In mid-January, the Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth with its microscopic grains of dust captured from the tail of a comet and several distant stars. Around the same time, NASA launched a space probe called New Horizons to obtain the first close-up imagery of Pluto and its moons. Both efforts should help to shed light on the origins of our solar system, and perhaps even of life itself.
Meanwhile, over at Columbia’s Astrobiology Center, known as the CAC, a cadre of scientists is attempting to take these investigations a step further by looking into the possibility of “habitable” moons around planets in our own, and other, solar systems.
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