Looking Up by Bob Eklund

With the push of a button, final commands for the European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder mission were beamed to space on July 18, a final goodbye before the spacecraft was powered down. LISA Pathfinder had …[READ MORE]

The National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory and the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo have joined the Red Dots project in the search for new planets around our nearest stars. …[READ MORE]

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft doesn’t zoom past its next science target until New Year’s Day 2019, but the Kuiper Belt object, known as 2014 MU69, is already revealing surprises. Scientists have been sifting through data …[READ MORE]

On July 10, just days after celebrating its first anniversary in Jupiter orbit, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will fly directly over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the gas giant’s iconic, 10,000-mile-wide storm. This will be humanity’s first …[READ MORE]

As the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft approached its destination on July 4, 1997, no NASA mission had successfully reached the Red Planet in more than 20 years. Even the mission team anxiously awaiting confirmation that the …[READ MORE]

Astronomers and solar physicists will be out in force during this summer’s total eclipse of the Sun (https://eclipse.aas.org/eclipse-america), now just two months away. They’ll use ground-based telescopes, airborne instruments, and orbiting satellites to shed new …[READ MORE]

In biology, “symbiosis” refers to two organisms that live close to and interact with one another. Astronomers have long studied a class of stars—called symbiotic stars—that co-exist in a similar way. Using data from NASA’s …[READ MORE]

A newly discovered Jupiter-like world is so hot, it’s being vaporized by its own star. With a dayside temperature of more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit, KELT-9b is a planet that is hotter than most stars. …[READ MORE]

Enceladus—a large icy, oceanic moon of Saturn—may have flipped, the possible victim of an out-of-this-world wallop. While combing through data collected by NASA’s Cassini mission during flybys of Enceladus, astronomers from Cornell University, the University …[READ MORE]

Heavy rain on Mars reshaped the planet’s impact craters and carved out river-like channels in its surface billions of years ago, according to a new study published in Icarus. In the paper, researchers from the …[READ MORE]