SUNSET: 
A Solar Source for Diamond Dust?
Microscopic diamonds, often found in primitive meteorites, may not have been forged in the fires of distant stars after all.
Panel Airs Next Steps for Impact Protection
According to a panel of space experts, the time has come to up the ante in the worldwide effort to defend our planet from wayward asteroids and comets.
Review Board Endorses Pluto-Kuiper Mission
A major study by the National Research Committee concludes that sending a probe to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt should be NASA's top priority in solar-system exploration.
A New Test for Extrasolar Planets
Based on an unusual spectral fingerprint, a Jupiter-size planet may be forming aroung the young star HD 141569.
Unique Crater Swarm Disputed
The origin of the Rio Cuarto crater chain in Argentina is being hotly debated.
Asteroid Chasers Are Seeing Double
Once considered virtually impossible, binary asteroids are turning up everywhere — especially in Earth's vicinity.
Comet Borrelly: Dry and Hot
The experimental spacecraft Deep Space 1 caught some lucky breaks when it plunged deep into a comet's coma last September.
Threatening Asteroid Aids Planetary Prognosticators
Asteroid 1950 DA may have a 1-in-300 of hitting Earth in 2880, and in deriving those odds dynamicists have learned much about all the factors that affect those long odds.
Radar Reveals Big Splash on Mercury
Using Arecibo's powerful radar system, astronomers have identified what may be one of the solar system's youngest craters on the Sun-scorched plains of Mercury.
New Probe of Yucatán Crater Ends
The Chicxulub impact crater is buried beneath roughly 1,000 meters of sediment (vertical scale is exaggerated). The Yaxcopoil-1 drilling effort intended to sample a variety of rocks resulting from the impact itself.Courtesy David A. Kring. It's been 11 years since geologists pinpointed the location of a huge impact that, most…
Scientists Track "Recent" Flood on Mars
Mars may be bone-dry today, but new observations suggests that floodwaters may have raged across its surface within the past 10 million years.
Testbed Paves Way for Amateur Space Telescope
Members of the ISS-AT (Interantional Space Station Amateur Telescope) team pose with their 'Alpha' telescope and its control computer during inaugural tests on February 2nd. From left: Richard Berry (kneeling), Tom Melsheimer, Matt Bisque, Orville Brettman, Terry Mann, Lance Martin, and Sean Sheldon.Courtesy Richard Berry. Amateur astronomers dream of someday…
Galileo Mission Winds Down
Even though its main communication antenna never deployed, NASA's Galileo spacecraft has been productive — and durable — ever since entering orbit around Jupiter in December 1995. Multiple flybys of the Jovian moon Io have subjected the spacecraft to more than 500,000 rads of magnetospheric charged particles — 3½ times…
A Saturn-Moon Spectacle
There will be other occultations of Saturn this year — but none with February's prime-time appeal for North American observers.
Huge Ice Deposits Found on Mars
A NASA spacecraft has strong evidence that slabs of ice lie buried just below of huge portions of the Martian surface.
Will Leonids "Storm" for North America?
A 'meteor's-eye view' shows how Earth will be oriented for the first expected peak of the Leonid shower on November 18, 2001, at about 5 a.m. EST (2 a.m. PST). That's when dynamicists predict that Earth will encounter the most dense region of particles released by Comet Tempel-Tuttle. While the…
