Jupiter appears to have more water than anyone expected.

After much anticipation and an unexpected two-day delay, NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter finally launched on Sunday, February 9 at 11:03 p.m. Eastern. Footage captured by NASA and the ESA reveal the spacecraft's fittingly spectacular send-off into deep space.

Thanks to some (very) remote engineering work by NASA, the intrepid explorer's science mission is back on.

ESA's orbiter will work with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to unveil the mysteries of our home star and the origin of violent storms that spew plasma across space.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is celebrating a technical achievement. For the very first time, one of its deep space antennas has simultaneously sent a series of commands to two spacecraft orbiting Mars. The antenna sent parallel transmissions to the agency’s Mars Express orbiter, which snaps pictures of the Red Planet, and its ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which analyzes gas signatures on Mars.

The first flight of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion crew capsule — and the first big step in putting astronauts back on the moon — was originally scheduled to launch this year, but the mission is now expected to slip to 2021.

Fixing problems on Voyager is a tricky business given that it is currently located around 11.5 billion miles from Earth.

ESA’s exoplanet-observer Cheops acquired the first image of its initial target star, following the successful telescope cover opening on 29 January 2020. The intentionally blurry image is a product of the specially designed telescope optics, which are deliberately defocused to maximise the precision of Cheops’ measurements and enable its unprecedented study of exoplanets, or planets in other solar systems.

Saturn's moon Enceladus has mysterious, evenly spaced fissures in its icy shell where water erupts into space.

Over the past 60 years, NASA has explored the solar system from the sun to the Kuiper belt. While many of these missions, especially those beyond Saturn, have been one-shot flybys, others have charted many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn extensively by repeated orbital passes.

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A mission to launch thousands of satellites is about to begin, but scientists say this could affect astronomy.

2019 was the shot. 2020 is the chaser. Four countries are sending robots to Mars, private companies will send humans into orbit, and we’re inching closer to seeing NASA return astronauts to the moon.

Big and small rockets. The Moon and Mars. Lots of asteroid stuff, too.

Ever since last summer’s Pluto flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, two UVA scientists have been astounded by images streaming in from the edge of the solar system: breathtaking shots of Pluto and its moons, close-up views of icy mountains, glaciers of frozen nitrogen and the dwarf planet’s hazy, tenuous atmosphere. UVA planetary astronomer Anne Verbiscer, and UVA planetary geologist Alan Howard were among the first scientists to witness and begin analyzing photos and data.

American and Russian engineers are getting closer to a new plan for cooperating in space, one that would go beyond low Earth orbit and preserve the multinational alliance forged at the dawn of the International Space Station program in 1993. Organizations on both sides are quietly toying with the idea of going back to the moon together. That is, if politics don't get in the way. With the ISS scheduled to make a controlled plunge into the ocean in 2024, the partners have been preparing to go their own ways. NASA, while funding companies like SpaceX to go to orbit, is developing the Orion spacecraft and the super-heavy rocket called...

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos says the big, re-usable rocket he has been developing inside his Blue Origin space company will be called New Glenn, after John Glenn.

“So the ship is really rolling, and the capsule is out there like a wrecking ball.

A darkness has spread over the grim, airless field of ice that threatens to swallow us. Night has come to the nightmare glacier. But then we see the shiny spacecraft, with its four gangly legs extending outward to find purchase on the jagged ice. Within, scientific instruments begin to blink on, one by one. Soon, they will start sniffing for any hint of life on this most alien and mysterious of worlds in the Solar System: the Jovian moon Europa. Through the HoloLens each of us wears, we watch this simulation of what might happen about 15 years from now on the icy, forbidding moon.

David Grinspoon looked as if someone had died. It was January 2017, and the astrobiologist had just received bad news. NASA had recently announced the results of its Discovery Program competition, which would decide where the agency would send its next outer space probe. The options: two asteroid missions or two individual Venus orbiters (another option involved an infrared space telescope). Grinspoon had been investigating Venus for most of his 30-year career. But NASA, to his chagrin, had gone with the asteroids.