The moon may look lonely, but it is far from alone. Small asteroids too dim to detect seem to stray into Earth’s orbit quite frequently and stay for short periods of time. We may even be able to bring one of these moonlets back to Earth for study. Continue reading
NASA has picked seven private spaceflight companies, each working to build a commercial spaceship, as its transportation of choice for launching experiments to the edge of space and back. Continue reading
New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before. Continue reading
This series of images of the rings of Uranus were taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. They were taken at different times when the rings were facing the Earth at slightly different angles. In the third image, the edge-on rings appear as two spikes above and below the planet. Continue reading
A piece of space junk zoomed uncomfortably close by the International Space Station today (June 28), so close that the outpost’s six-man crew had to take shelter in Russian space capsules in case of a collision. Continue reading
Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. It is the innermost of Jupiter’s four major moons also known as the Galilean moons, named after their discoverer. Io’s surface is constantly under construction. The volcanic eruptions quickly … Continue reading
This is a photo montage of Uranus and five of it’s largest moons. The photos were taken separately by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. The moons, from largest to smallest as they appear here, are Ariel, Miranda, Titania, Oberon and Umbriel. … Continue reading
Saturn has a lot of moons. Two of them are really odd, and bear a striking resemblance to the Death Star from the Star Wars movies. Mimas has a crater of approximately the same scale as the one on the … Continue reading