SUNSET: 
Hisaki: A New Orbiting Planet-Watcher
Japan's latest spacecraft is designed to study gas escaping from the atmospheres of Earth's neighbors in the solar system.
Onward, Voyager 1, to the Stars!
With the release of new results this week, NASA scientists are now confident that their plucky probe, launched 36 years ago, has entered interstellar space.
LADEE Leaves for Luna
NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer left Earth on Friday night — an event widely seen up and down the East Coast — on a mission to solve a 45-year-old mystery.
An Annular Eclipse on Mars
Not content merely to record the Martian landscape, a camera on NASA's Curiosity rover recently pointed skyward to watch Phobos cross the face of the Sun.
WISE Revived for Asteroid Hunt
NASA officials thought they'd switched off the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for good 2½ years ago. But soon it'll be revived for three years to hunt for small asteroids in Earth's vicinity.
Kepler KO'd; NASA Ponders New Purpose
The disabled space telescope's prolific planet-hunting run is officially over, as the team abandons efforts to salvage its full pointing ability and focuses on data analysis. Its next mission? Hunting for a job.
Martian Moon Occults Little Brother
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity watched the larger Martian moon, Phobos, pass right in front of the planet's smaller moon, Deimos.
"Smoking Gun" from Galactic Smashup?
Observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that something has slammed into the spiral galaxy NGC 1232. But you'd never know it from the galaxy's unperturbed appearance
Under Stress, Asteroids May Be Fragile
A new microgravity experiment demonstrates the weird, unstable fluidity of asteroid surfaces, with potential consequences for visiting craft.
What Powers the Van Allen Belts?
Thanks to a pair of NASA probes launched last year, space physicists have confirmed that relativistic electrons in the radiation belts surrounding Earth arise from "homegrown" acceleration processes.
Spacecraft Look Back at Planet Earth
July 19th was a Big Day for our home planet, as two spacecraft, Cassini and Messenger, took snapshots of Earth and Moon from great distances.
Wave at Saturn (But Will Cassini See You?)
Cassini is taking our picture on Friday, but how much light do we humans actually reflect? We've crunched the numbers, and the answer may surprise you.
A Tale of the Sun's Tail
Using observations from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, space physicists now realize that the solar wind forms a tail that likely extends light-years downwind from the Sun across interstellar space.
IRIS Tackles Coronal Mystery
Solar physicists hope NASA’s latest space observatory, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, can finally discover what heats the Sun’s million-degree corona.
Good-bye to GALEX
On Friday, flight controllers turned off the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, one of NASA's long-lived space observatories.
COROT Mission Ends
After several months of trying to reboot, mission planners for the exoplanet hunter COROT have declared the satellite's failure official.
A Billion Pixels of Mars-scape
When you take your camera all the way to the Red Planet, no one's going to blame you for taking a lot of touristy snapshots. Put 896 of them together, and here's the result!
Winds on Venus: Getting Stronger
The hurricane-like winds at Venus's cloudtops have steadily become faster since 2006 — and planetary scientists have no idea why it's happening.
Curiosity Readies for a Long Drive
NASA's roving geology lab has been on Mars for 10 months, and scientists are finally preparing to send the rover toward its main objective: a towering mound of layered sediments inside Gale crater.
Radiation Risks for Future Marsonauts
Thanks to a detector carried across interplanetary space aboard NASA's Curiosity rover, researchers now have a much clearer idea of radiation exposure that future astronauts will endure when traveling to and from Mars.
