Planetary Science

Earth's Magnetosphere Might Not Protect Us From Superstorms After All

By Andy Tomaswick - August 14, 2026

Science seems like a straightforward endeavour. You come up with a hypothesis, collect data to prove or disprove it, and analyze that data to see if the hypothesis is right. But anyone who actually does science will tell you many times it’s not that straightforward. And one of the most common complexities is in data analysis. A new paper suggests that one such complexity, known as regression to the mean, might be causing us to massively underestimate how severe solar storms can truly be.

The Ingredients For Planets Turned Up Astonishingly Early

By Mark Thompson - August 13, 2026

Planet building was supposed to be one of the universe's slow projects, something that only got going billions of years after the Big Bang. New research suggests otherwise. The raw materials for rocky worlds, and perhaps even the water needed for life, may have been ready to go just 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies had even taken shape.

NASA Wants to Float Microscopic 'Tracers' on Sunlight to Map the Edge of Space

By Andy Tomaswick - August 13, 2026

The atmospheric is a dynamic place, and just how well we understand that dynamism depends on what part of the atmosphere it is. Low altitudes can be reached by traditional balloons, with full suites of sensing equipment. Higher reaches are the domain of satellites, with their zippy orbits allowing them to travel through the less dense regions. But there a section scientists call the “ignorosphere”, between 30-100 kilometers up that still plays a major role in global climate dynamics, but which are only able to reach with temporary sounding rockets that only collect data for a few minutes before falling back to Earth. But a new technology from Benjamin Schafer of Rarefied Technologies that received a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant hopes to solve that problem by inserting a fleet of sensors that can float in that area for months, while providing insight to these hard-to-capture long-term patterns that influence weather everywhere on the globe.

How to Find Lunar Ice? Moonquakes to the Rescue!

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - August 11, 2026

The surface of the Moon is a bleak and forbidding place that might be hiding a lot of water ice on and under the dusty landscape. However, most possible ice deposits don't just stand out in an image. You need specialized mapping to find traces of water ice. So, scientists have devised another way to find the Moon's frosty hidden reserves. They use seismic waves from moonquakes as locator beacons.

Every Snowflake Needs a Speck of Dust and So Do Planets

By Mark Thompson - August 11, 2026

A snowflake cannot form out of nothing. Water vapour will sit in the air quite happily, supercooled and reluctant, until it finds a speck of dust to build on and then it crystallises around it. Cosmochemists have had a version of that problem for decades. The early Solar System was a furnace of gas, and the first solid grains had to condense out of it somehow, yet condensing from a perfectly uniform gas is slow and difficult work. New research from Caltech, analysing fragments of a meteorite that fell over Mexico in 1969, suggests the seeds were already there. Buried inside the oldest solids we possess are specks of stardust from a star that lived and died before the Sun existed.

The Odds of Finding Water on Mars

By Mark Thompson - August 10, 2026

Mars has plenty of water, and almost all of it is in the wrong place. The poles are rich in ice, the equator, where you would actually want to land, has none within reach. That leaves the mid-latitudes, and until now the honest answer about what lies beneath them has been a bit of a shrug. Two new studies from the Planetary Science Institute have changed the shape of that answer. Rather than simply asking whether the data are consistent with buried ice, they have started calculating the odds and can now say, of a given patch of Martian ground, that there is a 64 per cent chance of finding ice if you dig there.

Scientists Watch as a Distant World's Atmosphere Shrinks and Thins

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - August 07, 2026

As dwarf planet Pluto moves along in its distant, high-obliquity 248-year orbit, its atmosphere is changing. That's because it's beginning to travel through colder, darker parts of the outer Solar System for the next 88 years. As a consequence, the mostly-nitrogen atmosphere is expected to grow gradually thinner and eventually freeze out over the coming decades. When that happens, the atmosphere will shrink.

Venus Isn't Dead After All

By Matthew Williams - August 06, 2026

Simulations conducted by researchers at ETH Zurich suggest a strong likelihood that Venus’s rift valleys are still geologically active rather than being mere relics of a bygone era, as had been previously believed. This finding reshapes our understanding of Earth’s sister planet and will influence future missions to Venus.

Scientist Constructs "Big Picture" of Mars Water from Rover Data

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - August 05, 2026

Rover data from more than 20 years ago has revealed clues to the existence of liquid water on ancient Mars. The NASA Spirit Rover carried a specialized instrument called a Mössbauer Spectrometer that performed mineralogical analyses of soil, rock, and dust on the surface of the Red Planet at Gusev Crater. Individual measurements didn't always indicate definitive proof of water, but when scientist Paolo de Souza of Edith Cowan University in Australia examined years' worth of measurements together, a definite pattern began to show up in the existence of minerals that could only exist in the presence of water. His analysis shows that Mars used to sport a lot more water than scientists expected and that the data showing its existence was in the data all along.

