Alien Oceans' Glint Could Reveal Habitable Water Worlds

The planet's oceans reflect a great deal of light, especially during the crescent phase. "Seeing excessive brightness at the crescent phases could be a telltale signal of ocean planets," Tyler Robinson, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June. In 1993, for example, Carl Sagan and other researchers used observations made by NASA's Jupiter-studying Galileo spacecraft during a 1990 flyby of Earth to search for signs