Space Exploration

A team of planetary researchers from the United States, Canada and Italy has detected an ice-rich linear feature of bedrock in the tropical region of Saturn’s hazy moon Titan. A false-color view of Titan, a moon of Saturn surrounded by a thick orange haze. Image credit: NASA / JPL / …

  The Earth-Moon system is one of the unique features of the solar system. Earth is the only rocky planet with such a large moon, and the only planet besides Pluto to have a moon so fundamentally similar to itself in composition. The Pluto-Charon system is considerably different otherwise from …

  Aluminum is found in everything from smartphones to rockets, but one of those applications is somewhat more demanding. NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (IOG) and the Department of Justice have announced the outcome of a years-long investigation of problems with aluminum rocket components. It turns out a company …

  Saturn has a lot of moons, but Titan is of particular interest to scientists for numerous reasons. It has a thick atmosphere, bodies of liquid on the surface, and weather patterns. Scientists from the University of Arizona studying the atmospheric processes on Titan report they happened upon a previously …

The tenuous nitrogen atmosphere of the dwarf planet Pluto is predicted to ultimately collapse and freeze over. This high-resolution image of Pluto was taken by New Horizons on July 14, 2015. Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, …

  Last month, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule successfully flew to the International Space Station, as part of an important test of its flight and landing capabilities. This past weekend, while prepping for launch abort tests to be carried out later this summer, the vehicle catastrophically exploded. Luckily, no one was …

  In 2022, if all goes well, NASA will launch Psyche, a space probe intended to visit the asteroid of the same name (16 Psyche is its formal designation). It’s a particularly exciting mission given Psyche’s unique nature and highly unusual composition. The asteroid belt is composed of three types …

  We tend to think of the moon as an airless wasteland, and that’s mostly true. The moon actually has a tenuous envelope of water and hydroxyl (OH) molecules. NASA launched the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission in 2013 to study the wispy gas around the moon. …

  NASA’s Kepler space telescope has ended its planet spotting mission, but the agency’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has already picked up the torch. TESS has detected a new exoplanet called HD 21749c. This is not the first planet to show up in TESS data, but it is the …

Planetary researchers have long known that Earth and Mercury have metallic cores. Mercury’s core fills nearly 85% of the volume of the planet — huge compared to the other rocky planets in the Solar System. Like Earth, Mercury’s outer core is composed of liquid metal, but there have only been …