Solar system

An almost unkillable fungal strain isolated from NASA’s ultrasterile clean rooms hints at “critical gaps” in interplanetary quarantine

The Kardashev scale is an interesting but flawed gauge of a civilization’s growth

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

After all these years, Dream Chaser—a commercial U.S. space plane—is still chasing the dream of spacecraft that can fly from orbit to airports

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

Medieval poets, including a Japanese noble, provided key descriptions to track down solar events

Experts found that the White House budget request for the upcoming fiscal year could defund 54 NASA science missions, including a spacecraft currently studying Jupiter and two planned Venus missions

China is working toward its own moon landing. Could it put astronauts on the moon before NASA’s Artemis program does?

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