A citizen scientist from Europe discovered SOHO's 4 000th comet in the spacecraft's 25-year history. SOHO — Solar and Heliospheric Observatory — jointly operated by NASA and ESA since 1995. The comet was discovered on June 15, 2020, and is currently…
ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft passed through the ion tail of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on May 31 and June 1, 2020, and through its dust tail on June 6. This is the 7th space mission to fly through the tail of a comet, and the first one whose upcoming crossing was…
NASA's MAVEN spacecraft has created a map of electric currents around Mars, five years after it entered into its orbit. These currents hold crucial clues in the atmospheric loss that made the red planet incapable of supporting life. "These currents play a…
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that its Solar Orbiter probe will have a rare encounter with the Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), passing through the object's ion tail on May 31, 2020 into June 1. Solar Orbiter’s upcoming crossing is the first to be…
Over the past 200 years, Earth's magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength. Meanwhile, a large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America — known as South Atlantic Anomaly. Over the past 5 years, however, a…
Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 has reported new observations of Ryugu, revealing more secrets about the object's remarkable history– particularly signs of a close encounter with the Sun. Hayabusa-2 launched in December 2014 and reached Ryugu in 2018. In…
NASA's OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) has successfully descended down to just 75 m (246 feet) above the surface asteroid Bennu in a risky rehearsal to prepare the spacecraft before it collects…
Russia's first satellite for monitoring the Arctic climate called Arktika-M is set to be launched by the end of 2020, as announced by the General Director of the Lavochkin aerospace company, Vladimir Kolmykov. The launch was initially scheduled in 2019 but was…
A high-resolution satellite has captured detailed images of a rocky cliff on Mars, revealing the first evidence of ancient rivers that existed for more than 100 000 years on the surface of the planet, 3.7 billion years ago. The international team of scientists used…
An unusual tear-drop shaped star that only pulsates on one side has been discovered by amateur astronomers, who saw the anomaly in data taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). It is reportedly the first of its kind, and scientists are…
