One look at the Planetary Decadal Survey for 2023–2032, and you will see some bold and cutting-edge mission proposals for the coming decade. Examples include a Uranus orbiter and probe (UOP) that would study Uranus' interior, ...
Meteorites hit New Zealand three or four times a year, but the fireball that shot across the sky above Cook Strait last week was unusual.
The story of our solar system's origin is pretty well known. It goes like this: the sun began as a protostar in its "solar nebula" over 4.5 billion years ago. Over the course of several million years, the planets emerged ...
When NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected samples from asteroid Bennu's surface in 2020, forces measured during the interaction provided scientists with a direct test of the poorly understood near-subsurface physical properties ...
NASA put an asteroid mission on hold Friday, blaming the late delivery of its own navigation software.
Mining the asteroids for resources like iron, precious metals, water, or other valuable species may someday become profitable. Mining will probably starting with near Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids whose paths cross the ...
The violent death throes of a nearby star so thoroughly disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind—known as a white dwarf—is sucking in debris from both the system's inner and outer reaches, UCLA astronomers ...
Later this year, NASA is set to launch a probe the size of a tennis court to the asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where remnants of the early solar system circle the sun. Once inside the asteroid ...
It might be hard to fathom now, but the human exploration of the solar system isn't going to stop at the moon and Mars. Eventually, our descendants will spread throughout the solar system—for those interested in space exploration, ...
Before the Earth and other planets formed, the young sun was still surrounded by cosmic gas and dust. Over the millennia, rock fragments of various sizes formed from the dust. Many of these became building blocks for the ...
