Flying Past Pluto
5.10.2015

What would it look like to fly past Pluto? The robotic New Horizons spacecraft did just this in late July and continues to return stunning pictures of the dwarf planet. Some well-chosen flyby images have now been digitally sequenced to create the featured video.

Stickney Crater
6.11.2009

Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered both the Red Planet's moons in 1877.

Found on the Moon: Candidate for Oldest Known Earth Rock
2.02.2021

Was the oldest known rock on Earth found on the Moon? Quite possibly. The story opens with the Apollo 14 lunar mission. Lunar sample 14321, a large rock found in Cone crater by astronaut...

APOD: 2025 June 4 Б A Milky Road to the Rubin Observatory
3.06.2025

Is the sky the same every night? No -- the night sky changes every night in many ways. To better explore how the night sky changes, the USA's NSF and DOE commissioned the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Cerro PachцЁn, Chile.

Early Microscopic Life on Mars?
7.08.1996

Today a team of NASA and Stanford scientists announced the discovery of strong circumstantial evidence that microscopic life once existed on Mars. Dr. David McKay, Dr. Everett Gibson, and Kathie Thomas-Keprta of Lockheed-Martin, all from (NASA /JSC), and Dr.

A 2017 U1: An Interstellar Visitor
2.11.2017

Traveling at high velocity along an extreme hyperbolic orbit and making a hairpin turn as it swung past the Sun, the now designated A/2017 U1 is the first known small body from interstellar space.

Forty Thousand Meteor Origins Across the Sky
11.05.2009

Where do meteors come from? Visible meteors are typically sand-sized grains of ice and rock that once fragmented from comets. Many a meteor shower has been associated with a known comet, although some intriguing orphan showers do remain.

Geminids of the North
14.12.2017

Earth's annual Geminid meteor shower did not disappoint as our fair planet plowed through dust from active asteroid 3200 Phaethon. Captured in this northern hemisphere nightscape, the meteors stream away from the shower's radiant in Gemini.

A Double Ringed Basin on Mercury
7.10.2009

What created the internal second ring of this double ringed basin on Mercury? No one is sure. The unusual feature spans 160 kilometers and was imaged during the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft's swing past our Solar System's innermost planet last week.

Pioneer 10: The First 6 Billion Miles
2.03.1997

Q: What was made by humans and is 6 billion miles away? A: Pioneer 10 - and yesterday was the 25th anniversary of its launch. More than 9 light hours distant, Pioneer 10 is presently about twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, bound for interstellar space at 28,000 miles per hour.