Degas Ray Crater on Mercury
16.12.2000

Like the Earth's Moon, Mercury is scarred with craters testifying to an intense bombardment during the early history of the Solar System. In 1974, the Mariner 10 spacecraft surveyed this innermost planet up close, producing the only detailed images of its tortured surface.

Unusual Mountain Ahuna Mons on Asteroid Ceres
16.06.2019

What created this unusual mountain? There is a new theory. Ahuna Mons is the largest mountain on the largest known asteroid in our Solar System, Ceres, which orbits our Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ahuna Mons, though, is like nothing that humanity has ever seen before.

Apollo 13 Views of the Moon
3.03.2020

What if the only way to get back to Earth was to go around the far side of the Moon? Such was the dilemma of the Apollo 13 Crew in 1970 as they tried to return home in their unexpectedly damaged spacecraft.

The Missing Craters of Asteroid Itokawa
21.11.2005

Where are the craters on asteroid Itokawa? No one knows. The Japanese robot probe Hayabusa recently approached the Earth-crossing asteroid and is returning pictures showing a surface unlike any other Solar System body yet photographed -- a surface possibly devoid of craters.

Stereo Itokawa
19.06.2010

Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to asteroid Itokawa, a diminutive world of the solar system only half a kilometer across. Boulders strewn across its rough surface and the lack of craters indicate that this asteroid is a rubble pile, formed as smaller pieces collected and were kept together by gravity.

The Launch of OSIRIS REx
10.09.2016

Near sunset on Thursday, clear skies saw the launch of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Sporting a single solid rocket booster, its Atlas V vehicle blasts off from Cape Canaveral's Complex 41 in this low, wide-angle view toward launch pad and setting Sun. OSIRIS-REx is bound for Bennu, scheduled to encounter the mountain-sized asteroid in 2018.

Curiosity s Dusty Self
23.06.2018

Winds on Mars can't actually blow spacecraft over. But in the low gravity, martian winds can loft fine dust particles in planet-wide storms, like the dust storm now raging on the Red Planet.

NGST 10b: Discovery of a Doomed Planet
26.02.2020

This hot jupiter is doomed. Hot jupiters are giant planets like Jupiter that orbit much closer to their parent stars than Mercury does to our Sun. But some hot jupiters are more extreme than others. NGTS-10b, illustrated generically, is the closest and fastest-orbiting giant planet yet discovered, circling its home star in only 18 hours.

Neptune's Moon Proteus
4.11.1995

Proteus is the second largest moon of Neptune behind the mysterious Triton. Proteus was discovered only in 1982 by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. This is unusual since Neptune has a smaller moon - Nereid - which was discovered 33 years earlier from Earth.

MAVEN at Mars
26.09.2014

Launched on November 18, 2013, the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft completed its interplanetary voyage September 21, captured into a wide, elliptical orbit around Mars. MAVEN's imaging ultraviolet spectrograph has already...