ESA plans mission to smallest asteroid ever visited

ESA's planet-defending Hera mission will set a new record in space. The asteroid investigator will not only be the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair – but the smaller of these two ...

Image: 3-D printed planetary models

3-D-printed scale models of asteroids and other planetary bodies are used for real-life testing of spacecraft navigation and landing systems – martian moon Phobos seen in the foreground here.

The geography of Antarctica's underside

Planetary scientists would be thrilled if they could peel the Earth like an orange and look at what lies beneath the thin crust. We live on the planet's cold surface, but the Earth is a solid body and the surface is continually ...

'Chemical laptop' could search for signs of life outside earth

If you were looking for the signatures of life on another world, you would want to take something small and portable with you. That's the philosophy behind the "Chemical Laptop" being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ...

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