With only days to go before NASA’s Cassini space probe ends its two-decade mission to explore Saturn, what has it revealed about the ringed planet, the second largest in our solar system?
While we on Earth are familiar with our own star, the Sun, the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission will explore solar systems similar to ours as well as those that are more exotic.
The Voyager space probes sent back some amazing images of the planets in the outer Solar System, and they’re still talking to Earth every day via Australia’s tracking station.
An astronomer explains how. why and when eclipses happen, what scientists can learn from them, and what they would look like if you were standing on the Moon.
The images are in from the Juno probe’s closest flyby so far of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Citizen scientists are now getting involved in processing those images.
Juno has flown closer to the solar system’s most famous storm than any other spacecraft to take the most detailed images to date. They may help scientists reveal some of the spot’s best-kept secrets.
We could learn a lot from any mission to send people to Mars, such as whether there’s life elsewhere in the universe or even the technology for new household appliances.
We may need to re-think our models of Jupiter’s formation thanks to the first results from Juno probe orbiting the planet, and new observations from Earth.
Earth is a relatively dry planet compared to some of the other ocean worlds in our Solar system. Life needs water so what about life on these other places?
To help find Planet 9, you just need a computer and a little astronomy knowledge. Already, 120,000 images have been processed by citizen scientists in just 3 days.
A group of astronomers are trying to reclassify Pluto as full ‘planet’. But there are good reasons to leave our classification system alone, and this doesn’t mean Pluto is any less interesting.