Santorini Panorama This panorama shows the vista from which NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spent five weeks in November and December 2008 while the sun was nearly directly in between Mars and Earth. Opportunity is approaching the fifth anniversary of its landing on Mars, continuing a surface mission that was initially scheduled to last three months. The rover landed on Jan. 24, 2004. Opportunity... 

Mercury was once seen as a cold, dead little world, spinning around the sun unchanged for the past 4 billion years. No longer: Observations from the Messenger spacecraft say it’s anything but. NASA’s orbiter is sending back evidence of massive volcanism, strange impact craters and magnetic tornadoes that funnel plasma directly from the sun to the planet’s surface. “It’s definitely not this... 

American spacecraft had to dodge space debris four times in 2008, NASA revealed Tuesday, a fact that highlights both the extent of the space junk problem and the primary mitigation option open to NASA. By tracking pieces of debris larger than around four inches, space engineers can identify some dangerous space junk and meteoroids. If a satellite or spacecraft is in danger of getting hit, they simply... 

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this spectacular space fireworks display when a blob of matter within a 5,000-light-year-long plasma beam emanating from a giant black hole flared up. The glowing clump of gas, first discovered in 1999 and named HST-1, is located in one of the most massive black holes ever discovered, in the giant elliptical galaxy M87 54 million light years away from Earth. It... 

For the first time, scientists were able to track an asteroid from space to the ground and recover pieces of it. The bits are unlike anything ever found on Earth. The asteroid was spotted entering Earth’s atmosphere over Sudan in October and was believed to have fully disintegrated, but an international team found almost 280 pieces of meteorite in a 11-square-mile section of Sudan’s Nubian... 

Behold the mesmerizing mundanity of space! NASA has transformed the external camera on the International Space Station into a live webcam — and the view is fascinatingly dull. For its inaugural morning, the webcam showed a live space walk by US Commander Mike Fincke and Russian flight engineer Yury Lonchakov complete with commentary from an announcer (“That’s Fincke in the red stripes”).... 

The growing sphere of space junk surrounding the Earth is a hazard to spaceflight, as International Space Station astronauts found out Thursday when their home was buzzed by a five-inch piece of debris. As the story about the near miss was unfolding this morning, Twitter users quickly made a provisional claim about where the debris came from by examining space junk data visualized on Google Earth.... 

Small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA’s Moon outpost, according to a NASA-sponsored study prepared by Astrobotic Technology Inc. with technical assistance from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Astrobotic Technology and Carnegie Mellon researchers analyzed mission requirements and developed the design for an innovative new type of small... 

Is gravity getting your satellite down? Too bad it doesn’t have a Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster on board. The aeronautics minds at MIT have developed this new propulsion system as a lighter, more fuel-efficient way to give satellites the boost they need. Powered by electrically charged nitrogen gas, the Mini-Helicon is an alternative to the rockets maneuvering most satellites today, which get their... 

NASA’s Swift Gamma-Ray Explorer satellite took this shot of Comet Lulin on Jan. 28, and regular folks may be able to catch their own glimpse with binoculars on February 23. The image was taken as the comet was passing through the constellation Libra, 100 million miles from Earth and 115 million miles from the sun. It combines data from Swift’s optical and ultraviolet telescope (the blue...