Comet Halleys Nucleus: An Orbiting Iceberg
4.01.2010

What does a comet nucleus look like? Formed from the primordial stuff of the Solar System, comet nuclei were thought to resemble very dirty icebergs. But ground-based telescopes revealed only the surrounding cloud of gas and dust of active comets nearing the Sun, clearly resolving only the comet's coma, and the characteristic cometary tails.

Venus at Night in Infrared from Akatsuki
30.01.2018

Why is Venus so different from Earth? To help find out, Japan launched the robotic Akatsuki spacecraft which entered orbit around Venus late in 2015 after an unplanned five-year adventure around the inner Solar System.

An Atlas V Rocket Launches OSIRIS REx
17.10.2016

Have you ever seen a rocket launched into the Solar System? Last month a large Atlas V rocket blasted off from Launch Complex 41 in Florida carrying the ORISIX-REx spacecraft. This robotic spacecraft will attempt to land on Asteroid Bennu and return some of its soil to Earth.

New Data: Ultima Thule Surprisingly Flat
11.02.2019

Ultima Thule is not the object humanity thought that it was last month. When the robotic New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the distant asteroid Ultima Thule (officially 2014 MU69) in early January, early images showed two circular lobes that when most simply extrapolated to 3D were thought to be, roughly, spheres.

Active Region 1002 on an Unusually Quiet Sun
24.09.2008

Why has the Sun been so quiet recently? No one is sure. Our Sun has shown few active regions -- that house even fewer associated sunspots -- for over a year now, and such a period of relative calm is quite unusual.

Leaving Vesta
19.09.2012

Next stop: Ceres. Last week the robotic Dawn spacecraft ended its year-long mission to asteroid Vesta, becoming the first spacecraft ever to visit this far off world located between Mars and Jupiter, in the Solar System's main asteroid belt.

Moon Crashers
15.10.1999

On July 31, 1964, Ranger 7 crashed into the Moon. Seventeen minutes before impact it snapped this picture - the first image of the Moon ever taken by a U.S. spacecraft. Of course Ranger 7 was intended to crash, transmitting close-up pictures of the lunar surface during its final moments.

Views from Cassini at Saturn
18.06.2017

What has the Cassini orbiter seen at Saturn? The featured music video shows some of the early highlights. In the first time-lapse sequence (00:07), a vertical line appears that is really Saturn's thin rings seen nearly edge-on. Soon some of Saturn's moon shoot past.

Tagging Bennu: The Movie
3.11.2020

This is what it looks like to punch an asteroid. Last month, NASA's robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx descended toward, thumped into, and then quickly moved away from the small near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu. The featured video depicts the Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event over a three-hour period.

Asteroid Gaspra s Best Face
27.10.2002

Asteroid 951 Gaspra is a huge rock tumbling in space. Gaspra became one of the best-studied spacecraft Galileo flew by. In the above photograph, subtle color variations have been exaggerated to highlight changes in reflectivity, surface structure and composition.