Planetary Science News

Cassini’s 20-year mission culminated in a series of wild orbits. First, it grazed the outer rim of Saturn’s rings and then, in the Grand Finale phase,...

Fields of sharp ice growing to almost 50 feet (15 m) tall could be scattered across the equatorial regions of Jupiter’s moon Europa, according to a new...

An international team of researchers from the United States, Taiwan and France provides new evidence that phosphates — a key element in the building...

The Martian moons Phobos and Deimos have been suggested to be captured asteroids based on the similarities between the dark, red, nearly featureless spectra...

Researchers using data from NASA’s Cassini orbiter have found evidence for massive dust storms in Titan’s equatorial regions. The discovery, reported...

Mars had right conditions for subsurface life some 3.7 to 4.1 billion years ago (Noachian period), according to new research from Brown University. An...

A new image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft shows a long, brown oval known as a ‘brown barge’ in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. A ‘brown barge’...

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established a definition of a planet that required it to clear its orbit, or in other words, be the...

Planetary researchers from Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley may have solved the mystery behind lunar swirls, wispy bright...

When NASA’s Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, the gas giant’s southern hemisphere was enjoying summertime, while the northern was in the...

A team of researchers led by Dr. Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University has directly observed definitive evidence of surface-exposed...

A team of researchers from the Australian National University and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has solved the mystery underlying Jupiter’s...

Northwest Africa (NWA) 11119, a stone meteorite found in December 2016 in Mauritania, is the world’s oldest igneous meteorite, according to new research. An...

There may be more habitable exoplanets than we previously thought, according to Pennsylvania State University researchers Bradford Foley and Andrew Smye,...

On Mars, the atmospheric pressure is around 0.6% of Earth’s. Any liquid water on the surface would very quickly evaporate or freeze. One of the challenges...

By examining microscopic ice-blue crystals of mineral hibonite trapped inside a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, an international team of scientists was...

ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has used radar signals bounced through underground layers of ice to find evidence of liquid water trapped below the south...

Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the most compelling targets in the search for life beyond Earth. However, its water-ice surface is affected by the harsh...

There may have been two windows of habitability for the Moon, according to new research by University of London’s Professor Ian Crawford and Dr. Dirk...