SAN ANTONIO — March 11, 2025 —Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has received a three-year, $2,999,998 million grant from NASA to identify and characterize life and its biosignatures in frozen sand dunes in Alaska, under conditions similar to dune fields on early Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. The Assessing Regional Reflectors of Astrobiology in Kobuk dunes for Interplanetary Science (ARRAKIS) project team, which includes researchers from Brigham Young University and the University of California—Davis, seek insight into how microbial life may thrive in extreme environments on other worlds by understanding the limits on and constraints affecting life in similar planetary analog environments on Earth.

The discovery of the dwarf galaxy Andromeda XXXV—located roughly 3 million light-years away and the smallest yet found in the Andromeda system—is forcing astronomers to rethink how galaxies evolve in different cosmic environments and survive different epochs of the universe.

University of Arizona astronomers have peered back to a time when the universe was just less than 300 million years old. The research team, using JWST revealed something extraordinary in the galaxy: significant amounts of oxygen.