Original reports, explanations and news from their publishers.
Juno’s close observations and Galileo’s earlier tour show why a mission to Jupiter is also a mission through a system of moons, rings and charged particles. Each moon follows a different geological history inside the same gravitational and magnetic environment.
3 min read
Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Alain Mirón Velázquez © CC BY · CC BY
From Earth, Saturn’s rings look like smooth bands. Cassini revealed particles moving at different speeds, waves driven by moons and small objects throwing long shadows. Their patterns explain how a disk of ice can become a measuring instrument.
4 min read
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Cassini followed the six-sided pattern around Saturn’s north pole as northern sunlight returned. The hexagon belongs to an atmospheric jet, with clouds tracing a structure that can persist while the gas itself moves.
3 min read
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University
Cassini–Huygens travelled to Saturn as an orbiter and a Titan entry probe. Their investigation reached beyond the planet’s clouds: jets from Enceladus and lakes on Titan showed how different two neighbouring moons could be.
3 min read
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Voyager 2 saw Uranus with its south polar region facing the Sun in 1986. Decades later, telescopes watch the northern hemisphere approach summer. The difference follows from an almost sideways spin axis and a year longer than a human lifetime.
4 min read
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Voyager 2 supplied Uranus’s only close spacecraft survey. Its measurements, combined with later observations, test a planet often called an ice giant. The name describes a compositional family; it does not mean a frozen solid sphere.
3 min read
NASA/JPL
Voyager 2 discovered Uranus’s unusual magnetic environment in 1986. Reanalysis decades later showed why the conditions during that short encounter matter: the solar wind may have compressed the magnetosphere shortly before the spacecraft arrived.
2 min read
NASA/JPL
Voyager 2 photographed Neptune’s Great Dark Spot in 1989. Later Hubble observations found that feature gone and other vortices appearing elsewhere. The comparison turns a famous planetary “landmark” into a study of changing weather.
3 min read
NASA/JPL/STScI
Voyager 2 found a cold Neptune with fast winds and enormous storms in 1989. At about 30 times Earth’s distance from the Sun, the planet receives little sunlight. Its atmosphere also draws on energy escaping from a deep interior.
4 min read
NASA/JPL
Voyager 2 reached Triton in August 1989 and photographed an unexpectedly active, icy world. Its orbit had already supplied a different clue: Neptune’s largest moon travels around the planet in the opposite direction to the planet’s rotation.
3 min read
NASA/JPL/USGS
ESA’s PLATO mission will look for planets by measuring changes in the light of their stars. Follow one possible signal from a dark silhouette to a repeatable orbit—and see which questions the dip cannot answer.
5 min read
ESA · ESA Standard Licence
Move outward from the Sun’s visible surface and the temperature first falls, then climbs to more than a million degrees. Parker Solar Probe flies through this thin, hot atmosphere to find where its energy comes from.
4 min read
NASA/Goddard/SDO
