All articles
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Stargazing
Saturn's rings are nearly edge-on. Here's why that's worth watching.
Saturn's rings appear to open and close as the planet orbits the Sun, presenting a full face every fifteen years or so — and then nearly vanishing as they tilt edge-on. We are approaching one of those disappearing acts. Understanding the geometry, and how to watch it unfold, makes an ordinary telescope into a front-row seat for orbital mechanics.
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Astronomy
Webb found water in the disk where a planet is forming right now
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have detected vast amounts of water vapor in the inner region of a protoplanetary disk — the ring of gas and dust that surrounds a young star and eventually assembles into planets. It's direct evidence that planets can begin their lives wet.
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Missions
NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose. It worked better than the models said it would.
The DART spacecraft impacted asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, reducing its orbital period by 33 minutes — far more than the minimum 73-second threshold for mission success. The result has permanently changed how planetary defense is planned.
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Missions
Solar Orbiter flew closer to the Sun than any imaging spacecraft before it. What it saw was unexpected.
ESA's Solar Orbiter has returned the closest images ever taken of the Sun, revealing thousands of tiny flares — dubbed 'campfires' — across the solar surface. It is also the first spacecraft designed to image the Sun's poles, solving a geometry problem that has frustrated solar physicists for decades.
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Missions
India landed on the Moon's south pole when others had failed. What Pragyan found in two weeks.
Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander touched down near the lunar south pole on August 23, 2023, making India the fourth nation to soft-land on the Moon and the first to reach the polar region. The Pragyan rover operated for two weeks before entering sleep mode and has not reawakened.
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Missions
Before it died, InSight mapped the inside of Mars — and nothing was what we expected
NASA's InSight lander operated on Mars for four years, recording more than 1,300 marsquakes and making the first seismic measurements of another planet's interior. Its findings rewrote models of how rocky planets form.
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Missions
The asteroid Bennu handed us clay and carbon. Scientists are still processing what that means.
OSIRIS-REx returned 121 grams of material from asteroid Bennu in September 2023 — the largest asteroid sample ever brought to Earth. The rocks contained water-bearing clay minerals and carbon-rich organics, direct evidence of chemistry that preceded the formation of the solar system.
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Missions
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012. It's still transmitting, and it's still surprising us.
Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space in August 2012, more than 35 years after launch. In 2024 it recovered from a computer glitch and resumed science operations at a distance of more than 24 billion kilometers from the Sun.
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Missions
China just brought back rocks from the side of the Moon we've never sampled. Here's why that matters.
Chang'e-6 landed in the South Pole–Aitken Basin on the Moon's far side in June 2024 — the first mission to return samples from this ancient region. The rocks it brought back may finally explain why the near and far sides of the Moon are so different.
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Missions
Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars. Here's what those flights changed.
Designed for five flights, Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars over nearly three years before a rotor blade broke on landing. It proved that powered flight on another planet is possible — and gave Perseverance a scout that changed how it drove.
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Missions
NASA's new space telescope has one job: find every asteroid that could hit Earth
NEO Surveyor is a purpose-built infrared space telescope designed to find near-Earth objects that ground-based surveys miss. Its goal is to complete the congressional mandate to catalog 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters — a mandate that has gone unmet since 2005.
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Missions
A microwave-oven-sized spacecraft spent a year testing the orbit where NASA's Moon station will live
CAPSTONE, a 25-kilogram cubesat, was the first spacecraft to enter the near-rectilinear halo orbit that will host the Gateway lunar station. Its year of operations validated the orbital mechanics and navigation techniques Gateway will depend on.
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