Parallax
Stories from Payload’s weekly space science newsletter, Parallax.
Predicting Arctic Sea Ice Thickness by Satellite
Each year, seawater in the Arctic freezes, melts, and re-freezes with the changing of the seasons. And each year, brave researchers trek out into the cold to stick poles into the snow and float buoys on the sea to measure just how thick that ice is. Why not just measure the ice thickness with satellites? …
Searching for Biomolecules on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently trekking through an ancient river delta on the Red Planet, searching for signs of life. As it journeys through the great rocky wasteland, here and there, the rover is taking small samples of Mars rocks a few centimeters deep and storing them in little metal tubes. But our favorite little…
A New Kind of Galaxy Death
This is the way a galaxy dies. Not with a bang but a whimper. Or, at least, that’s the case for a galaxy identified in a paper released last week. The study challenges the conventional wisdom that galaxy death—which happens when galaxies stop forming new stars—occurs alongside major cosmic events like supernovae or black hole…
