New research indicates that Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, may continue to lose rotational energy despite the pair’s long-standing tidal lock, offering scientists a rare glimpse into the hidden interiors of distant icy worlds.

The post Pluto’s Moon Charon May Still Be Slowing Its Spin, Study Suggests appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has uncovered evidence that a 245-foot-thick (75-meter-thick) stack of ancient rock on the rim of Jezero Crater was built by repeated asteroid impacts. Referred to as the “Broom Point member” by the rover’s science team, this sequence of layered bedrock is likely more than 3.9 billion years old, making it among the oldest terrain ever examined by a Mars rover.  

Released Wednesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the findings offer a window into one of the most tumultuous chapters in the history of the solar system.  

“Since leaving Jezero, Perseverance has been exploring a brand-new frontier, both geographically and geologically — a chapter of Martian time that predates the crater itself,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance deputy project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “On Earth, our earliest geologic history has been fundamentally broken up, deformed, and erased by plate tectonics. Because Mars lacks plate tectonics to recycle its crust, this ancient record remains intact, giving us a rare glimpse into a geological time period that doesn’t exist on our own planet.” 

Reading between layers 

After ascending the western rim of Jezero Crater in late 2024, Perseverance began examining surrounding locations with its science instruments. Their data at Broom Point revealed six distinct rock types, including breccias — rocks composed of angular fragments — alternating with layers of fine-grained, pulverized rock dust. Rock fragments within the breccias are pocked with gas-bubble cavities, indicating they were once molten. 

The presence of tiny, dark, glassy beads within the layers offered an important clue about how these rocks formed. While volcanoes can produce similar glassy droplets, they rarely occur in such high abundance, pointing to asteroid impacts, instead, as the primary architect. In fact, the largest beads rival those flung out by the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub asteroid’s impact on Earth. 

The repetition of these distinct rock types multiple times throughout this thick sequence of rock indicates that high-energy impact events happened again and again across this region of early Mars. 

“The different rock layers are a record of variable-sized impacts occurring at different distances from where this rock sequence was accumulating,” said Alex Jones, a Ph.D. student in planetary geology at Imperial College London and lead author of the paper. “Some large impacts took place very far away, some small impacts nearby. Their debris all ended up landing here, constructing this thick section of rock.”  

How these layers formed may suggest an interaction with water or ice. Several of the layers look like they may have been formed by fast, ground-hugging debris flows. On Earth, these powerful, fluidlike surges can occur when molten rock hits water or ice that instantly flashes into steam.  

Cosmic one-two punch 

Some of Broom Point’s layers tilt at angles exceeding 80 degrees — nearly vertical — which is far too steep to be caused by the impact that created Jezero Crater.  

Instead, scientists suspect a cosmic “one-two punch” shaped this landscape long ago. First, a colossal asteroid impact created the 1,200-mile-wide (1,900-kilometer-wide) Isidis Basin, one of the largest impact basins on Mars, upending and tilting the once-flat rock layers. Later, a second asteroid likely struck, forming Jezero Crater, which measures 28 miles (45 kilometers) across. This second impact fractured and uplifted the already-tilted rocks into the dramatic formations the rover sees today.  

To pin down exactly when these events took place, the Perseverance team collected two core samples, dubbed “Bell Island” and “Main River.” If a future mission were to return them to Earth, laboratory dating could determine when and how often impacts were occurring on early Mars — and, by extension, the infant Earth, whose own early impact record has been erased by billions of years of plate tectonics. 

“During this violent era, it wasn’t rain or snow falling from the sky, but an almost constant barrage of molten rock droplets and pulverized dust kicked up by asteroid impacts,” said Jones. “If we can pin down the ages of these layers, it would be like reading a cosmic weather report from 4 billion years ago.” 

More about Perseverance 

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Arizona State University leads the operations of the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras. SuperCam is led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the instrument’s Body Unit was developed. The rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument was built at NASA JPL, and its WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera was built at Malin Space Science Systems.

For more information on NASA’s Perseverance, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance

News Media Contacts

DC Agle 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov  

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 202-672-4780
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

2026-045

Titan’s resources could one day make Saturn’s largest moon a major outpost for deep space exploration. Titan is one of the few places in the Solar System where the landscape can feel strangely familiar and completely alien at the same time. Saturn’s largest moon has weather, clouds, rain, lakes, and seas, but its cycle is [...]

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Sugars are key biomolecules in living organisms, as they form the backbone of DNA and RNA and play a fundamental role in metabolic processes. In theories of the origin of life, sugars are also essential for the synthesis of the first nucleic acids. Despite their importance, one of the major questions in origin-of-life research is how the first sugars formed on Earth, since laboratory experiments show that they do not form in enough quantities under prebiotic conditions. Sugars such as ribose and glucose have previously been detected in meteorite and asteroid samples, suggesting that some of these molecules may have originated in the primordial molecular cloud from which our Solar System formed. However, until now, no sugar had ever been directly detected in the interstellar medium.

An international team led by Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) researcher Izaskun Jiménez-Serra has now identified ¹ the first sugar in interstellar space: erythrulose. This molecule is the only possible four-carbon ketose, and on Earth it is commonly found in raspberries and sunless tanning products. Erythrulose was detected toward the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, located near the centre of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The discovery was made possible by ultra-sensitive, broadband spectroscopic surveys carried out with the 40-m Yebes radio telescope and the 30-m telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM).

The team identified 12 spectral lines matching the laboratory spectrum of erythrulose measured at the University of the Basque Country. The study also shows that this sugar is at least eight times more abundant than similar three-carbon sugars, none of which were detected in the same region. “This finding was unexpected, as the prevailing view in astrochemistry is that interstellar molecules grow in size through the sequential addition of carbon atoms”, says Izaskun Jimenez-Serra.

Working in collaboration with chemists from the University of Extremadura and Radboud University (the Netherlands), the CAB team discovered that erythrulose can form within interstellar ices from simpler two-carbon alcohols and aldehydes.

Based on the abundance of erythrulose measured in the G+0.693−0.027 molecular cloud, the researchers estimate that between 0.5 and 50 million tonnes of this sugar could have reached Earth’s surface during the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. The presence of erythrulose in interstellar space therefore provides an alternative source of sugars that may have contributed to the emergence of the first metabolic and replication processes on the early Earth.

“The detection of erythrulose is very exciting because it opens up the possibility of discovering in space other sugars such as ribose, which is part of RNA, and other important molecules for the origin of life,” says Carlos Briones, co-author of the study.

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