Visualizing milestones of the ExoMars 2016 mission

Visualizing milestones of the ExoMars 2016 mission

The European Space Agency (ESA) has established the ExoMars programme to research the question if life ever existed on Mars. The programme will investigate the Martian environment through two missions. The first one, consisting of an Orbiter plus and Entry, Descent…

Isolated hills on Pluto floating in the sea of frozen nitrogen

Isolated hills on Pluto floating in the sea of frozen nitrogen

NASA's New Horizons missions collected images and data indicating the isolated hills on Pluto may be fragments of water ice from the planet's surrounding uplands. The hills are thought to float in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move just like the icebergs in…

Giant hydrogen cloud boomeranging back to Milky Way

Giant hydrogen cloud boomeranging back to Milky Way

A large cloud of hydrogen gas is on a return collision course to the Milky Way galaxy, running towards it with a speed of almost 1 126 540 km/h (700 000 mph) and is expected to hit it in about 30 million years. The new Hubble Space Telescope observations suggest the…

Cassini makes final close flyby images of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

Cassini makes final close flyby images of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

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…

Rosetta’s OSIRIS launches website with most recent imagery of Comet 67P

Rosetta’s OSIRIS launches website with most recent imagery of Comet 67P

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 funky star shows long-lasting cloud storms possible

A funky star shows long-lasting cloud storms possible

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…

Two new studies offer new clues to Ceres’ bright spots and origins

Two new studies offer new clues to Ceres’ bright spots and origins

Two new studies reveal some of Ceres' well-kept secrets, including highly anticipated insights about mysterious bright features found all over the dwarf planet's surface. In one study, scientists identify this bright material as a kind of salt, while the…

The closest images ever of a distant Kuiper Belt object – 1994 JR1

The closest images ever of a distant Kuiper Belt object – 1994 JR1

There is a region of space filled with comets beyond the gas giant Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. This expanse holds trillions of objects – remnants of the early Solar System – and NASA's New Horizons spacecraft recently took the closest images of one of…