An enormous canyon stretches across Mars: Valles Marineris is 3,000 kilometers long, 600 kilometers wide and on average 8 kilometers deep. Its Latin name goes back to the Mars orbiter Mariner, which discovered the valley ...
Throughout Earth's history, the planet's surface has been regularly impacted by comets, meteors, and the occasional large asteroid. While these events were often destructive, sometimes to the point of triggering a mass extinction, ...
The dwarf planet Ceres has a diameter of almost 1,000 kilometers and is located in the asteroid belt. In the television series "The Expanse," Ceres gained new fame as the main base of the so-called 'belters': in this series, ...
Volcanoes were erupting on the moon as recently as 120 million years ago, evidence collected by a Chinese spacecraft suggests. Until the last few years, scientists had thought volcanic activity ended on the moon around 2 ...
Survey observations using the Subaru Telescope's ultra-widefield prime focus camera have revealed that there may be a population of small bodies further out in the Kuiper Belt waiting to be discovered.
After about 10 years of construction, the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is scheduled to see its first light in January 2025. Once it's up and running, it will begin its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a decade-long ...
Digging in the ground is so commonplace on Earth that we hardly ever think of it as hard. But doing so in space is an entirely different proposition. On some larger worlds, like the moon or Mars, it would be broadly similar ...
This week, much of the US is suffering from yet another heat wave. So far this year, 15 countries have set records for high heat. Last July, the average global temperature, factoring in heat waves in multiple regions around ...
The largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for planetary exploration just got its "wings"—massive solar arrays to power it on the journey to Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
An international team of 45 researchers studying meteor showers has found that not all comets crumble the same way when they approach the sun. In a paper published in the journal Icarus, they ascribe the differences to the ...
