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Cassini offers best-ever view of Saturn’s rings

30 January 2017 Stephen Clark

A sequence of images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft last month are the most detailed pictures ever taken of Saturn’s famous rings, revealing complex, unexplained bands and the movements of dozens of tiny icy moonlets spinning around the planet.

NASA resumes JWST vibration testing

25 January 2017 Stephen Clark

Vibration testing on the James Webb Space Telescope, the multibillion-dollar successor to Hubble, has resumed after engineers traced a problem that cropped up last month to a restraint holding part of the observatory’s giant segmented mirror in place for launch.

NuSTAR finds new clues to ‘chameleon supernova’

25 January 2017 Stephen Clark

“We’re made of star stuff,” astronomer Carl Sagan famously said. Nuclear reactions that happened in ancient stars generated much of the material that makes up our bodies, our planet and our solar system. When stars explode in violent deaths called supernovae, those newly formed elements escape and spread out in the universe.

Future of asteroid deflection mission to be decided soon

20 January 2017 Stephen Clark

Decisions on the future of a joint robotic mission between NASA and the European Space Agency to demonstrate the ability to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth have been put off until later this year after European governments declined to fully fund their part of the project in December.

Skywatchers: Get your Iridium flare fix now

16 January 2017 Stephen Clark

The launch of the first batch of new-generation Iridium communications satellites Saturday marked the beginning of the end for the predictable, spectacular flares of reflected sunlight produced by the old-design craft, a favorite of amateur skywatchers for nearly two decades.

Hubble captures ‘shadow play’ caused by possible planet

10 January 2017 Stephen Clark

Searching for planets around other stars is a tricky business. They’re so small and faint that it’s hard to spot them. But a possible planet in a nearby stellar system may be betraying its presence in a unique way: by a shadow that is sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding a young star.

Cassini offers best-ever view of Saturn’s rings

NASA resumes JWST vibration testing

NuSTAR finds new clues to ‘chameleon supernova’

Future of asteroid deflection mission to be decided soon

Skywatchers: Get your Iridium flare fix now

Hubble captures ‘shadow play’ caused by possible planet

NASA’s NEOWISE mission spies one comet, maybe two

Astronomers team up to give first look at birthplaces of most current stars

Cassini sees tilted terminator of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

New Kepler planet could be Earth’s closest cousin yet