Posts in category

Solar System


French novelist Jules Verne delighted 19th-century readers with the tantalizing notion that a journey to the center of the Earth was actually plausible. Since then, scientists have long acknowledged that Verne’s literary journey was only science fiction. The extreme temperatures of the Earth’s interior – around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,537 Celsius) at the core – …

ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 14:14 CEST on 14 April. The successful launch marks the beginning of an ambitious voyage to uncover the secrets of the three ocean worlds around the giant planet Jupiter, the moons of Ganymede, Callisto and …

asteroid Didymos and orbiting moonlet Dimorphos in space

In a world first, NASA has crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to push the rocky traveler off its trajectory. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test – or DART – is meant to test one potential approach that could prevent an asteroid from colliding with Earth. David Barnhart is a professor of astronautics …

color image of pluto taken by nasa's new horizons spacecraft

Discovered by humanity less than 100 years ago, Pluto has largely remained an enigma ever since. It was not until 2015 that the first spacecraft from Earth – an uncrewed probe sent by NASA – made a flyby of the distant planet, passing within 7,750 miles of the surface after traversing three billion miles since …

We can learn a lot about climate change from Venus, our sister planet. Venus currently has a surface temperature of 450℃ (the temperature of an oven’s self-cleaning cycle) and an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide (96 per cent) with a density 90 times that of Earth’s. Venus is a very strange place, totally uninhabitable, except …

The Parker Solar Probe captured an absolutely stunning glimpse of Venus during its third close flyby of the planet in July 2020, as seen in a newly released image from NASA and the mission’s science team. Although the Sun is the focus of the Parker Solar Probe’s seven-year-long mission to “touch” the Sun and fly …