as Enceladus, Titan, and Jupiter’s Europa—harbor icy oceans, lakes of methane, or hints of habitable climates in the past. Mariana Blanco-Rojas, a PhD student in EAPS, presented an explanation of how an ocean layer can exist, even with this lack of smoothing.

Decoding Space Rocks with AI: The Meteorite Breakthrough
08-13-2025
Securities — Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we do things, not only on Earth but also in Space. Lead author Marissa Tremblay, assistant professor with EAPS, further noted that meteorites tend to be denser than rocks on Earth, are magnetic and contain metal. However, finding meteorites isn't that easy.

How Ceres Froze Over: Modeling the Ice-Rich Crust of an Evolving Dwarf Planet
07-24-2025
Join planetary scientists Beth Johnson and Purdue's Ian Pamerleau, lead author of a groundbreaking new Nature Astronomy study, for a deep dive into the icy mysteries of Ceres—the largest object in the asteroid belt and the only dwarf planet to be orbited by a spacecraft.

Purdue announces launch of Neil Armstrong Space Prize
07-22-2025
Purdue University — recognized globally as the Cradle of Astronauts — announced the creation of a new international prize honoring excellence over the past 10 years in space discovery, innovation and human achievement. Named the Neil Armstrong Space Prize, the award is designed to stand alongside other prestigious honors in the scientific field, including the Nobel Prize, and become the premier global honor in space advancement.

Is there life on Mars? Scientists claim thick layers of clay could be perfect breeding grounds
07-15-2025
GBNews — Scientists have discovered that thick clay deposits on Mars could have provided stable environments where ancient life might have developed, according to new research. EAPS's Roger Wiens was quoted in this article and led the research team.

Forget Mars and Europa — NASA is hunting life on this unthinkable little world
07-01-2025
The Pulse — NASA is constantly searching for any signs of life in the solar system. Earth is currently the only planet that is capable of holding life as we know it, as the distance between it and the sun is perfect for life to proliferate. Now, they are turning their focus to somewhere else to see if there’s something vital for life. A team led by Ian Pamerleau, a Ph.D. student at Purdue University, worked with his supervisor, Mike Sori, and Jennifer Scully from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Ceres: The asteroid belt’s forgotten ocean world
06-24-2025
Big Think — Dawn data showed that Ceres’ density is quite low, suggesting a high overall water (rather than rock) content. That seemed inconsistent, however, with the general lack of shallow craters and the observation that deep craters are very well preserved. Recently, following a paper published in Nature Astronomy by EAPS's Ian Pamerleau and colleagues from Purdue University and the Jet Propulsion Lab, we found a solution to this apparent mystery.