The world's greatest meteorite collection exists not because Antarctica attracts space rocks, but because the continent's ice and wind are nature's most efficient sorting machines.
Voyager 1 crossed the Sun's plasma boundary in 2012, yet it remains thousands of years from the gravitational edge of the solar system.
Proxima Centauri b and the newly confirmed GJ 887 d occupy nearby habitable zones, but neither is known to have an atmosphere, ocean or life.
Gaia has revealed a vast stellar ripple travelling through the Milky Way's outer disc. Its scale is extraordinary, but its origin remains unknown.
Mimas looks frozen and geologically quiet, yet Cassini's measurements point to a young global ocean beneath 20 to 30 kilometres of ice.
The discovery suggests a chemical compound exists on two frigid, geologically alien worlds—yet remains unknown to science.
Congress has ended support for the existing Mars Sample Return programme. Perseverance's carefully documented collection now waits on Mars with no approved retrieval mission.
Textbook diagrams enlarge asteroids until the belt looks packed. NASA's own scale estimates show why spacecraft cross it safely and why planned flybys require precise targeting.
The Sun's outer atmosphere reaches millions of degrees while the surface below is far cooler. Waves, reconnection and new spacecraft measurements explain parts of the paradox, but not yet all of it.
Apophis will pass inside geostationary altitude in April 2029, giving OSIRIS-APEX a rare chance to inspect how Earth's gravity changed it.
Europa Clipper is following a 1.8-billion-mile route to Jupiter, where 49 close flybys will test whether Europa's hidden ocean could support life.
Helium escaping from LHS 1140 b has provided the first firm atmospheric detection for a rocky planet in a habitable-zone orbit, while leaving its surface conditions and lower atmosphere unresolved.
For the first time, a lunar impact comes with a complete history, tracked from Earth to moon.
The Saturnian moon's rapid retreat from its planet rewrites theories about how it formed and where it has spent its 4.5-billion-year history.
A laboratory experiment found that Europa-like salty ice emits different visible glows under high-energy electrons, offering a possible new way to map the moon's surface chemistry in darkness.
Four Cassini bistatic radar flybys found millimetre-scale roughness across Titan's open seas and rougher estuaries consistent with methane-rich inflow meeting more ethane-rich liquid.
