SUNSET: 
Juno's Hi-and-Bye Flyby
A NASA spacecraft bound for Jupiter made a close flyby of Earth to gain speed for the long trek outward, and amateur astronomers prepared to watch its passage.
To Catch a Comet
A balloon-borne mission launching from the Southwest will aim a telescope at the approaching Comet ISON. While it won't observe the comet at its best, the mission might reveal details about the composition of the icy body and the family it comes from.
Methane Goes Missing on Mars
The Curiosity rover conducted super-sensitive tests of the Red Planet's atmosphere for methane — the most abundant hydrocarbon in the solar system — and found none. What does this finding mean for the search for Martian life?
Deep Impact Meets Its End
Primarily known for its up-close comet observations, the Deep Impact spacecraft went on the fritz in mid-August. The mission team scrambled to reestablish communication, but efforts were unsuccessful.
Asteroid Scheme Still Under Way
Despite funding pushback in the House of Representatives, NASA is full steam ahead in plans for its asteroid retrieval mission.
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.
