The surface of Mercury is filled with craters, ridges and steep cliffs. Over billions of years, as the planet's interior cooled, the planet also shrank. Just as the skin of a drying fruit wrinkles when what is inside it shrinks, ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 13, 2026
0
37
We've found more than 5,500 exoplanets so far. Dozens of them are in the habitable zones of their parent stars, where, at least in theory, they could host an ocean. But we've never definitively found a liquid ocean on another ...
Space Exploration
Sep 13, 2026
0
62
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached another milestone this summer, a first for space agencies. On Sunday, July 5, the probe conducted the first successful laser-ranging experiment ...
Space Exploration
Sep 12, 2026
0
165
Scientists were shocked when they received the first images of Martian gullies. They were even more shocked as those gullies appeared to change over time. Their similarities to gullies seen on Earth were uncanny, but all ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 11, 2026
0
110
NASA is bringing artificial intelligence to the study of the moon, helping researchers transform how they analyze its surface. In an ongoing collaboration with IBM Research and several academic institutions, NASA has launched ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 11, 2026
0
60
Thanks to JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and its sample-return capabilities, we're on the cusp of receiving our first sample from the Martian system—not from Mars itself, but from its largest moon, Phobos. ...
Space Exploration
Sep 11, 2026
0
14
On a mostly flat plain an hour north of Stockholm lies a collection of large burial mounds dating from an ancient culture at least 2,500 years old. These people were not Vikings; they were northern Germanic Goths, pagan polytheists ...
Astronomy
Sep 10, 2026
0
18
We've been searching for life on Mars for a long time, but so far we've come up empty. The fundamental problem is a Catch-22 involving two of the key ingredients for life. Life as we know it needs liquid water and reasonable ...
Astrobiology
Sep 9, 2026
0
15
Halley's Comet captures the imagination in a way that few other astronomical objects do. When it last made its approach toward the sun (admittedly when this author, who is now middle-aged, was 1 year old in 1986), humanity ...
Space Exploration
Sep 8, 2026
0
20
After an eight-year journey, a spacecraft carrying European and Japanese probes began the monthslong, high-risk approach to Mercury on Thursday to study the sun-scorched planet.
Planetary Sciences
Sep 5, 2026
1
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