Recent News in...

Astrophysics

Observations from HST and the Kepler space telescope have provided evidence for the first moon discovered orbiting a planet outside of our solar system. The discovery was announced on 03 October 2018. The moon may be the size of Neptune, orbiting a planet several times the mass of Jupiter with the designation Kepler-1625b. More...

Heliophysics

The Voyager 2 became the second spacecraft (the first was Voyager 1) to escape the heliosphere and enter insterstellar space. More...

The Parker Solar Probe made its first perihelion pass on 05 November 2018, coming within 25 million km of the Sun. The probe will orbit the Sun over the course of the next seven years, ultimately coming closer than 7 million km from the Sun's surface.

Lunar and Planetary Science

On June 7 at 17:35 UT (1:35 p.m. EDT), the NASA Juno spacecraft passed within about 1000 km of the surface of Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.

NASA has selected two new missions to Venus as part of its Discovery program, an atmospheric probe: DaVinci+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging), and an orbiter: VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy), to launch in 2028 to 2030. For more detail see the NASA Press Release.

The Zurong rover on China's Tianwen 1 mission rolled onto the surface of Mars from the lander platform on May 22 at 2:40 UT (10:40 a.m. Beijing time).