Scientists Identify a Potential Source of a Special Kind of Meteorite
Its characteristics may help to explain certain discrepancies in the classification of near-Earth asteroids. When the Chelyabinsk fireball exploded over the Russian sky in 2013,…
Planetary Science News
Scientists Discover the First Impact Crater in Spain
The crater was found in the province of Almeria. The first probable impact crater in Spain has been discovered in the southern province of Almeria….
Martian Landslides Not Conclusive Evidence of Ice – Analysis of State-of-the-Art Satellite Data Reveals
Giant ridges on the surface of landslides on Mars could have formed without ice, challenging their use by some as unequivocal evidence of past ice…
Rocky, Earth-Sized Exoplanet Is Missing an Atmosphere [Video]
Study reports on search for an atmosphere around a planet somewhat similar to ours. Astronomers at MIT, Harvard University, and elsewhere have searched a rocky,…
Classic Mars Image From NASA’s Mariner 6 and 7
Lost in the glare following the Apollo 11 Moon landing, two intrepid robotic spacecraft flew by Mars in the summer of 1969 and returned photographs…
Hubble Discovers an Exoplanet Shaped Like a Football
How can a planet be “hotter than hot?” The answer is when heavy metals are detected escaping from the planet’s atmosphere, instead of condensing into…
TESS Discovers Habitable Zone Planet in GJ 357 System
A piping hot planet discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has pointed the way to additional worlds orbiting the same star, one of…
NASA’s TESS Mission Discovers Three New Worlds
NASA’s newest planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has discovered three new worlds — one slightly larger than Earth and two of a…
Noteworthy Discoveries From TESS Mission’s First Year
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered 21 planets outside our solar system and captured data on other interesting events occurring in the southern…
Water in Polar Moon Craters Not as Invincible as Expected
The Moon’s south pole region is home to some of the most extreme environments in the solar system: it’s unimaginably cold, massively cratered, and has…
Scientists Update HITRAN to Help Model Exoplanet Atmospheres
All atoms and molecules emit distinctive spectral lines across the spectrum, the details of which depend on the internal structures of the species (for example,…
Astronomers Pit Einstein Against Newton to Determine the Mass of KOI-3278
A team of astronomers led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have updated and confirmed self-lensing binary star KOI-3278’s companion to be a white dwarf…
Scientists Reveal What a Marsquake Looks Like
Southern California got all shaken up after a set of recent quakes. But Earth isn’t the only place that experiences quakes: Both the Moon and…
Subzero Arctic Water Provides Peek at Possible Life on Other Worlds
In recent years, the idea of life on other planets has become less far-fetched. NASA announced on June 27 that it will send a vehicle…
New Study Reveals A Way To Make Mars Habitable
People have long dreamed of altering the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside the realm of science…
Hubble and Spitzer Identify the Atmosphere of Mid-Size Planet
Two NASA space telescopes have teamed up to identify, for the first time, the detailed chemical “fingerprint” of a planet between the sizes of Earth…
Successful Orion Test Brings NASA Closer to Mars Mission
NASA successfully demonstrated Tuesday the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system can outrun a speeding rocket and pull astronauts to safety during an emergency during launch….
TESS Mission Discovers Smallest Planet to Date
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet,…
