For nearly 10 years, there’s been only one spacecraft able to keep its cool above the hellish landscape of Venus. The Japanese Akatsuki probe was sent to Earth’s neighboring planet to observe its atmospheric dynamics, but the lone Venusian mission has suddenly gone quiet.
The surface of Venus is littered with thousands of volcanoes, some of which may still be active until today. A fresh look at 30-year-old radar images captured by the Magellan spacecraft revealed new lava flows on Venus, suggesting that the planet was volcanically active between 1990 to 1992.
A long overdue mission to Venus is finally back on track after being put on hold due to budgeting and staffing issues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Asteroid 99942 Apophis is fast approaching our home planet for an uncomfortably close encounter in 2029. In order to prepare for the rare event, NASA is calling for ideas for low cost missions to rendezvous with Apophis, but the space agency already has a pair of asteroid probes ready to take on the task.
The EnVision mission to Venus was officially adopted by the European Space Agency on Thursday, which means the organization has committed to getting the spacecraft Venus-bound by the early 2030s.
NASA has announced a delay in its ambitious Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, moving the launch date to July 2028. This decision, driven by budget uncertainties, comes despite the mission successfully passing key design reviews. Worryingly, the space agency is delaying formal confirmation of the mission until…
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be.…
NASA is going to store a pair of spacecraft at a facility, awaiting a second chance to go to space should the agency find a new purpose for them.
It’s been 30 years since a NASA spacecraft went to Venus, a yellowish planet 67 million miles from the Sun and 141 million miles from us. Venus is often thought of as a sibling planet to Earth, both being rocky worlds close enough to the Sun to bask in its heat. And yet, at some point in their histories, the two…
A new analysis of 30-year-old images taken by the Magellan spacecraft suggests that a volcanic eruption happened on the planet between 1990 and 1992. In other words, Venus is a living planet.
