Space Exploration

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next target, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, more than four months ahead of its 2019 close encounter. Artist’s impression of New Horizons encountering a Pluto-like object in the distant Kuiper Belt. Image credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI …

After an almost two-year journey through space, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) caught its first glimpse of Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid whose makeup may record the earliest history of our Solar System, last week and began the final approach toward the asteroid. Using its multipurpose PolyCam …

When NASA’s Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, the gas giant’s southern hemisphere was enjoying summertime, while the northern was in the midst of winter. Cassini spied a broad, warm, high-altitude vortex at Saturn’s southern pole, but none at the northern pole. A study led by the University of …

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established a definition of a planet that required it to clear its orbit, or in other words, be the largest gravitational force in its orbit. Since Neptune’s gravity influences Pluto, and Pluto shares its orbit with frozen gases and objects in the Kuiper …

Planetary researchers from Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley may have solved the mystery behind lunar swirls, wispy bright regions scattered on the Moon’s surface. The solution hints at the dynamism of the Moon’s ancient past as a place with volcanic activity and an internally generated magnetic field. …

One month after its successful launch, Parker Solar Probe — a NASA’s robotic spacecraft designed to explore the Sun’s atmosphere — has collected and transmitted its first data. First light data from Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR instrument suite: the right side of this image — from WISPR’s inner telescope — …

A new image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft shows a long, brown oval known as a ‘brown barge’ in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. A ‘brown barge’ cyclone in Jupiter’s South Equatorial Belt. Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill created this image using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Image credit: …

Researchers using data from NASA’s Cassini orbiter have found evidence for massive dust storms in Titan’s equatorial regions. The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, implies that Titan — like Earth and Mars — has an active dust cycle. An artist’s concept of a dust storm on Titan. Image …

Mars had right conditions for subsurface life some 3.7 to 4.1 billion years ago (Noachian period), according to new research from Brown University. An artist’s impression of habitable Mars. Image credit: Daein Ballard / CC BY-SA 3.0. “We showed, based on basic physics and chemistry calculations, that the ancient Martian …

An international team of researchers from the United States, Taiwan and France provides new evidence that phosphates — a key element in the building blocks — were generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one billion years by meteorites or comets. The findings are published in …