Sending a spacecraft to the underexplored planet Uranus is at the top of many planetary scientists’ wish lists. But which spacecraft-mounted instruments would be most useful for answering questions about the mysterious ice giant?

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Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists studying the inner main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson have found that its rotation wobbles. Rather than rolling through space in a steady pattern, Donaldjohanson turns on two axes, rotating end over end once every 10.5 Earth days while wobbling around its horizontal axis every 26.5 days. The findings are published in the […]

A new study of two supernova remnants, the debris left behind after stars explode, suggests the explosions came from stellar siblings that once orbited each other. The first star’s detonation sent its binary companion hurtling through space, and then, after traveling for thousands of years, the surviving star blew up, too.

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Millions of light-years away, millions of years ago, a star exploded. In this violent process, it ejected incredible amounts of mass, including carbon, nitrogen and oxygen—the building blocks of life. In fact, the star may have produced elements on the periodic table all the way up to iron. As it exploded, it spewed these elements […]

Billions of years ago, environmental conditions on Mars were significantly more hospitable than they are today. Our neighboring planet was likely warm, humid and surrounded by a dense atmosphere. Whether simple microorganisms could have evolved at that time remains an open question.

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