mars, moon, nasa, new discoveries

Mars Plays Shepherd to Our Moon’s Long-Lost Twin

An international team of planetary scientists, led by astronomers at AOP, have found an asteroid trailing behind Mars with a composition very similar to the Moon’s. The asteroid could be an ancient piece of debris, dating back to the gigantic impacts that formed the Moon and the other rocky planets in our solar system like ...

Troy Oakes

The Moon and Mars at night over a field.

How Many Habitable Planets Are Out There?

Thanks to new research using data from the Kepler space telescope, it’s estimated that there could be as many as 300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy. Some could even be pretty close, with several likely within 30 light-years of our Sun. The findings will be published in The Astronomical Journal, and research was a ...

Troy Oakes

This illustration depicts Kepler-186f.

OSIRIS-REx TAGs Surface of Asteroid Bennu

Captured on Oct. 20, 2020, during the OSIRIS-REx mission’s Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event, this series of images shows the SamCam imager’s field of view as the NASA spacecraft approaches and touches down on asteroid Bennu’s surface, over 200 million miles (321 million km) away from Earth. The sampling event brought the spacecraft down to sample ...

Troy Oakes

The spacecraft’s sampling arm.

Chronicling Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy

To understand the significance of the Spitzer Space Telescope in the understanding of our Solar System, think of what the steam engine meant for the industrial revolution. A national team of scientists published in the journal Nature Astronomy two papers that provide an inventory of the major discoveries made possible thanks to the Spitzer Space ...

Troy Oakes

The Spitzer Space Telescope.

Venus’ Ancient Layered, Folded Rocks Point to Volcanic Origin

An international team of researchers has found that some of the oldest terrain on Venus, known as tesserae, has layering that seems consistent with volcanic activity. The finding could provide insights into the enigmatic planet’s geological history. Tesserae are tectonically deformed regions on the surface of Venus that are often more elevated than the surrounding ...

Troy Oakes

A volcano.

Hubble Data Suggests an Ingredient Is Missing From Current Dark Matter Theories

Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps stars, dust, and gas together in a galaxy. This mysterious substance makes up the bulk of a galaxy’s mass and forms the foundation of our Universe’s large-scale structure. Because dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, its presence is only known through its gravitational pull ...

Troy Oakes

Galaxy cluster MACSJ 1206.

Where No Spacecraft Has Gone Before: Close Encounter With Binary Asteroids

CU Boulder and Lockheed Martin will lead a new space mission to capture the first-ever closeup look at a mysterious class of solar system objects: binary asteroids. These bodies are pairs of asteroids that orbit around each other in space, much like the Earth and Moon. In a project review on Sept. 3, NASA gave ...

Troy Oakes

Artist's depiction of the twin Janus spacecraft.

Infrared Eyes on Enceladus: Hints of Fresh Ice in Northern Hemisphere

New composite images made by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft are the most detailed global infrared views ever produced of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. And data used to build those images provides strong evidence that the northern hemisphere of the moon has been resurfaced with ice from its interior. Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) collected light ...

Troy Oakes

Jupiters's icy moon Enceladus .

Webb Telescope Will Study Jupiter, Its Rings, and 2 Intriguing Moons

Jupiter, named for the king of the ancient Roman gods, commands its own mini-version of our solar system of circling satellites; their movements convinced Galileo Galilei that Earth is not the center of the universe in the early 17th century. More than 400 years later, astronomers will use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to observe these ...

Troy Oakes

The planet Jupiter.