Saturn spacecraft samples interstellar dust

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from beyond our solar system. The research, led by a team of Cassini scientists primarily from Europe, is published this week in the journal ...

Close comet flyby threw Mars' magnetic field into chaos

Just weeks before the historic encounter of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) with Mars in October 2014, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft entered orbit around the Red Planet. To protect sensitive ...

Curiosity rover finds biologically useful nitrogen on Mars

A team using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard NASA's Curiosity rover has made the first detection of nitrogen on the surface of Mars from release during heating of Martian sediments.

Spitzer and Kepler detect Jupiter-like storm on small star

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a tiny star with a giant, cloudy storm, using data from NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The dark storm is akin to Jupiter's Great Red Spot: a persistent, raging storm ...

New clues to Ceres' bright spots and origins

Ceres reveals some of its well-kept secrets in two new studies in the journal Nature, thanks to data from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. They include highly anticipated insights about mysterious bright features found all over the ...

New Horizons returns first of the best images of Pluto

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby – and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades.

Earth might have hairy dark matter

The solar system might be a lot hairier than we thought. A new study publishing this week in the Astrophysical Journal by Gary Prézeau of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, proposes the existence of ...

Fermi mission finds hints of gamma-ray cycle in an active galaxy

Astronomers using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected hints of periodic changes in the brightness of a so-called "active" galaxy, whose emissions are powered by a supersized black hole. If confirmed, ...

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