Department Homepage
Professors Jonathan I. Lunine and Alexander Hayes played leadership roles in identifying U.S. national scientific priorities through 2033.
/news/cornell-chaired-panels-advocate-uranus-enceladus-missions
Nikole Lewis will be one of the first to characterize distant exoplanets using infrared data from the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.
/news/glowing-planets-and-chemical-fingerprints
As ground-based and space telescopes improve, astronomers need a color-coded guide to compare Earth’s biological microbes to cold, distant exoplanets to grasp their composition.
/news/tint-life-color-catalog-built-find-frozen-worlds
Aided by microbes found in the subarctic conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay, an international team – including researchers from Portugal’s Instituto Superior de Agronomia and Técnico, Canada’s Université Laval in Quebec, and Cornell – has created the first color catalog of icy planet surface signatures to uncover the existence of life in the cosmos...
/news/tint-life-color-catalog-built-find-frozen-worlds-0
After a European spacecraft rendezvoused with Comet 67P about seven years ago, astronomers now have found a cosmic revelation: It emits molecular oxygen drawn from its nucleus.
/news/comet-67p-emits-ancient-molecular-oxygen-its-nucleus
NASAFifty years ago, on March 2nd, 1972, Pioneer 10 touched off from Cape Canaveral on humanity’s first mission to the outer solar system. Just five months before the first moon landing in 1969, NASA approved a pair of spacecraft designated Pioneer F and G. They would use entirely nuclear power and travel faster than any previous manmade...
/news/50th-anniversary-pioneer-10
In this Interesting Engineering article, read about how space agencies from around the world will be venturing farther out into space than ever before. This includes returning to the Moon (perhaps to stay this time), exploring Mars, and maybe even establishing human settlements on both. Beyond that, there are even proposals for establishing...
/news/taking-earth-us-space-exploration-sustainable
For the past year, two Cornell doctoral students have been living, thinking and working on the red planet Mars, digitally commuting from our own blue world.
/news/rock-stars-mars-students-look-life-big-red-planet
In the future, mass transportation will almost certainly involve self-driving vehicles. The aerospace industry is pushing that idea even further, all the way to space, but the results for autonomous small spacecraft have been mixed.Now, a Cornell Space Systems Design Studio project that demonstrates the technology’s potential is poised to take...
/news/student-built-cubesats-rendezvous-space
Far above the populated towns on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, off the coast of western Africa, Esteban Gazel and Kyle Dayton carried equipment from their car and hiked toward the erupting Cumbre Vieja volcano’s active vents.Gazel, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Engineering, and...
/news/cornell-scientists-coolly-recall-fiery-volcano-visit