Ceres

Impact cratering happens on every solid body in the solar system. In fact, it is the dominant process affecting the surfaces on most extraterrestrial bodies today.

New astronomical measurements in the infrared range have led to the identification of a heretofore unknown class of asteroids. An international research team including geoscientists from Heidelberg University has succeeded in characterizing these small planets using infrared spectroscopy.

In the coming years, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will send two robotic missions to explore Jupiter's icy moon Europa. These are none other than NASA's Europa Clipper and the ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which will launch in 2024, and 2023 (respectively). Once they arrive by the 2030s, they will study Europa's surface with a series of flybys to determine if its interior […]

We have now discovered 30,039 near-Earth asteroids in the solar system—rocky bodies orbiting the sun on a path that brings them close to Earth's orbit. The majority of these were discovered in the last decade, showing how our ability to detect potentially risky asteroids is rapidly improving.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Subject to memorization in school and known as the definitive planetary lineup, Pluto was included in the list until the International Astronomical Union determined it did not meet qualifications in 2006.

For a long time, our view of Ceres was fuzzy, said Scott King, a geoscientist in the Virginia Tech College of Science. A dwarf planet and the largest body found in the asteroid belt—the region between Jupiter and Mars speckled with hundreds of thousands of asteroids—Ceres had no distinguishable surface features in existing telescopic observations from Earth.

When Sicilian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres in 1801, he thought it was a planet. Astronomers didn't know about asteroids at that time. Now we know there's an enormous quantity of them, primarily residing in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Since 2002, the United States National Research Council (NRC) has released a publication that identifies objectives and makes recommendations for science missions for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other government agencies for the next decade. These reports, appropriately named Planetary Science Decadal Surveys, help inform future NASA missions that address the mysteries that persist […]

The third-largest crater on the dwarf planet Ceres was geologically active at least once many millions of years after its formation. In a recent study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen, the University of Münster (WWU) and the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) in […]

A trio of researchers from the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, Université de Lyon and Sorbonne Université, respectively, has made the first sighting of a quadruple asteroid system—an asteroid with three moons orbiting around it. In their paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, Anthony Berdeu, Maud Langlois and Frédéric Vachier, describe how they […]