Robin Wordsworth

Incredibly exciting news from JAXA! MMX will be the first Mars sample return mission — unless China gets there first.

www.reuters.com/technology/m... Latest from Meta: Look everyone, our AI just hacked into someone else's company too, can we also have another $100 bn please?

Very proud of my student Collin Cherubim for his discovery of an atmosphere on the habitable-zone exoplanet LHS 1140 b! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/s...

Elon Musk boasted that he put USAID in the woodchipper, and bears responsibility for fuelling one of the worst Ebola outbreaks and the hundreds of deaths it has caused. hsph.harvard.edu/news/ebolas-...

A pretty good idea! www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/o...

We have a new paper out in PNAS led by Charlotte Minsky! Our research indicates that around 700 million years ago, Earth's climate may have been just One Snowball After Another. sciencex.com/news/2026-04... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Next week, March 31st at 6:00 pm EDT, head to the Harvard Geological Museum to hear Andrew H. Knoll discuss his new book, Earth and Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation. He will be in conversation with @rdword.bsky.social. RSVP is required for this free, in-person event: buff.ly/8Qm7Ahz

www.theguardian.com/politics/202... It's inspiring to see this result and speech from the Green party in the UK today!

NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) community webinars are starting this week! Please join if you're interested in contributing to NASA's next astrobiology roadmap. Sign-up link is here: science.nasa.gov/astrobiology...

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

AGU petition to save NCAR. Please share widely! agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...

I'm a day late with this because I was at the National Academies for this briefing. The big takeaway is that the search for life should be the top science priority when we send humans to land on #Mars! 🪐🧪🔭 #Astrobiology www.nationalacademies.org/news/search-...

This is lunacy. The Chinese scholars I know are among the hardest working, most selfless people I've ever encountered. They want to contribute to our intellectual endeavors, and they make our research teams better.

Twin spacecraft are set to take off on an unprecedented, winding journey to Mars, where they will investigate why the barren red planet began to lose its atmosphere billions of years ago. https://cnn.it/49FLkR0

A personal reflection on the destructive erosion of ethics, norms and respect for law at NASA: 🧪🔭 🧵

New paper on arxiv led by Prune August on rocky exoplanet atmospheric reinflation! All comments welcome arxiv.org/abs/2510.25896

My new essay on the future of life in space just appeared in Noema magazine! Kudos to Satwika Kresna for the lovely artwork.

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... This is good news for US higher education, although far from the end of the story.

Update on the atmosphere vs no atmosphere debate for TRAPPIST-1 b and c -- here's a nice and (IMO) conclusive result from Gillon and Ducrot et al.: no thick atmosphere on either planet. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02128

The #MaxPlanckPostdocProgram offers a guaranteed contract of at least 3 years, targeted mentoring, and career workshops. The call for applications is open now! 🚀 Take advantage of this opportunity and browse the job vacancies. www.mpg.de/en/max-planc...

#RockyWorldsDiscussion is back from our summer break! 🔭🧪 Our next speaker is Laura Schaefer from Stanford University, who will tell us about redox gradients in planet formation simulations of terrestrial planets 🌍🌕🪨 Join us on Zoom on Thu 4 Sep @ 16:00 UTC More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail...

🧪 I'm a fan of this way of interacting with vibrational spectra. I did this on my blog a while ago: nanoscale.blogspot.com/2015/06/what...

If you could hear in the infrared, what would CO2 sound like? We calculated this recently for a Gen Ed course, and the result is a little eerie. Results were generated by mapping IR frequency in inverse cm to sound frequency in Hz.

Now on @sciam.bsky.social, by @nadiadrake.bsky.social: The U.S. has axed CMB-S4, its boldest cosmology experiment in generations. Tight budgets and crumbling infrastructure helped doom the project, which was meant to test cosmic inflation. RIP. www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-...

Direct evidence for tectonics (of some kind!) 3.5B years ago. The timeline keeps moving back. Nice find by @alexwilkins.bsky.social at Goldschmidt.

