Planet News
InSight has been Sensing Dust Devils Sweep Past its Landing Site
The InSight lander has been on the surface of Mars for about a year, and a half dozen papers were…
After a Challenging First Year on Mars, InSight Shows Us that Mars is Seismically Active
The NASA and DLR InSight lander has been on Mars for over a year now. The mission has faced significant…
There Are Winds Blowing On Pluto, Driven by Frozen Nitrogen
Earth and Pluto don't have much in common. Earth is a vibrant, living world, whereas Pluto is cold, distant and…
A Second Planet May Have been Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri! And it’s a Super Earth.
Astronomers have discovered another candidate exoplanet orbiting our neighbor, Proxima Centauri. A paper announcing these results was just published in…
Mars Has Auroras Too, We Just Can’t See Them
Our eyes can't see them, but Martian auroras are there, and more commonplace than we once thought. The Martian auroras…
How Long is a Day on Venus? Astronomers Make Their Best Measurement Yet
There's a problem with Venus. We don't know how fast it rotates. For a space-faring civilization like ours, that's a…
This Dried Up Riverbed Shows that Water Once Flowed on the Surface of Mars
From some viewpoints, Mars is kind of like a skeleton of Earth. We can see that it had volcanoes, oceans,…
Io’s Largest Volcano, Loki, Erupts Every 500 Days. Any Day Now, It’ll Erupt Again.
Jupiter's moon Io is in stark contrast to the other three Galilean moons. While Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa all appear…
Whoa. Lakes on Titan Might be the Craters from Massive Underground Explosions
The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission to Saturn and its moons two years ago when it was sent plunging into…
Mercury has Magnetic Poles that Drift Like Earth’s
Earth's magnetic poles drift over time. This is something that every airplane pilot or navigator knows. They have to account…