InSight Lander Makes Best-Yet Maps of Martian Depths

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July 22, 2021

Dear Reader, This week, we're contemplating what lies beneath. Deep beneath—in the hidden hearts of alien worlds, in fact. Our lead story reports on fresh results from NASA's InSight Mars Lander, which has used seismic waves to unveil the Red Planet's subsurface structure in unprecedented detail. Another story dives into lab-based studies using giant lasers and electromagnets to simulate conditions at the cores of massive planets. Elsewhere, we have coverage of surprisingly resilient extremophile microorganisms, the physics of hypersonic weaponry, and, yes, the suborbital spaceflight of the world's richest person. Read on!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Space InSight Lander Makes Best-Yet Maps of Martian Depths The NASA mission used seismic waves from marsquakes to perform a core-to-crust survey of the planet's subsurface By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Space Massive Machines Are Bringing Giant Exoplanets Down to Earth Scientists are using football-field-sized lasers, warehouse-sized electromagnets and other immense facilities to reveal the deep secrets of planetary interiors By Adam Frank

Space Hardy Microbes Hint at Possibilities for Extraterrestrial Life Studies of extreme ecosystems on Earth can guide the search for Martian life and may reveal the fundamental limits of biology By Brianne Palmer

Space Jeff Bezos Launches into Space on Blue Origin's First Astronaut Flight The billionaire and three others take a suborbital trip onboard the craft New Shepard By Mike Wall,SPACE.com

Space New Approach Could Boost the Search for Life in Otherworldly Oceans "Ecological biosignatures" hold promise for revealing alien organisms that may dwell within icy moons such as Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus By Natalie Elliot

Physics China Is Pulling Ahead in Global Quantum Race, New Studies Suggest The competition between the U.S. and China over development of quantum technology has implications for both the future of science and the two countries' political relations By Daniel Garisto

EARTH Ugly Diamonds Hold a Billion-Plus Years of Earth History Tiny pockets of fluid inside imperfect diamonds show how Earth changed By Stephanie Pappas

Physics The Physics and Hype of Hypersonic Weapons These novel missiles cannot live up to the grand promises made on their behalf, aerodynamics shows By David Wright,Cameron Tracy

Space Martian Crust Could Sustain Life through Radiation Meteorites reveal that so long as groundwater is present, the Martian subsurface is habitable By Nikk Ogasa

Space Brown Dwarfs Could Reveal Secrets of Planet and Star Formation They're not quite stars and not quite planets but can help us understand both By Katelyn Allers

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Space & Physics, Volume 4, Issue 3

QUOTE OF THE DAY "I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this." Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin

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FROM THE ARCHIVE The Adolescent Spacefaring Dreams of Tech Billionaires Their obsession harks back to sci-fi, but they could be doing more good on Earth By Zeynep Tufekci | December 2019

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