How a moon slows the decay of Pluto's atmosphere

Pluto's relationship with its moon Charon is one of the more unusual interactions in the solar system due to Charon's size and proximity. It's more than half of Pluto's diameter and orbits only 12,000 or so miles away. To ...

NASA's Sun-observing IRIS mission

While it seems static from our vantage point on Earth 93 million miles away, the sun is constantly changing. Under the influence of complex magnetic forces, material moves throughout the solar atmosphere and can burst forth ...

MAVEN spacecraft gears up to observe global dust storm on Mars

NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission (MAVEN) orbiter will have a front-row seat to watch a marvelous dusty spectacle in late 2016. The spacecraft, nearing its second anniversary in Martian orbit, has already ...

The curious case of Earth's leaking atmosphere

Earth's atmosphere is leaking. Every day, around 90 tonnes of material escapes from our planet's upper atmosphere and streams out into space. Although missions such as ESA's Cluster fleet have long been investigating this ...

Are mystery Mars plumes caused by space weather?

Mysterious high-rise clouds seen appearing suddenly in the martian atmosphere on a handful of occasions may be linked to space weather, say Mars Express scientists.

Close comet flyby threw Mars' magnetic field into chaos

Just weeks before the historic encounter of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) with Mars in October 2014, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft entered orbit around the Red Planet. To protect sensitive ...

Saturn and Enceladus produce the same amount of plasma

The first evidence that Saturn's upper atmosphere may, when buffeted by the solar wind, emit the same total amount of mass per second into its magnetosphere as its moon, Enceladus, has been found by UCL scientists working ...

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