News by Subject Space & Planetary

Shortly after NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu, an unexpected discovery by the mission's science team revealed that the asteroid could be active, or consistently discharging particles into space.

Early returns from the US Naval Research Laboratory's camera on NASA's latest mission to study the Sun's corona revealed on Dec. 4 a star more complex than ever imagined.

After a lengthy and challenging process, the team is finally ready to down-select from the four candidate sites to a primary and backup site.

The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, which has flown closer to the sun than any mission before, has found new evidence of the origins of the solar wind.

New data from the Parker Solar Probe, which got closer to the sun than any other spacecraft, allowed physicists to map the source of a major component of the solar wind that continually peppers Earth. The slow solar wind seems to emerge from coronal holes along the sun's equator. Data also reveal strange magnetic field reversals that could be accelerating solar wind particles, and an unexpectedly dense shroud of comet dust around the sun.

University of Maryland astronomers have made the most complete and detailed observations to date of the formation and dissipation of a naturally occurring comet outburst. Using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the researchers gained a clear start-to-finish image sequence of an explosive emission of dust, ice and gases during the close approach to Earth of comet 46P/Wirtanen in late 2018.

Measurements taken by the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft are providing important new insights from some of the farthest reaches of space ever explored. In a paper recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team led by Southwest Research Institute shows how the solar wind -- the supersonic stream of charged particles blown out by the Sun -- evolves at increasing distances from the Sun.

The search for evidence of life on Mars could be helped by fresh insights into ancient rocks on Earth.