Planetary Flyby

The James Webb Space Telescope may have detected life-associated gas in the atmosphere of a far-off planet. The news is being greeted with both enthusiasm and skepticism.

ESA released new Mercury images from BepiColombo's final flyby of Mercury on January 8, 2025. The spacecraft will eventually go into orbit around Mercury. The post Mercury images from final flyby of BepiColombo! first appeared on EarthSky.

These Earth-size ovals at Jupiter's north and south poles are visible only at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths, and appear and disappear seemingly at random.

A small asteroid, 2024 PT5, will spend the next two months alongside our planet as a mini moon before swooping back to deep space

A NASA mission launching in October will send cameras and other scientific equipment to see, among other things, whether Jupiter's moon Europa could sustain life.

This scrappy spacecraft proves it's a survivor.

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has successfully completed its fourth of six gravity assist flybys at Mercury, capturing images of two special impact craters as it uses the little planet's gravity to steer itself on course to enter orbit around Mercury in November 2026.

Preliminary evidence for gases that could be biosignatures have been found in the atmosphere of Venus, but even if these biosignatures are real, does it...

Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, have evidence of oceans beneath their ice crusts. A NASA experiment suggests that if these oceans support life, signatures of that life in the form of organic molecules (e.g. amino acids, nucleic acids, etc.) could survive just under the surface ice despite the harsh radiation on these worlds. If robotic landers are sent to these moons to look for life…

Though Pluto has formally been considered a dwarf planet for almost two decades, it still has many lessons left for planetary scientists — including hints about how the solar system formed.

Yet another sky show is coming in a season of them.

OSIRIS-APEX emerged unscathed from its first of six close brushes with the sun, thanks to some clever engineering.

In August 2021, the ESA/JAXA Mercury-bound BepiColombo spacecraft performed its second flyby of Venus and provided a short-lived observation of its induced magnetosphere.

BepiColombo spotted an outpour of carbon and oxygen atoms in Venus' fragile magnetic environment

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a "Pale Blue Dot," hasn't sent usable data from interstellar space in months. From a report: When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do...

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a "Pale Blue Dot," hasn't sent usable data from interstellar space in months.

A new study suggests there is less oxygen on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa than scientists previously thought.

The search for life beyond Earth fascinates many and inspires big questions: Are we truly alone in the universe? Is our Earth unique? Is it possible that life beyond Earth may actually be far from little green aliens and much closer to the microbial life with which we share our planet?

Since the Juno mission's most recent flyby of Jupiter and one of its moons, more detailed pictures of the gas giant have appeared in the official repository....

NASA's Juno spacecraft just made the closest flybys of Jupiter's moon Io that any spacecraft has carried out in more than 20 years. An instrument on this spacecraft called "JunoCam" returned spectacular, high-resolution images—and raw data are now available for you to process, enhance, and investigate. On Dec. 30th, 2023, Juno came within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of […]