Credit: NASA Some of the asteroids NASA’s Lucy mission will visit are still more than 330 million miles (530 million kilometers) away from the spacecraft, which is more than three…
Category: Planetary Science
European spacecraft on way to Jupiter and its icy moons
In this image provided by the European Space Agency, an Ariane rocket carrying the robotic explorer Juice takes off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, Friday, April 14, 2023. European…
TESS discovers a Venus-sized exoplanet orbiting nearby star
Phase-folded photometry of LHS 475 highlighting the 3-hour window surrounding the planetary transits. Credit: Ment et al, 2023 Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a team of astronomers from…
Europe’s Jupiter probe set for new launch attempt
Thursday’s launch was called off just minutes before countdown due to bad weather in Kourou. The European Space Agency’s JUICE mission to explore Jupiter’s icy, ocean-bearing moons will again try…
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover gets a major software upgrade
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover will drive faster and reduce wear on its wheels thanks to two of the new capabilities included with a major software update that was completed on…
Astronomers peer inside the ‘Dragon Cloud’
arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2303.15499″> The inner core of the “dragon cloud” complex. Credit: Barnes et al, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2303.15499 How did the most massive stars form? Astronomers have debated…
Lots of Tatooine-like planets around binary stars may be habitable
SEATTLE — Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is the stuff of science fiction. But Tatooine-like planets in orbit around pairs of stars might be our best bet in…
Enceladus is blanketed in a thick layer of snow
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is shrouded in a thick layer of snow. In some places, the downy stuff is 700 meters deep, new research suggests. “It’s like Buffalo, but worse,” says…
Methylated gases could be an unambiguous indicator of alien life
SEATTLE — Attention alien hunters: If you want to find life on distant planets, try looking for signs of toxic chemical cleanup. Gases that organisms produce as they tidy up…
Io may have an underworld magma ocean or a hot metal heart
CHICAGO — An entire ocean of liquid magma, or maybe a hot heart of solid metal, may lurk in Io’s underworld. The surface of Jupiter’s innermost moon is covered in…
