Planetary Science

An out-of-this-world weather report from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals how clouds move across a giant planet hundreds of light-years from Earth

To build its moon base, NASA needs a lot of power

NASA’s Mars rovers have found traces of minerals akin to those that make up precious gems on Earth. But their appearance and abundance on Mars is likely very different, experts say

An oddity among exoplanets, L 98-59 d is (so far) in a class all its own, but astronomers expect powerful new telescopes will eventually reveal more like it

The problem with Pluto isn’t its planetary or nonplanetary status—it’s our insistence on declaring the world must be one or the other

The NASA administrator’s latest remarks in support of reexamining Pluto’s status come 20 years after the orb was downgraded to a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union

Rather than slowly condensing over millions of years, the first building blocks of Earth and other planets may have formed rapidly in a chaotic disk at the dawn of the solar system

All the sun’s planets are oddballs. But some are more so than others

Observations by the Mars Express orbiter reveal rapid changes on the Red Planet’s surface from windblown volcanic ash

The triumph of NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in a half-century is a reminder of what the moon really means for Earth—and why we’re going back

NASA plans to launch a wildly ambitious nuclear-powered octocopter to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2028

A hidden milestone lurks in the U.S.’s Artemis-focused lunar ambitions—the nation’s first-ever successful robotic moon rover