Solar System

The top news about what's going on in the cosmic neighborhood—from planet nine to the sun, and everything in between.

Latest in Solar System

a red moon due to a total lunar eclipse

March skygazing: a full blood moon rises and new season

Handing winding a series of brass gears that comprise an interplanetary clock device

What time is it on Mars? This analog ‘Interplanetary Clock’ can tell you.

Left: An artist’s drawing of Earth’s magnetic field (blue lines) interacting with the Sun’s charged particles (yellow lines). The Earth’s magnetosphere (orange crescent) is created by Earth’s magnetic field. It deflects those particles like an umbrella. Right: NASA MMS mission observations like those volunteers would see while participating in the Space Umbrella project.

Help NASA prepare for the next solar storm disaster

These observations by NASA’s SPHEREx show the infrared light emitted by the dust, water, organic molecules, and carbon dioxide contained within comet 3I/ATLAS’s coma during the mission’s December 2025 campaign.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is leaving the solar system with a dramatic light show

Candidates for Luna 9's landing site. Credit: Pinault et al.

Astronomers close in on long-lost Soviet lunar lander

Seed cone of the evergreen Norway spruce tree, Picea abies.

No, trees can’t anticipate a solar eclipse

an illustration of an asteroid

World’s largest digital camera spots massive asteroid

By Laura Baisas

a full moon rises over a snowy mountain

January stargazing: A supermoon, asteroid, and one very large planet

a telescope image of an oval shaped star cluster

Hubble spots massive sandwich-shaped blob in deep space

By Mack DeGeurin

This view of a region called Syrtis Major is from the 100,000th image captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its HiRISE camera. Over nearly 20 years, HiRISE has helped scientists understand how the Red Planet’s surface is constantly changing.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snaps 100,000th image

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander. This rendering does not have the new LightPort, but it will sit atop the lander in future models.

Wireless power grids head to the moon

By Mack DeGeurin

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Nov. 30, with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument.

Hubble Space Telescope caught a second glimpse of comet 3I/ATLAS

Nov. 19 image obtained by Pau Montplet from Breda (Girona) using a C6 telescope at f:7. Original image is in the lower right inset, while a false color 0.6º wide Larson-Sekanina filtered image at 9º shows 3I in negative to remark the antitail pointing to the subsolar point, and several jets getting out from the false nucleus. Two additional arrows mark wavy structures in the jets. Image resolution is 0.7 arcsec/pix. Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2511.19112

Infamous 3I/ATLAS comet is covered in ice volcanoes, surprising astronomers

Martian landscape taken by rover

How to tell time on Mars

Comet passing above auroras on Earth

ISS astronauts photograph two comets soaring over Earth’s auroras

Artist illustration of satellite above Earth's auroras monitoring the sun

Geomagnetic superstorm shrunk Earth’s protective plasmasphere

This artist’s impression shows a coronal mass ejection (CME) around another star.

A star unleashed a planet-destroying flare

Comet 3I/ATLAS streaks across a dense star field in this image captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South at Cerro Pachón in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab. This image is composed of exposures taken through four filters — red, green, blue and ultraviolet. As exposures are taken, the comet remains fixed in the center of the telescope’s field of view. However, the positions of the background stars change relative to the comet, causing them to appear as colorful streaks in the final image. See a version of the image where the stars have been “frozen” here. These observations of Comet 3I/ATLAS were conducted during a Shadow the Scientists program hosted by NSF NOIRLab. A full recording of the session can be found here.

3I/Atlas isn’t deep space aliens and didn’t ‘change color’

Dark lines of discolored dust on slopes of Martian mountain

On Mars, meteorites can cause miles-long dust slides

Artist illustration of two ESCAPADE satellites orbiting Mars

Meet Blue and Gold: NASA’s first twin satellites bound for Mars