New Cassini infrared images of Saturn have revealed one of its strangest features - a bizarre six-sided cloud structure circling the entire north pole. This structure was hinted at when the Voyager spacecraft first visited the planet more than 20 years ago, but the new images from Cassini really show the structure in detail.
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Even though New Horizon's Jupiter flyby happened weeks ago, scientists are only just starting to crunch through the data sent back. They're revealing better and better images of Jupiter, taken by the spacecraft's powerful instruments. The image attached to this story was taken using New Horizon's LEISA infrared camera. It's a false colour photograph - not what you'd actually see if you were looking at Jupiter - but the fine details in the image are impressive.
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Astronomers have turned up many binary asteroids in the Solar System. Instead of a single, solitary spacerock, you've got two objects orbiting a common centre of gravity. A new paper published in the 2007 issue of the journal Icarus focuses on one of these double objects: the binary asteroid 90 Antiope.
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Trial and error is for tinkering. Simulations and analogues replace them for when grander projects are contemplated. William L. Fox in his book, Driving to Mars: In the Arctic with NASA on the Human Journey to the Red Planet gives us his experience in one of the Mars analogue sites situated on Earth. And, his writing shows that it's humanity's sense of being that is as much a subject of investigation as Mars itself.
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Monday, March 26 - Much like our crater from last night, tonight we we'll explore the lunar surface for another surface scar caused by a glancing blow. Head to the north near the terminator as the incredible Alpine Valley now comes into view.
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This week we're talking about asteroids. And not just any asteroids, but Near Earth Objects. How do astronomers find these things, why are they buzzing around the Earth, what are the chances we'll actually get hit, and what would happen if we did get hit? How could we stop them?
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Planetary geologists propose that our planet once had periods of extreme global freezing nicknamed the "Snowball Earth" eras. During these periods, they supposed, the planet's temperatures went so low that the oceans froze, and everything was covered in ice. Most sunlight was reflected back into space, perpetuating the icy period.
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You'd think it would be an easy question to answer: how long is Saturn's day? But it's been a puzzle for astronomers for many years. On other gas planets, astronomers just measure the rotation of their magnetic fields. The problem is that the Ringed Planet's field rotates slower than the rest of the planet, and it changes.
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This beautiful photograph shows a small portion of the star-forming Orion Nebula. The strange, wake-like structures are supersonic "bullets" of gas ejected from the nebula. What actually caused these ejections is still unknown, but astronomers think there was a recent violent event that fired them out.
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New Horizons captured this image of Jupiter as it zipped past on February 27, 2007 receiving a gravity assisted velocity boost. This photograph was captured when the spacecraft was 3 million km (1.8 million miles), resolving objects as large as 15 km (9 miles) across.
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If you're planning a move in the next few years, you might want to consider thread from asteroid impact on your list of annoyances. Researchers from the University of Southampton have modeled the consequences of asteroid strikes around the Earth, and figured out which countries would suffer worst.
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Once a permanent base is set up on the Moon, it's going to need lots of supplies shipped up from Earth. And these shipments, like water, food and air, absolutely, positively have to get there on time, or people die.
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NASA released some absolutely amazing new images of the surface of the Sun today, taken by the Japanese Hinode spacecraft. Just look at the attached image with this story, and you'll get a sense of why astronomers think this spacecraft will do for solar astronomy what Hubble has done for the visual spectrum.
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It's not a great picture of Jupiter, but that's not the point. The point is that the photograph was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn.
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It wasn't a perfect launch, but it wasn't a disaster either. All in all, SpaceX took a big step on Wednesday with the first launch of its new Falcon-1 rocket.
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Monday, March 19 - Heads up for viewers in Alaska and Asia! There will be a partial solar eclipse visible in your area on this universal date. Be sure to check www.mreclipse.com for information in your area. It's great fun to watch the Moon take a "bite" out of the Sun!
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Come on, admit it, you've had this question. If the Universe is expanding from the Big Bang, what is it expanding into? What's outside the Universe? Ask any astronomer and you'll get an unsatisfying answer. We give you the same unsatisfying answer, but really explain it, so your unsatisfaction doesn't haunt you any more.
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The loss of CryoSat was a sad day for Earth observation. It was destroyed in October 2005 when an onboard flight-control system failed on a Russian Rockot launch vehicle. But engineers kept their plans, and the development of CryoSat version 2 is well underway. This replacement spacecraft is scheduled for launch in 2009, and will measure the thickness of land and sea ice to determine how quickly it's melting away.
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Gamma ray bursts are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. Even more amazing is just how quickly it all unfolds. One moment, everything's quiet. A moment later, there's a tremendous explosion that we can see from billions of light years away. And just seconds later, it's gone again - the afterglow will be around for a few days, but that's it. Astronomers and spacecraft have only a few seconds to a few minutes to find the explosion and study it before it fades away.
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A new NASA mission is being proposed to fly out, extract a sample from a nearby asteroid, and return it to Earth. The asteroid is known as 1999 RQ36, and the mission is OSIRIS.
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Planetary scientists had reported lakes around Titan's southern poles, but now it looks like the northern hemisphere has liquid on the surface as well. Of course, we're not talking about water, that would be frozen solid. These are seas filled with liquid methane or ethane.
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Each of the multicoloured dots in this photograph is a black hole. The panorama was created using images taken by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and several ground-based telescopes. The scale image of the moon should give you an idea of how large a portion of the sky was imaged.
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Since Cassini arrived at Saturn, it has made many impressive discoveries. One of the most intriguing is the discovery that Saturn's icy moon Enceladus has geysers spewing water ice into space. Some planetary scientists theorize that there are pockets of liquid water near the surface of Enceladus that could harbour life. But where is the heat coming from to fuel these geysers?
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Globular star clusters are gigantic collections of stars formed at the same time, and held together by their mutual gravity. Amazingly, they're some of the oldest objects in the Universe - some are more than 10 billion years old. More than 150 globular clusters have been discovered in the Milky Way by astronomers. And now you can add one more to that list.
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The questions are piling up, so it's time to get through them. We've got a great collection this week. How can our eyes collect so many photons? What's the speed of gravity? Shouldn't the light from the cosmic microwave background radiation have passed us by?
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