SUNSET: 
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.
Lots of Rocks Hit the Moon and Mars
Thanks to high-definition cameras or orbiting spacecraft, planetary geologists are getting their first reliable stats for the impact rates on our neighbor worlds.
Uranus & Neptune: Thin Weather Layers
The solar system's "ice giants" display surprisingly energetic weather patterns — and a new analysis suggests they're all confined to a very thin outer layer on each planet.
Kepler Goes Down — and Probably Out
NASA's revolutionary planet-hunting spacecraft suffered malfunction this week that leaves it unable to point precisely at its target stars.
Brilliant GRB Blast with an Amateur Twist
An exceptionally powerful gamma-ray burst on April 27th wowed astronomers around the world — and its fading was tracked by an alert backyard observer.
Lingering Echoes of Comet S-L 9's Demise
It's been nearly 19 years since fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter. Recent observations show that water delivered by the comet still lingers in the planet's stratosphere.
Saturn is Making Waves
Just as it's coming closest to Earth, the big ringed planet is in the news in multiple ways — including the discovery of a long-lasting hurricane at its north pole.
Has the Mars 3 Lander Been Found?
New images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter appear to show the Soviet Union's Mars 3 lander, which mysteriously fell silent just seconds after reaching the Red Planet's surface in 1971.
NASA to Snag a Near-Earth Asteroid
Not content to let private companies have all the fun in asteroid exploration and exploitation, NASA managers have proposed a high-flying mission that would capture a small asteroid and dispatch astronauts to study it — all within the next decade.
Aging Telescope Finds Baby Stars
The Herschel Space Telescope, now approaching its final days, has helped astronomers spot one of the earliest stages of star formation.
Possible Dark Matter Signal?
Scientists using an instrument aboard the International Space Station have measured a signal that might come from dark matter — or might not.
Is Saturn's Family Showing Its Age?
A detailed analysis of Cassini images suggests that the rings of moons of Saturn are ancient creations that in recent times have been coated to varying degrees by a dark, reddish patina.
Mission Planning for the Public
A NASA web-based tool plots trajectories to your favorite planet or near-Earth object.
Curiosity Wades Into Mudstone and More
In the six months since it landed onto the floor of Gale crater, NASA's newest rover has found plenty of evidence that this bit of Mars was soaking wet — and probably more than once.
Planck: Best Map Yet of Cosmic Creation
Planck mission scientists have released the first half of their observations of the cosmic microwave background. The results are a stunning confirmation of today's standard model for how the universe formed and grew. But they also raise some head-scratchers.
Radar Reveals Martian Flood Channels
Using a ground-penetrating radar instrument, researchers have "unearthed" new details about one of the Red Planet's most recent catastrophic floods.
