Solar System News

July 17, 2026

Top Headlines

NASA Selects 41 Space Technologies for Future Moon and Mars Exploration

July 15, 2026 NASA has chosen 41 commercial technology projects that could solve critical challenges for future missions to the Moon and Mars. From powering lunar outposts to protecting spacecraft from Moon dust, the innovations are designed to push both space ...

NASA's Perseverance Just Completed a Marathon on Mars

July 14, 2026 NASA's Perseverance rover has reached an impressive new milestone on Mars, completing the equivalent of a full marathon by driving 26.2 miles (42.195 kilometers) across the Red Planet. It accomplished the feat in just five years and four months, ...

NASA Selects Four New Moon Missions to Build a Permanent Lunar Base

July 14, 2026 NASA is ramping up its lunar ambitions by awarding nearly $600 million for four commercial Moon landings planned for late 2028. Each mission will carry the same trio of science instruments to improve lunar navigation, study dangerous dust kicked up ...

Europe Just Unveiled a New Rival to SpaceX’s Starship

July 10, 2026 A detailed independent study found that SpaceX's Starship is every bit as revolutionary as expected, while revealing both its impressive capabilities and its biggest remaining hurdles. It also introduces an ambitious European rocket concept that ...

Scientists Want to Quarantine Alien Life on the Moon Before It Reaches Earth

July 6, 2026 Scientists are calling for a lunar quarantine facility where samples from Mars, the Moon, and beyond would be examined before being brought to Earth. They warn that even a tiny alien microorganism ...

Alien Messages May Have Reached Earth Without Us Realizing It

June 16, 2026 A new SETI study suggests we may be overlooking alien signals not because they aren't there, but because their own stars are scrambling them before they escape into space. Turbulent plasma and powerful stellar storms can spread an ultra-narrow radio ...

MIT’s New Spacecraft Engine Could Send Tiny Satellites to Mars

June 10, 2026 MIT researchers have shown that one fuel can power both chemical and electric spacecraft thrusters, potentially transforming what small satellites can do. The approach combines quick bursts of speed with highly efficient long-range propulsion in a ...

Tiny X-ray Telescope Could Unlock the Moon's Hidden Chemistry

June 6, 2026 A lightweight new X-ray telescope could finally give scientists something they’ve never had before: a complete chemical map of the Moon. Researchers used detailed mission simulations to show that a compact telescope orbiting the Moon could ...

NASA Just Proved Spacecraft Can Switch Between Multiple Satellite Networks

June 6, 2026 NASA’s PExT terminal has shown that spacecraft can seamlessly communicate through multiple government and commercial networks, a major step beyond traditional single-network systems. The mission is now expanding to test new capabilities that could ...

NASA’s Powerful Roman Space Telescope Is About to Transform Astronomy

May 18, 2026 NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now aiming for an earlier launch in September 2026. Designed to explore dark matter, dark energy, and distant exoplanets, the telescope will capture massive, ultra-detailed surveys of the cosmos using ...

NASA’s New AI Space Chip Could Let Spacecraft Think for Themselves

May 15, 2026 NASA is testing a next-generation space computer chip that could give spacecraft the ability to operate far more independently in deep space. The radiation-hardened processor is showing performance levels hundreds of times beyond current spaceflight ...

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Could Reveal Millions of Invisible Neutron Stars

May 15, 2026 NASA’s Roman Space Telescope could expose a vast hidden population of neutron stars lurking unseen across the Milky Way. By detecting subtle shifts in starlight caused by gravity, the mission may ...

Latest Headlines

updated 6:04am EDT

Sun-Like Star Caught After Eating One of Its Own Planets

July 16, 2026 A distant Sun-like star appears to have devoured one of its planets, leaving behind a surprising chemical fingerprint. Researchers found an unusually high concentration of lithium, a strong sign that ...

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Reveals a Strange Atmosphere on a Hellish Lava Planet

July 15, 2026 NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has revealed new details about the blistering lava planet 55 Cancri e, where temperatures are high enough to melt ...

Future Moon Landings Could Wipe out Clues to How Life Began on Earth

July 12, 2026 A new study suggests spacecraft exhaust could quickly contaminate the moon's most scientifically valuable regions, potentially masking ancient clues about how life began on Earth. Researchers say ...

This Alien Planet Never Has Sunrise or Sunset. It May Support Life

July 9, 2026 A planet with one side permanently roasting and the other frozen in endless darkness might still have a chance of supporting life. Researchers found that heat inside a tidally locked exoplanet could ...

This Mars Rover Could Finally Reveal Whether Life Ever Existed on Mars

July 9, 2026 The hunt for ancient life on Mars just got an important test run. Scientists confirmed that the Rosalind Franklin rover's sophisticated instrument can detect subtle differences in two stable ...

NASA's Hubble Captures a Crimson Stellar Nursery Sparkling With Blue and White Stars

July 5, 2026 Hubble has captured a spectacular view of LH 95, where about 2,500 young stars are still on their journey to becoming full-fledged stars. Scientists ...

NASA's Hubble Captures a Star-Spangled Sea of 500,000 Stars

July 4, 2026 Celebrating the United States' 250th anniversary, NASA released a stunning Hubble portrait of Messier 3, an ancient globular cluster with more than 500,000 stars. The remarkable cluster is helping ...

NASA Celebrates America's 250th Birthday With Incredible Views of Space

July 4, 2026 NASA is marking the United States' 250th birthday with four striking red, white, and blue images of deep space from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The collection features an exploded star, a stellar ...

390 Gravitational Wave Detections Reveal Hidden Population of Black Holes

July 1, 2026 Astronomers have released the largest gravitational wave catalog ever, revealing 161 new black hole collisions and pushing the total number of detections to 390. Among the highlights are the clearest ...

