Space Exploration

  The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) recently passed its 15th anniversary leaving Earth behind to observe the red planet, and NASA is celebrating by recapping some of the robot’s best images. You’ve probably seen some of them pop up over the last few years but maybe never stopped to appreciate …

Planetary researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center have used dry paleolakes and riverbeds to determine how much precipitation was present on Mars 3.5-4 billion years ago. Open and closed lakes on early Mars. Image credit: University of Texas at Austin. The climate …

NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Reveals Scientists believe Mars was much more similar to Earth in the distant past, not the dried-up ball of dust it is today. Understanding Mars could help us better understand how planets form, and the NASA InSight mission has the tools to get us there. Using …

High-resolution observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft of mysterious bright spots (faculae) in Occator crater on the dwarf planet Ceres suggest the existence of a brine reservoir — which is about 40 km (25 miles) deep and hundreds of km wide — that emerged to the surface through long-lived cryovolcanic activity …

May Form Ammonia-Water Hailstones A new study suggests that during Jupiter’s violent storms, hailstones form from a cooled mixture of water and ammonia gas, similar to the process in Earth’s storms where hail forms in the presence of supercooled liquid water; growth of these Jovian hailstones, dubbed ‘mushballs,’ creates a …

Vast Areas of Mars’ Night Sky Pulse in Ultraviolet Using new data from the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) on NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, scientists have found that the atmosphere of Mars pulses in ultraviolet three times per night, and only during Martian spring and fall. The …

May Be Smaller and Rounder than Previously Thought The heliosphere is a giant magnetic bubble that contains our Solar System, the solar wind and the solar magnetic field. Outside the heliosphere is the interstellar medium — the ionized gas and magnetic field that fills the space between stellar systems in …

Juno Discovers ‘Shallow Lightning’ on Jupiter An unexpected form of electrical discharge, ‘shallow lightning’ originates from Jovian clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, according to a new analysis of data collected by the Stellar Reference Unit instrument onboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. This illustration uses data obtained by NASA’s Juno mission to …

NASA’s Curiosity rover has seen a lot since August 5, 2012, when it first set its wheels inside the huge basin of Gale Crater. Curiosity rover took this selfie on October 11, 2019. The rover drilled twice in this location, nicknamed Glen Etive. Just left of the rover are the …

Ice Sheets Covered Southern The southern highlands of Mars are dissected by hundreds of ancient valley networks (3.9-3.5 billion years old), which are evidence that water once sculpted the Martian surface. According to new research, these valley networks were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers …