The next rover NASA will send to Mars in 2020 will carry seven carefully selected instruments to conduct unprecedented science and exploration technology investigations on the Red Planet. NASA announced the selected Mars 2020 rover instruments today...

The latest narrow angle camera (NAC) view from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta mission continues to reveal more details regarding Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's surface. Taken July 29 at a distance of 1,210 miles (1,950 kilometers), one ...

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express spacecraft has climbed to a new orbit following its daring aerobraking experiment and will now resume observations of this fascinating planet for at least a few more months. The orbit-raising fol...

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found wildly misaligned planet-forming gas disks around the two young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. These new ALMA observations provide the clearest picture ever of...

Following extensive in-orbit commissioning and several unexpected challenges, the European Space Agency’s ( ESA) billion-star surveyor, Gaia, is now ready to begin its science mission. The satellite was launched December 19, 2013, and is orbit...

Scientists using mission data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have identified 101 distinct geysers erupting on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Their analysis suggests it is possible for liquid water to reach from the moon’s underground ...

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover that landed on the Red Planet in 2004 now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles (40 kilometers) of driving. The Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover held the previous record. “O...

New findings from a NASA-funded instrument have resolved a decades-old puzzle about a fog of low-energy X-rays observed over the entire sky. Thanks to refurbished detectors first flown on a NASA sounding rocket in the 1970s, astronomers have now conf...

NASA is taking steps to protect its Mars orbiters while preserving opportunities to gather valuable scientific data as Comet Siding Spring (C/2013 A1) heads toward a close flyby of Mars on October 19. The comet’s nucleus will miss Mars by abou...

Thanks to NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer Space Telescopes, scientists have made the most precise measurement ever of the radius of a planet outside our solar system. The size of the exoplanet, dubbed Kepler-93b, is now known to an uncertainty of jus...

Surface structures are becoming visible in new images of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken by the scientific imaging system OSIRIS onboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. The resolution of these images is now 330 feet (100 meters)...

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have mapped the mass within a galaxy cluster more precisely than ever before. Created using observations from Hubble's Frontier Fields observing program, the map shows the amount and distribution ...

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have gone looking for water vapor in the atmospheres of three planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun — and have come up nearly dry. The three planets — HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and ...

In this striking new image from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile, young stars huddle together against a backdrop of clouds of glowing gas and lanes of dust. The star cluster, known as NGC 3293, would have ...

In late June 2013, an exceptional binary containing a rapidly spinning neutron star underwent a dramatic change in behavior never before observed. The pulsar's radio beacon vanished while at the same time the system brightened fivefold in gamma rays,...

There is more to a galaxy than first meets the eye. Extending far beyond the bright glow of a galaxy’s center, the swirling spiral arms, or the elliptical fuzz is an extra component — a dim halo of stars sprawling into space. These expan...

Astronomers have discovered a transiting exoplanet with the longest known year. Kepler-421b circles its star once every 704 days. In comparison, Mars orbits our Sun once every 780 days. Most of the 1,800-plus exoplanets discovered to date are much cl...

A team of Brazilian and American astronomers used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) observations of the system 16 Cygni to discover evidence of how giant planets like Jupiter form. One of the main models to form giant planets is called &ldqu...

A heat-sensing camera designed at Arizona State University (ASU) has provided data to create the most detailed global map yet made of martian surface properties. The map uses data from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), a nine-band visual...

Lawrence Livermore scientists for the first time have experimentally re-created the conditions that exist deep inside giant planets, such as Jupiter, Uranus, and many of the planets recently discovered outside our solar system. Researchers can now r...