The Asteroid That May Be Three Worlds

By Mark Thompson - August 01, 2026

We have been watching asteroid (44) Nysa for well over a century without ever really knowing what it looks like. Now the sharpest images ever taken of it, from two of the largest telescopes on Earth, have revealed two deep valleys running right around its circumference and the team behind them think those are necks, joining three separate lobes into a single 75 kilometre body. If that holds up, Nysa is the first three lobed world we have ever found. And in the glare beside it the same observations turned up something nobody was looking for, a tiny moon a kilometre across, which may be the thing that settles the argument.

Smashed Ice Worlds Formed Neptune's Inner Moons and Rings

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - August 01, 2026

The planet Neptune has 16 known moons, with its largest Moon, Triton, comprising more than 99.5 percent of the mass of all of them. Triton’s incredible size has led scientists to hypothesize it was a captured object originating from the Kuiper Belt, which wreaked havoc on Neptune’s original moon system upon its capture and subsequential elliptical orbit. Today, some remnants of these original moons are part of the dusty rings that orbit Neptune. But what did that original moon system consist of? Were they the same small worlds observed today or are they pieces of what was once much larger worlds?

Charon’s Mountains Reveal Moon Once Spun 10x Faster

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - August 01, 2026

Pluto’s moon, Charon, is one of the most unexplored (and arguably underappreciated) planetary objects in the entire solar system. This is primarily because it’s only been visited once by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its famous Pluto flyby in July 2015. Despite this quick encounter, New Horizons beamed back troves of data regarding Charon that scientists continue to pour over with the goal of gaining insight into Charon’s formation and evolution. This is because Charon is the largest moon compared to its parent body in the solar system, noted by it being half of Pluto’s diameter and one-eighth of Pluto’s mass.

NASA Wants to Toss 10,000 Tiny Probes Directly Into Saturn's Rings

By Andy Tomaswick - July 31, 2026

Cassini, NASA’s last major mission to Saturn, famously plunged to its fiery death in the gas giant’s atmosphere at the end of its mission. It had captured more accurate in-situ data of the Saturnian system than any mission before or since. But there’s one particular part that it couldn’t directly approach - Saturn’s rings. But NASA very obviously wants to take a nice up-close look at them, as they have recently funded a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to send a swarm of 10,000 highly expendable “femtosatellites” to get up close and personal with the most spectacular rings in our solar system.

What happens to a moon when its planet is stolen?

By Mark Thompson - July 31, 2026

The galaxy is littered with rogue planets, worlds flung out of the systems that built them, drifting between the stars with no sun to call their own. But when a planet is torn away, does anything go with it? New simulations say yes, a passing star can rip a world out of its orbit and leave its moons still faithfully circling it, sailing off into the dark as a set. If our own Jupiter were evicted tomorrow, all four Galilean moons would go with it. And in that darkness, with no sunlight at all, one of those moons might still be warm enough for an ocean.

Mercury's Weak Magnetic Field Periodically Traps Solar Wind

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - July 31, 2026

The planet Mercury is the first planet from the Sun but also one shrouded in mystery. This is primarily due to the limited number of spacecrafts that have visited it, but this limited data has provided scientists with new and exciting characteristics previously thought impossible. One fascinating aspect is its magnetic field, which was first discovered in March 1974, which both surprised and puzzled scientists due to the planet’s small size, which is measured at about half the size of the continental United States from coast to coast.

Mars' Double Storm Problem

By Mark Thompson - July 30, 2026

A new study presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting suggests that solar storms may warm the Martian lower atmosphere, but only when they strike during a major Martian dust storm. The discovery was accidental, emerging from a search for a different effect entirely, and hints that the weather system on Mars may be more tangled and interconnected than scientists previously assumed.

Samples of Lunar Rock Are Leading Scientists to Rethink the Moon's History

By Matthew Williams - July 28, 2026

Based on a new analysis of the Chang'e-6 lunar samples, scientists are again questioning the timing and intensity of the Late Heavy Bombardment period.

Chang'e-6 Samples Provide an Ancient Record of the Moon's Far Side.

By Matthew Williams - July 28, 2026

The samples returned by the Chang'e-6 mission from the far side of the Moon reveal that the two hemispheres have had rather different experiences when it comes to space weather.

Mars Express Captures 'Metallic' Waves Rolling Across an Ancient Martian Crater

By Andy Tomaswick - July 24, 2026

When we think of Mars as the “Red Planet”, the image that comes to mind is just that - a lot of red. That comes from the oxidization of the dust and rocks that cover the planet's surface, but there are some instances where the Red Planet still has a few visual tricks up its sleeve. One such trick was recently captured by the European Space Agency’s venerable Mars Express orbiter, which captured what seems to be a set of metallic waves inside a giant impact basin. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear they aren’t liquid metal or some sort of alien architecture, but a manifestation of Mars’ complex environment.

Astronomers Catch a "Dark Comet" Red-Handed

By Andy Tomaswick - July 21, 2026

Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”.

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