MESSENGER Returns Images from Oct. 6 Mercury Fly-By

Mercury, traveling in its 88-day-long orbit around the Sun with basically zero axial tilt, has many craters at its poles whose insides literally never see the light of day. These permanently-shadowed locations ...

(Phys.org) —Until recently, most everyone accepted the conventional wisdom that the moon has virtually no atmosphere. Just as the discovery of water on the moon transformed our textbook knowledge of Earth's ...

When you look at the night sky, you see stars, a few planets, and perhaps even the Milky Way's spangled belt stretched across the middle.

The first day of April is always a traditional time for pranks and puns, and astronomers and scientists aren't above an April Fools' Day shenanigan or two. Hey, I gotta admit, as a freelance science journalist, ...

During its two years in orbit around Mercury—as well as several more years performing flybys—the MESSENGER spacecraft has taken over 150,000 images of the innermost planet, giving us a look at its incredibly ...

(Phys.org) —A distant world gleaming in sunlight, Earth's twin planet, Venus, shines like a bright beacon in images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.

A Russian capsule filled with 45 mice and 15 newts along with other small animals returned from a month's mission in orbit on Sunday with data scientists hope will pave the way for a manned flight to Mars.

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers from the SETI Institute, the Mars Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, and the space robotics company Honeybee Robotics, has successfully completed a first series of field ...

(Phys.org) —NASA's senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is driving to a new study area after a dramatic finish to 20 months on "Cape York" with examination of a rock intensely altered by water.

On 5:24 a.m. EDT on May 17, 2013, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME, a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of solar particles into space that can reach Earth ...

While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth's moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission's Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles ...

For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. "Lunar meteor showers" have turned out to be more common than anyone ...