A lab experiment that simulated Mars conditions showed that green algae can grow in plastic containers made from the same algae, setting the stage for a self-sustaining system to build habitats on the planet.

On a related note, we found that convective shutdown by the same mechanism can drastically shorten primordial magma ocean freeze-out times, though with enough irradiation there can be persistent magma oceans despite convective shutdown. arxiv.org/abs/2412.11987

New work led by Jess Cmiel finds that planets with steam atmospheres may be cooler — much cooler — at the surface than we previously thought. 

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
 arxiv.org/abs/2505.00775 This supports and extends conclusions published last year by Selsis et al. in Nature. 🔭 🧪

The abstract submission for Rocky Worlds 4 is now open! groningen2026.rockyworlds.org/registration... 🌋🔭🧬😱

These ‘large igneous provinces’ have formed a few times in Earth history and are terrifying — imagine a huge chunk of the surface turning into Mordor in a geologic blink of the eye

What does it take to turn Earth into a Snowball? Formation of a volcanic plateau about the size of India at the equator, according to our new study led by Charlotte Minsky: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... 🔭 🧪

Interesting paper by Yang et al. on arxiv today arguing clouds might _help_ us observe O2/O3 on exoplanets in some cases: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07760

Proposed NASA cuts in context, courtesy of the Planetary Society #astronomy #science

www.planetary.org/press-releas...

Sub-Neptunes shrink and oxidize as they cross the radius valley and become rocky planets, in a new paper led by Collin Cherubim arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05055 #astronomy #science

www.harvard.edu/research-fun...

I'm excited to announce that my first solo-author paper has been accepted at ApJ: arxiv.org/abs/2502.19394. I study the dependence of hot Jupiter circulation on both the temperature and wind initial conditions building upon Liu & Showman (2013), finding that the circulation of typical HJ is robust.

The Planetary Society strongly opposes the sudden, indiscriminate dismissal of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and explorers at NASA — the largest involuntary workforce reduction since the end of the Apollo program. Read more on our stance. ⬇️

Our new Nature Geoscience paper led by Danica Adams is now published: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Water-rock chemistry released hydrogen and helped make early Mars habitable to microbial life. We'll be able to test this idea directly once we can study Mars rocks here on Earth.

Our new paper led by Jake Seeley on clouds and convection in H2-dominated atmospheres is out! Technical conclusion: Things get weird when nitrogen is no longer the background gas 🧪🔭 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... arxiv.org/abs/2412.06648

Tides? Volcanism? Magnetospheres?! Everyone’s favourite Jupiter moon Io has it all! 🌋🧲🌊 On Thu 9 Jan @ 16:00 UTC on Zoom, Katherine de Kleer from @caltech.edu will tell us about Io's tidally-driven volcanism & mass loss at the next #RockyWorldsDiscussion More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail...

Big NASA Mars Sample Return announcement coming up tomorrow at 1 pm ET. I’m looking forward to hearing the new plan! www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Nice new BBC Sky at Night piece on our hypothesis paper about life outside planetary gravity wells 🔭 www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-scienc... arxiv.org/abs/2409.14477

Late-breaking job ad for a tenure-track position in climate science (broadly defined) at Harvard. The committee will start reviewing applications on January 21, 2025. Please share with interested candidates. academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/14496

🚨 SPECIAL FIRST POST 🚨 Applications to @exoclimes.bsky.social (7-11 July, 2025 at @umontreal.ca) is now OPEN until Jan 24, 2025! Join us for a week of exciting talks on planetary atmospheres interspersed with ample opportunities to discuss and forge new collaborations! forms.gle/mpeZ3LXGoFb9...

Just finished reading Buhler 2024, a creative new idea to explain how a sea the size of the Mediterranean once formed on Mars because the atmosphere collapsed. Nice use of cartoons too #planetaryscience #Mars @bot.astronomy.blue signup agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

New paper led by undergrad Jason Jorge on warming early Mars: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...