Planets, Nasa | featured news

For explorers searching for life beyond Earth, the siren song of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, trills sweetly. “Europa has the best chance of having life there today,” said Britney Schmidt, who studies the moon at the University of Texas at Austin. Astrobiologists think so because NASA’s Galileo probe found strong evidence for a deep, briny ocean covering the entire moon deep under the icy surface.

The Tatooine-like world about the size of Saturn is a frozen mass of rock and gas about 200 light years from Earth. NASA astronomers say it was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft launched in 2009. The desert planet of Tatooine is home to all manner of wonderful creatures — womp rats and banthas and jawas.

The first rock a NASA rover looked at when it arrived at a crater on Mars was unlike any looked at on the planet before, scientists said... And the first rock it looked at has already opened a new chapter in the study of Mars, NASA scientists said Thursday. On a telephone news conference, mission scientists giddily described that rock: full of zinc and bromine, elements that, at least for rocks on Earth, would be suggestive of geology formed with heat and water.

NASA's surviving Mars rover Opportunity has reached the rim of a 14-mile-wide crater where the robot geologist will examine rocks older than any it has seen in its seven years on the surface of the red planet, scientists said Wednesday....

NASA is on the verge of launching a new solar-powered spacecraft all the way to Jupiter....

NASA's upcoming mission to Jupiter can't get much greener than this: a solar-powered, windmill-shaped spacecraft....

For the first time, Earth has a regular orbiting eye-in-the-sky spying on the solar system's smallest and strangest planet, Mercury.

NASA's next-generation rover mission to the surface of Mars needs more money – again. Nine months before the scheduled launch, the space agency says the mission has burned through its reserves and needs another $82 million to complete testing before liftoff.

Thirty-four years after NASA's Viking missions to Mars sent back results interpreted to mean there was no organic material - and consequently no life - on the planet, new research has concluded that organic material was found after all.

Scientists don't know quite why, but one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has disappeared -- again.