Planetary Science

President-elect Joe Biden will elevate the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to a cabinet-level agency and picks world famous geneticist Eric Lander to run it.

The planetary trio has come and gone, but some in EarthSky's community captured photos!

The news that NASA will extend the InSight mission on Mars for two years, taking it through December of 2022, is not surprising, given the data trove the mission team has collected through operation of the mission seismometer. A live asset on Mars also deepens our knowledge of the planet's atmosphere and magnetic fie

What's up with all those volcanoes on Io, anyway?

Scientists seek guidance on exploring frozen caches at the lunar poles responsibly

The missions - Juno and InSight - have each increased our understanding of our solar system, as well as spurred new sets of diverse questions.

NASA is always keen to highlight the space agency's many successes, and rightly so -- those who pay for these expensive projects have a right to know what they're getting for their money. And so the n...

For the first time since October 2015, sky watchers will have the chance to view a planetary trio, or 3 planets all bunched up together on the sky's dome. Two are Jupiter and Saturn, fresh from their much-viewed December conjunction. The 3rd planet is elusive Mercury.

About a month after the new year has started on Earth, three spacecraft will pull into the vicinity of Mars.

The 1972 Apollo 16 lunar mission included his telescope, which observed the earth's atmosphere and materials in space.

If the robot uprising ever comes, the machines might cite a new entry in their list of grievances. An international team of researchers has developed a machine learning algorithm to do a task that no planetary scientist would—or could—ever do. After breaking the lunar surface into billions of pixels and painstakingly learning how the grey dots were related, the new algorithm amassed what the researchers say is the…

The moon's crust has remnant magnetization from a magnetic field, but how the field was generated is a mystery. New simulations from the MIT Weiss group rule out plasmas caused by meteoroid impacts.

Although stellar flares are typically viewed as a detriment to habitability, study shows 'life might still have a fighting chance.' Researchers find that flares drive a planets atmospheric composition to a new chemical equilibrium.

The decay of rocks at the Earth's surface may play a lesser role in regulating our climate than previously thought, says new research.

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s Solar Orbiter will be swinging by Venus this Christmas on its first gravity assist flyby.

When the Hubble Space Telescope set its sights toward the binary star system HD 106906, astronomers found a world that could resemble the long-sought Planet X. For the first time, ...

The two largest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, are coming closer together than they have been since the Middle Ages, appearing to be a "Christmas Star." This close approach will happen on December 21, but it will be visible December 16 to 25.

Astronomers using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have discovered two exoplanets transiting inactive red dwarf stars TOI-122 and TOI-237.

How to watch the closest observable conjunction of the two since the year 1226.

The Arecibo Observatory, in operation during its better days, with the Milky Way overhead. Credit: University of Central Florida