Only the two Voyager spacecraft have ever been there, and it took than more than 30 years of supersonic travel. It lies well past the orbit of Pluto, through the rocky Kuiper belt, and on for four times that distance. This ...
Astronomy
Oct 31, 2020
60
1186
NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, ...
Astronomy
Oct 26, 2020
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869
Hidden pockets of water could be much more common on the surface of the moon than scientists once suspected, according to new research led by the University of Colorado Boulder. In some cases, these tiny patches of ice might ...
Astronomy
Oct 26, 2020
1
275
After a four-year journey, NASA's robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx briefly touched down on asteroid Bennu's boulder-strewn surface on Tuesday to collect rock and dust samples in a precision operation 200 million miles (330 million ...
Space Exploration
Oct 21, 2020
1
990
The moon, Mercury and many meteorite parent bodies contain a magnetized crust, which is commonly credited to an ancient core dynamo. A longstanding alternative hypothesis suggests the amplification of the interplanetary magnetic ...
Recent science missions and results are bringing the search for life closer to home, and scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) may have figured ...
Space Exploration
Sep 23, 2020
20
730
Solar flares are violent explosions on the sun that fling out high-energy charged particles, sometimes toward Earth, where they disrupt communications and endanger satellites and astronauts.
Astronomy
Sep 22, 2020
1
155
In a paper published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers report the first ever clear images of nanojets—bright thin lights that travel perpendicular to the magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere, called the corona—in ...
Astronomy
Sep 21, 2020
8
204
Data from Southwest Research Institute-led instruments aboard ESA's Rosetta spacecraft have helped reveal auroral emissions in the far ultraviolet around a comet for the first time.
Astronomy
Sep 21, 2020
9
3088
Scientists used data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during 13 years of exploring the Saturn system to make detailed images of the icy moon—and to reveal geologic activity.
Astronomy
Sep 19, 2020
8
1522
