NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft is aiming its largest telescope at five stars in a search for alien (exosolar) planets as it enters its extended mission, called Epoxi. More...

Scientists on the Cassini mission have become out-of-this world "plumbers" as they try to piece together what's happening inside the "pipes" feeding the plumes of Saturn's moon Enceladus. More...

Scientists around the globe have observed an astonishing and rare change in Jupiter's atmosphere -- a huge disturbance churning in the middle northern latitudes of the planet as two giant storms erupted. More...

Contrary to expectations for a small icy body, much of the comet dust returned by the Stardust mission formed very close to the young sun and was altered from the solar system’s early materials. More...

The most detailed three-dimensional seismic images yet of the Chicxulub crater, a mostly submerged and buried impact crater on the Mexico coast, may modify a theory explaining the extinction of 70 percent of life on Earth 65 million years ago. More...

Mars has an ethereal, tenuous atmosphere with less than one-percent the surface pressure of Earth, which challenges scientists to explain complex, wind-sculpted landforms seen with unprecedented detail in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. More...

Shortly following MESSENGER’s closest approach to Mercury on January 14, 2008, the spacecraft’s Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) on the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument acquired this image as part of a mosaic that covers much of the sunlit portion of the hemisphere not viewed by Mariner 10. Images such as this one can be read in terms of a sequence of geological events and provide insight into the relative timing of processes that have acted on Mercury's surface in the past. More...

Until now, Mars has generally been regarded as a desert world, where a visiting astronaut would be surprised to see clouds scudding across the orange sky. However, new results show that the arid planet possesses high-level clouds that are sufficiently dense to cast a shadow on the surface. More...

A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, GPS signals and even cell phones and ATM transactions, showed signs it was on its way late yesterday when the cycle’s first sunspot appeared in the sun’s Northern Hemisphere, NOAA scientists said. More...

Samples of the material picked up during the NASA Stardust mission indicate that parts of the comet Wild 2 actually formed in an area close to the sun. More...

Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution have found the first indications of highly complex organic molecules in the disk of red dust surrounding a distant star. More...

A recently discovered asteroid which passed close to the Earth in November, is now headed towards a very close passage by Mars in late January, and there is a small chance that it could hit that planet. More...

The United Nations (UN) 62nd General Assembly proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. The Resolution was submitted by Italy, Galileo Galilei's home country. The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) celebrates the first astronomical use of the telescope by Galileo – a momentous event that initiated 400 years of astronomical discoveries and triggered a scientific revolution which profoundly affected our worldview. More...

The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations suggest. More...

A team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic explosion that seems to have come from the middle of nowhere — thousands of light-years from the nearest galaxy-sized collection of stars, gas, and dust. This "shot in the dark" is surprising because the type of explosion, a long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB), is thought to be powered by the death of a massive star. More...

A fleet of NASA spacecraft, launched less than eight months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called "substorms" and the source of their power. More...

New observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft indicate the rings of Saturn, once thought to have formed during the age of the dinosaurs, instead may have been created roughly 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was still under construction. More...

Researchers using NASA's twin Mars rovers are sorting out two possible origins for one of Spirit's most important discoveries, while also getting Spirit to a favorable spot for surviving the next Martian winter. More...

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin, Voyager 1, into the solar system's final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars. More...

At a Monday, Dec. 10 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, NASA's Associate Administrator for Science Alan Stern announced the selection of a new mission that will peer deep inside the moon to reveal its anatomy and history. More...

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