Original reports, explanations and news from their publishers.
Dragonfly is planned to investigate Titan’s surface chemistry by flying between locations. Cassini and Huygens established the setting: rain, channels and lakes on a moon so cold that water ice acts as bedrock and hydrocarbons supply the liquid weather.
4 min read
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
MESSENGER mapped a world whose clocks disagree: one orbit takes about 88 Earth days, one rotation about 59, and sunrise to sunrise about 176. Those three numbers describe different motions. Reading the map means understanding which clock controls the sunlight.
3 min read
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
In 1991, radar found unusually bright patches near Mercury’s poles. MESSENGER later connected them with polar deposits and permanently shadowed craters, explaining how water ice can survive so close to the Sun.
4 min read
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
MESSENGER revealed the full extent of Caloris, a basin about 1,550 kilometres across. Its photographs do more than show a large crater: they let geologists reconstruct a sequence in which impact, volcanism and later bombardment changed the same ground.
3 min read
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/Brown University
Magellan travelled to Venus aboard the STS-30 mission, then mapped a surface hidden beneath global cloud. Its radar images are measurements of returning radio signals. Learning to read them begins by separating a strong echo from a high mountain.
3 min read
NASA/JPL
Magellan mapped a rocky world hidden beneath Venus’s clouds. At the ground, temperatures are around 465°C—hotter than on Mercury. The explanation depends on where energy leaves Venus, as well as how much sunlight arrives.
4 min read
NASA/JPL
Akatsuki observed Venus at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths to follow weather at different heights. Its target was a striking mismatch: the solid planet takes about 243 Earth days to rotate, while winds near the cloud tops can circle it in only a few days.
3 min read
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich carries a radar altimeter that times echoes from the ocean. The mission’s launch record leads to a deceptively simple question: how can a spacecraft moving hundreds of kilometres above Earth measure changes in sea level?
3 min read
NASA Earth Observatory
ESA launched three Swarm satellites to measure a field made mostly thousands of kilometres beneath our feet. Their instruments also detect magnetised rocks, currents in space and even moving seawater. To understand Earth’s magnetic field, they must separate those signals.
4 min read
NASA
Suomi NPP’s VIIRS instrument supplied the observations used for the 2012 Blue Marble shown here. The globe is a composite assembled from orbital swaths. Understanding that construction makes it more useful as evidence—and explains why it is different from one distant snapshot.
3 min read
NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Juno flew over a storm whose outline has been watched for generations. Its cameras could show the top. To measure what lay beneath, the mission needed microwaves, a radio link to Earth and two different ways of investigating hidden atmosphere.
4 min read
Enhanced image by Kevin M. Gill (CC BY), using NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS data · CC BY
Juno’s investigation of Jupiter’s interior begins with measurements made outside it. The spacecraft’s changing motion and magnetic environment constrain what lies beneath the clouds, where pressures prevent any conventional lander from surviving.
3 min read
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
