The NASA spacecraft Dawn has spent more than seven years traveling across the Solar System to intercept the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Now in orbit around Ceres, the probe has…

From 2009 to 2013, ESA’s Planck satellite took measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), radiation that originated approximately13 billion years ago, around 380,000 years after the Big…

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is approaching its historic orbit insertion at Ceres, which will happen on Friday, March 6th. Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of agriculture and harvests. Ceres is…

The MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever 3-D view of the deep Universe - in just 27 hours. By taking very long exposure pictures of regions of the sky,…

On Feb. 11, ESA’s Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV), atmospheric reentry demonstrator, successfully completed its first test flight, ending with a splashdown into the Pacific Ocean and one…

Known as the ‘Heart of Voh’ for its proximity to the Voh commune, a mining colony controlled by the French, these Mangrove swamps along the coast of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean…

The mysterious, distant and yet unexplored by any probe world of Pluto and its moons, located on the edge of our solar system, is about to get visited. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on July 14…

Balloons are common at childrens' birthday parties - we can thank Professor Michael Faraday of The Royal Institution for inventing "caoutchoucs" - but ever since the Montgolfier brothers took their…

By Monica Grady, The Open University Landing a spacecraft on a celestial body, whether it be the moon, Mars or a comet, is not easy. The European Space Agency found out the hard way in 2003 when its…

The Beagle-2 Mars lander,hitched a ride on ESA’s Mars Express mission in 2003 and was released from the mothership on December 19th with a planned landing 6 days later.   Then it was lost. Mars…