SUNSET: 
Saturn's Prometheus: Just Plain Weird!
A remarkable new close-up of a "ring shepherd" reveals muted surface features that make it look more like a giant gray potato than a planetary satellite.
WISE: A Very Cool Space Telescope
Early this morning a Delta rocket soared into the predawn darkness over California. It carried aloft a space observatory designed to map hundreds of millions of hidden cosmic treasures at infrared wavelengths.
"Free Spirit" Effort Hits a Snag
The bad news is that NASA engineers aren't having much luck freeing one of their Mars rovers from a quagmire of soft sand. But the good news is that it's gotten stuck in a remarkable deposit where steam and molten rock once mingled.
Cassini Visits a Science-Fiction World
NASA's Cassini probe grabbed three-dimensional views of a landscape of geysers, as the craft sped above an evening twilight zone on Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Rosetta Bids Earth Adieu
A European comet-chaser has made its third and final flyby of its home planet, taking a few snapshots when it was nearby.
Bird's-Eye View of Tranquility Base
Did Armstrong and Aldrin really walk the Moon? An incredible new image from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter should erase any naysayer's lingering doubt.
LCROSS Impact Kicked up Lunar Water
It took more than a month of fevered analysis, but NASA scientists are at last convinced that October 9th's crash by the LCROSS spacecraft on a shadowed lunar plain vaporized at least 100 kg of water.
Phoenix Amid the Winter Snow
An orbiting camera has spotted NASA's Phoenix lander amid deepening dry-ice snow in the Martian arctic. Hardly anyone expects the craft to have survived the long, dark, bitterly cold winter — but engineers will attempt to reestablish contact anyway in a few weeks.
Kepler's Twitchy Detectors
NASA's new planet-hunting spacecraft, launched seven months ago, has a few noisy detectors that make the stars under study appear to flicker. It's a problem the mission team knew about — and decided not to repair before sending the craft irretrievably into space.
Strange Brew at LCROSS's Crash Site
NASA scientists haven't said much since a spacecraft and its carrier rocket slammed into a lunar crater on October 9th. One reason might be that they can't believe what they're finding there.
Mercury Throws Geologists a Curve
When NASA's Messenger spacecraft zipped past the innermost planet for a third and final flyby on September 29th, a glitch caused half of the planned observations to be lost. Scientists are thrilled to have the other half — but they're not entirely sure what to make of them.
The LCROSS Impact, Continued
We've added updates our story on the Moon probe that NASA hoped would raise a big dust-and-vapor splash. The debris plume has indeed been seen. But how much information can be extracted from it?
LCROSS Readies to Shoot the Moon
Early Friday morning, two spacecraft will slam into a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole in the hope of finding water there.
Big Pix from Herschel
Europe's new Herschel Space Observatory is up and running and showing what it can do. You've never seen the far-infrared sky like this.
Messenger's Third "Taste" of Mercury
Today a NASA spacecraft zipped past the innermost planet at close range, a move designed to set up a return visit in 2011 that will cap seven years of wandering through the inner solar system. Three flybys down, one orbit insertion to go!
The Humid Moon
Just-released infrared maps of the Moon reveal traces of water and hydrated minerals (colored blue) clinging to large tracts of the lunar surface. Is there enough of it for future astronauts to collect and drink?
Planck Sees "First Light"
European astronomers are delighted that their new microwave-background spacecraft has successfully begun making its highly detailed map of tiny temperature variations across the sky — the key to revealing insights about how the Big Bang happened and how the earliest galaxies formed.
India's Chandrayaan 1 Goes Silent
Ground controllers abruptly lost contact with India's first lunar probe on August 29th, likely signaling the premature end of this promising mission.
Martian Meteorite in 3-D
Rolling along over the sandy Meridiani Plain on Mars, the tireless rover Opportunity has chanced upon a hefty iron-nickel meteorite. Grab your 3-D glasses for an eye-popping closer look!
Kepler Shows Its Promise
After just 1½ weeks of test observations, scientists are confident that the Kepler spacecraft is well on its way to discovering Earthlike planets around distant stars.