James Webb Uncovers Exotic Salt Clouds on a Mysterious Pink World

June 28, 2026 Astronomers have finally cracked the mystery of the famous “Pink Planet,” a strange world 57 light-years away that has puzzled scientists for more than a decade. Using the James Webb Space ...

Astronomers Found Two Rare Super Puff Planets Lighter Than Cotton Candy

June 26, 2026 Two newly confirmed "super-puff" planets are so diffuse that they are less dense than cotton candy, despite being about the size of Jupiter. Their rare orbital relationship and enormous, ...

NASA’s Lucy Finds a Wobbling Peanut-Shaped Asteroid With Signs of Ancient Water

June 25, 2026 NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered that asteroid Donaldjohanson is a wobbling, peanut-shaped relic born from a violent collision and slowly reshaped by the subtle force of sunlight. It also carries ...

Future Astronauts Could Walk Across Rocks from Deep Inside the Moon

June 22, 2026 A colossal ancient collision may have left some of the Moon’s deepest secrets surprisingly close to future Artemis landing sites. By recreating the impact that formed the giant South Pole-Aitken ...

James Webb Reveals Two Completely Different Twilights on an Alien World

June 11, 2026 JWST has revealed dramatic differences between the dawn and dusk regions of the scorching exoplanet WASP-121 b. Fierce winds appear to carry heat from the planet’s permanent dayside, making the ...

NASA Reveals Artemis III Crew for One of the Most Complex Space Missions Ever

June 11, 2026 NASA has selected the Artemis III crew for a high-stakes 2027 mission designed to test the future of lunar exploration. Astronauts will launch aboard Orion and perform unprecedented docking ...

Earth May Have Been Seeding Venus With Life for Billions of Years

June 25, 2026 A new study suggests Earth may have been sending tiny hitchhikers to Venus for billions of years. Researchers found that asteroid impacts could launch microbes into space, where some might survive ...

Meteorite Reveals a Lost Moon-Sized World from the Dawn of the Solar System

June 23, 2026 A rare meteorite has revealed evidence of a massive lost world that once orbited the young Sun before being destroyed in a catastrophic collision. The discovery suggests some early planets formed ...

Venus Will Disappear Behind the Moon in a Rare June Sky Event

June 3, 2026 June's night sky delivers several must-see events, starting with a close encounter between Venus and Jupiter after sunset. Mercury joins the pair to form a rare three-planet lineup, while the ...

NASA’s Roman Telescope Could Reveal 100,000 Hidden Worlds

June 1, 2026 NASA’s Roman Space Telescope could revolutionize the search for alien worlds by discovering around 100,000 exoplanets—far more than all previous missions combined. It will look deep into ...

Scientists Discover a Giant “planet Factory” Beyond Jupiter

May 26, 2026 Scientists believe a dust-filled ring just outside Jupiter acted like a cosmic “planetesimal factory,” producing multiple generations of early space rocks with very different compositions. The ...

NASA’s Webb Telescope Discovers a Planet Where Rock Clouds Vanish Every Night

May 27, 2026 A giant planet nearly 700 light-years away has a bizarre daily weather cycle where mineral clouds appear every morning and vanish by nightfall. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers ...

NASA’s Fermi Telescope Reveals the Power Source Behind Monster Supernovae

May 27, 2026 NASA’s Fermi telescope has detected what may be the first confirmed gamma-ray signal from a superluminous supernova — one of the most extreme explosions in the universe. Scientists believe the ...

NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Captures Stunning Mars Images During High-Speed Flyby

May 23, 2026 NASA’s Psyche spacecraft skimmed past Mars in a precision flyby that helped catapult it deeper into space toward its ultimate target: the bizarre metal-rich asteroid Psyche. During the encounter, ...

James Webb Discovers a Rare Giant Planet With Surprisingly Earth-Like Temperatures

May 21, 2026 Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have uncovered a rare world unlike anything in our solar system — a giant planet about the size of Saturn with surprisingly Earth-like ...

NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Uses Mars as a Giant Slingshot Toward a Mysterious Metal World

May 26, 2026 NASA’s Psyche spacecraft just used Mars as a giant gravitational slingshot to continue its journey toward a strange metal rich asteroid. The close flyby boosted the spacecraft’s speed by about ...

Mars May Have Once Had an Ocean and This Chaotic Valley Is a Big Clue

May 15, 2026 A colossal valley near Mars’s equator is revealing dramatic clues about the Red Planet’s watery and volcanic past. Stretching roughly 1,300 kilometers, Shalbatana Vallis was carved billions of ...

Earth Is Flying Through Ancient Supernova Debris and Scientists Found the Evidence in Antarctic Ice

May 13, 2026 Earth is quietly collecting radioactive debris from an ancient stellar explosion as our Solar System drifts through a giant cloud of gas and dust between the stars. Scientists analyzing Antarctic ice ...

NASA’s Psyche Probe Is About to Slingshot Around Mars at 12,000 Mph

May 11, 2026 NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is about to pull off a dramatic close flyby of Mars, skimming just 2,800 miles above the planet to get a powerful gravitational boost on its journey to the mysterious ...

Scientists Say Dante’s Inferno Described an Asteroid Impact 500 Years Before Modern Science

May 11, 2026 Dante’s Inferno may have been far more than a religious epic. New research argues that the 14th-century poet essentially imagined a catastrophic asteroid impact centuries before modern science ...

The Universe’s Biggest Black Holes May Be Forged in Violent Mergers

May 8, 2026 The Universe’s biggest black holes may not be born giants after all. Scientists analyzing gravitational-wave signals from dozens of black hole collisions found evidence that the heaviest black ...