Even the world's most powerful telescopes have their blind spots. Although NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can peer billions of years into the past, it still struggles to photograph planets orbiting nearby stars. ...
Space Exploration
11 hours ago
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Modern space exploration hasn't quite reached "Star Trek" levels of boldly going where no one has gone before. But if, like the denizens of the USS Enterprise, astronauts one day want to land on an uncharted planet, they'd ...
Planetary Sciences
Nov 3, 2026
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16
With their mysterious glow and swirling veils of color, auroras enchant even experienced researchers. When a particularly intense solar storm reached Earth on the night of May 10, 2024, and relevant websites predicted auroras ...
Planetary Sciences
Nov 3, 2026
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28
If a dangerous asteroid were headed toward Earth, one defense could be a nuclear detonation to blast one side with X-rays and nudge it off course. But new simulations suggest that for a lumpy, irregular asteroid, exactly ...
Planetary Sciences
Nov 3, 2026
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36
It's a dizzyingly busy time for scientists searching for life on distant planets. To date, astronomers have cataloged more than 6,000 planets beyond our solar system and are searching the atmospheres of the most promising ...
Astrobiology
Nov 2, 2026
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679
Asteroid Ryugu and some carbonaceous meteorites, which are thought to have similar origins in the early solar system, are known as chemically "primitive" materials because they preserve the chemical composition of the early ...
Astrobiology
Nov 2, 2026
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97
Tucked away among its sensors, cameras and navigation tools, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance is wearing small swatches of spacesuit material. A rover doesn't need a spacesuit, but the swatches—each less than a square inch ...
Space Exploration
Nov 1, 2026
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111
Scientists at the University of New Mexico have played a key role in identifying a rare, 4.1-billion-year-old Martian meteorite that provides new evidence that the red planet may have once had a wetter, Earth-like environment.
Astrobiology
Oct 29, 2026
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127
When asteroids travel too close to white dwarfs, the dense remnants of stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel, powerful gravitational forces can tear them apart. However, new research from Planetary Science Institute ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 29, 2026
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15
A new study lets some of the air out of a long-held theory that growing, rocky planets will lose their atmosphere if they smash into a large object in space.
Planetary Sciences
Oct 29, 2026
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