A new Southwest Research Institute-led study proposes a solution to a longstanding puzzle in planetary science: What caused the concentration, assembly, and preservation of millimeter-sized, spherical mineral grains within ...
Planetary Sciences
Jul 8, 2026
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22
Hayabusa 2's primary mission is now well in the past. JAXA's asteroid-sampling spacecraft rendezvoused with asteroid Ryugu in June 2018. It studied the asteroid for 1.5 years and gathered a sample that was returned to Earth ...
Space Exploration
Jul 8, 2026
1
43
Like a shelf in an old house, the Earth collects a lot of dust from its surroundings. This "space dust" is mostly made up of micrometeorites that survive atmospheric entry and provides researchers with a cheap and easy way ...
When it comes to the search for life elsewhere in the universe, methane and other chemical compounds are seen as signs of biology because they are often produced by living microbes. However, scientists can be misled because ...
Where does the solar system end and interstellar space begin? That's a question scientists have been working to answer using spacecraft traveling beyond the sun's influence. A team of researchers from the Southwest Research ...
Astronomy
Jul 7, 2026
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38
Rare images taken by a Japanese space probe during a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid have revealed that the space rock resembled a snowman, scientists said Monday.
Space Exploration
Jul 6, 2026
1
396
China's Tianwen-2 space probe, which is set to bring back samples from an asteroid for research, has reached its target after traveling 1 billion kilometers (620 million miles) over more than a year, the Chinese space agency ...
Planetary Sciences
Jul 6, 2026
0
64
Astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) to study the composition of 3I/ATLAS, the brightest interstellar object ever seen, in detail. By measuring specific chemical fingerprints—the ...
Astronomy
Jul 6, 2026
0
57
A new Southwest Research Institute-led study compared eight AI-generated lunar crater catalogs, discovering that many of their published performance metrics drop sharply when the databases are evaluated using the same scientific ...
Planetary Sciences
Jul 6, 2026
0
40
In the course of studying planets beyond our solar system (6,316 confirmed exoplanets and counting), scientists have discovered some very interesting systems. Consider TOI-201, a compact system populated by three bodies, ...
Astronomy
Jul 6, 2026
1
40
