One of the Mars targets being explored by NASA’s rover Curiosity has been named St Kilda because of a very personal connection to Linda Kah, a UT scientist who is working on the mission, according to the BBC.
Times Daily interviews Hap McSween about verifying a meteorite.
UT paleontologist Stephanie Drumheller-Horton is quoted in a New York Times article about Aldabra Atoll, an island in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar that is a predator-free paradise for more than 100,000 giant tortoises.
A research team, which included UT assistant professor Nick Dygert, took to the lab to recreate the magmatic melt that once formed the lunar surface and uncovered new insights on how the modern moonscape came to be.
WVLT-TV Local 8 Now reported that UT students can now roam the planet Mars with new glasses. Using new Hololens designed by Microsoft, students can actually virtually walk on the planet, while studying the sandy, rocky terrain. Linda Kah, a UT carbonate sedimentology and geochemistry professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said
Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was part of a team that identified a new species of delta crocodile. These giant prehistoric crocodiles roamed the coasts and waterways of what’s now north-central Texas about 95 million years ago. Scientists say the Deltasuchus motherali, named after a dig
Science News reports that like sea stars, ancient echinoderms used to eat, breathe and scuttle around the seafloor with tiny tube feet. Scientists suspected that the ancient marine invertebrates, called edrioasteroids, had tube feet. A set of unusually well-preserved fossils from around 430 million year ago–described September 13 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B–provides
Through that Apollo 17 mission 45 years ago, geoscientist Lawrence “Larry” Taylor—who would go on to establish UT’s Earth and Planetary Sciences program—formed a longtime friendship and collaboration with astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt that would come to shape the collaboration between the university and NASA.
Lawrence “Larry” Taylor, a faculty member who was founder and director of UT’s Planetary Geosciences Institute, passed away September 18. He was 79. A prolific researcher, Taylor had a career at UT that spanned 46 years. He was one of the geoscientists based at the Johnson Space Center during Apollo 17, NASA’s last manned mission
Around 95 million years ago, a giant relative of modern crocodiles ruled the coastlines and waterways of what would one day become north central Texas.
With the Mars 2020 rover mission just around the corner, NASA has created a Returned Sample Science Board to grapple with the scientific, technological, and policy issues that come with such a robotic venture. Members will discuss the best strategy for hauling Red Planet rock and dirt to Earth. Harry McSween, UT professor of Earth
A UT earth and planetary sciences professor is co-principal investigator on a project that will study how practices to restore coastal marshes and lands are impacting marsh food webs. The project recently received a $2 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s RESTORE Science Program. NOAA disbursed a total of $16.7 million to