News From Space
A planet-encircling dust storm on Mars, which was first detected May 30 and halted operations for the Opportunity rover, continues to abate. With clearing skies over Opportunity’s resting spot in Mars’ Perseverance Valley, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, believe the nearly 15-year-old, solar-powered rover will soon receive enough sunlight to automatically […]
In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole’s ice […]
Lunar masonry starts on Earth. European researchers are working with Moon dust simulants that could one day allow astronauts to build habitats on our natural satellite and pave the way for human space exploration. The surface of the Moon is covered in grey, fine, rough dust. This powdery soil is everywhere — an indigenous source that […]
Radar data collected by ESA’s Mars Express point to a pond of liquid water buried under layers of ice and dust in the south polar region of Mars. Evidence for the Red Planet’s watery past is prevalent across its surface in the form of vast dried-out river valley networks and gigantic outflow channels clearly imaged […]
A planet-encircling dust storm on Mars, which was first detected May 30 and halted operations for the Opportunity rover, continues to abate. With clearing skies over Opportunity’s resting spot in Mars’ Perseverance Valley, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, believe the nearly 15-year-old, solar-powered rover will soon receive enough sunlight to automatically […]
NASA’s Dawn mission is drawing to a close after 11 years of breaking new ground in planetary science, gathering breathtaking imagery, and performing unprecedented feats of spacecraft engineering. Dawn’s mission was extended several times, outperforming scientists’ expectations in its exploration of two planet-like bodies, Ceres and Vesta, that make up 45% of the mass of […]
New observations by three of the world’s largest radio telescopes have revealed that an asteroid discovered last year is actually two objects, each about 900 meters (3000 feet) in size, orbiting each other. Near-Earth asteroid 2017 YE5 was discovered with observations provided by the Cadi Ayyad University Morocco Oukaimeden Sky Survey on December 21, 2017, but no details about […]
New comprehensive mapping of the radiation pummeling Jupiter’s icy moon Europa reveals where scientists should look — and how deep they will have to go — when searching for signs of habitability and biosignatures. Since NASA’s Galileo mission yielded strong evidence of a global ocean underneath Europa’s icy shell in the 1990s, scientists have considered that moon […]
During NASA’s Cassini mission’s final distant encounter with Saturn’s giant moon Titan, the spacecraft captured the enigmatic moon’s north polar landscape of lakes and seas, which are filled with liquid methane and ethane. They were imaged on September 11, 2017. Four days later, Cassini was deliberately plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn. Punga Mare (390 kilometers, […]
An enigmatic X-ray source revealed as part of a data-mining project for high-school students shows unexplored avenues hidden in the vast archive of ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray Observatory. When XMM-Newton was launched in 1999, most students who are finishing high school today were not even born. Yet, ESA’s almost two-decade old X-ray observatory has many surprises […]
Using observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and groundbased observatories, an international team of scientists has confirmed ‘Oumuamua (oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah), the first known interstellar object to travel through our solar system, got an unexpected boost in speed and shift in trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year. “Our high-precision measurements of ‘Oumuamua’s […]
The mass of a very young exoplanet has been revealed for the first time using data from the European Space Agency’s star mapping spacecraft Gaia and its predecessor, the quarter-century retired Hipparcos satellite. Astronomers Ignas Snellen and Anthony Brown from Leiden University, the Netherlands, deduced the mass of the planet Beta Pictoris b from the […]