A decade ago this week, NASA’s New Horizons mission snapped the first-ever close-up image of Pluto. The awe-inspiring portrait of the dwarf planet featured a heart-shaped plane of frozen nitrogen and ...

July 15, 2025, TUCSON, Ariz. – Orbiting in the outskirts of the Solar System is a mysterious object moving in rhythm with Neptune, according to a new paper published in the Planetary Science Journal.

July 15, 2025, TUCSON, Ariz. – The United Nations General Assembly agreed in 2021 to create International Moon Day, which celebrates the anniversary of the first landing by humans on the Moon on 20 ...

June 26, 2025, TUCSON, Ariz. – June 30 is Asteroid Day, the United Nations sanctioned day of public awareness of the importance of asteroids. Asteroid Day is observed on the anniversary of the Siberia ...

June 26, 2025, TUCSON, Ariz. – After nearly 20 years of operations, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO for short, is on a roll, performing a new maneuver to squeeze even more science out of ...

Now, $18.8 billion may sound like a lot of money. But NASA represents less than half of one percent of government spending. Thus, cutting NASA by this much will not significantly change the national ...

The march of the planets around the Sun may seem interminable, but new research suggests that the likelihood of another star in our galaxy passing by and disrupting our Solar System is slightly higher ...

Centaurs are mysterious icy small-bodies that are neither purely comets nor purely inactive asteroids, but they all orbit the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune in unstable orbits.

Ancient river valleys carved less than 3 billion years ago during Mars’ Early Amazonian Epoch dissect the flanks of the Martian volcano Alba Mons. To understand Mars’ more recent geologic and ...

Religion and science can sometimes feel at odds, to the chagrin of Grace Wolf-Chase, a Planetary Science Institute senior scientist and senior education and communication specialist who is also a ...

Planetary Science Institute scientists have converged in the lab, trying to decipher the mineral composition of dust. Not just any dust, but rather a simulated sample of Mercury’s surface, created as ...

April 30, 2025, TUCSON, Ariz.— The Planetary Science Institute, along with a coalition of leading space industry organizations, scientific societies and public advocacy groups are submitting a joint ...