Solar System
Rosetta Detects Water on its Target Comet
It's no surprise that there is a lot of water in comets. The "dirty snowballs" (or dusty ice-balls, more accurately)…
New Horizons Wakes Up for the Summer
While many kids in the U.S. are starting their school summer vacations, New Horizons is about to get back to work! Speeding…
Why Isn’t the Asteroid Belt a Planet?
It seems like there's a strange gap in between Mars and Jupiter filled with rocky rubble. Why didn't the asteroid…
ESA Marks 50 Years of Cooperative Space Innovation
In 1964 the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) and the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) were founded, on February 29 and March…
Mercury’s Ready For Its Close-Up, Mr. MESSENGER
Are you ready for a good close look at Mercury? At an incredible 5 meters per pixel, this is one of…
Cassini’s View of Another Pale Blue Dot
When you hear the words "pale blue dot" you're probably reminded of the famous quote by Carl Sagan inspired by…
Mercury Shrinking: the First Rock from the Sun Contracted More than Once Thought
Whatever Mercury's did to trim down its waistline has worked better than anyone thought -- the innermost planet in our…
If the Moon Were Only One Pixel: a Scale Model of the Solar System
One of my favorite pet peeves is the inability of conventional models to accurately convey the gigantic scale of the…
NEOWISE Spots a “Weirdo” Comet
NASA's NEOWISE mission -- formerly known as just WISE -- has identified the first comet of its new near-Earth object…
Playing Marbles With The Planets
We've all seen charts showing the relative sizes of planets and moons compared to each other, which are cool to…