NASA's Dawn spacecraft collected new detailed images of the cratered and fractured southern hemisphere surface of the dwarf planet Ceres on December 10, 2015. The spacecraft took the images while cruising in the lowest and final orbit of the small planet. Dawn…
The discovery of hundreds of giant comets in the outer planetary system over the last two decades means that these objects pose a much greater hazard to life than asteroids, a team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory and the University of Buckingham report. The…
NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its 22nd and the final close flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus on December 19, 2015 at 17:49 UTC and will now continue to observe the moon from a much greater distance. The spacecraft passed Enceladus at a distance of 4 999 km…
A newly discovered asteroid, about 10-meters (34 feet) wide, flew past Earth well withing the orbit of the Moon on December 19, 2015. After a much bigger, 650-meter (0.33 miles) wide asteroid that flew past Earth at about 1.3 LD on October 31, this is the second…
NASA scientists have discovered new properties of the Moon's exosphere – a thin layer of gas surrounding the Moon that's about 25-trillionth the density of Earth’s atmosphere. Their data reveals that meteoroids cause an increase in two key elements in…
A long time ago in a galaxy half the universe away, a flood of high-energy gamma rays began its journey to Earth. When they arrived in April, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope caught the outburst, which helped two ground-based gamma-ray observatories detect…
Less than a year after its launch on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, also known as EPIC, is taking images of the entire sunlit side of Earth every two hours. All images are in the public domain and can be…
One of the most popular meteor showers in the night sky and the most impressive meteor shower of the year – Geminid meteor shower – is set to peak between the nighttime on December 13 and the early morning December 14, 2015, producing up to 120 meteors per hour in…
Rosetta's OSIRIS camera team has launched new website designed to showcase its most recent images taken of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. These images are in high-resolution, taken with narrow- or wide-angle camera, showing the comet at very small distances….
A raging storm, similar to the Jupiter's Great Red Spot, discovered by NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes has been pictured in a vivid artist's animation video. The star named W1906+40, located approximately 53 light years away in the Lyra…
