Planetary science

172 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 2 of 3.

61. How much would we struggle to survive on our own planet's past?This NASA panel explores why ancient Earth would seem incredibly inhospitable to us today, and how studying its extreme history helps scientists identify potentially habitable pla…
62. How Mars serves as a vital rehearsal for deep space explorationBefore reaching its target, NASA's Psyche spacecraft used Mars as a high-stakes practice run. By performing a gravity assist and testing specialized instruments around the red pla…
63. NASA's ambitious roadmap for Mars involves testing deep-space hardware and sample retrievalReaching the Red Planet requires more than just a powerful rocket. From testing the Orion spacecraft to managing the medical realities of long-duration travel, NASA is navigating …
64. How to survive the intense heat of Venus by surfing its atmosphereTo study Venus, the EnVision spacecraft must first endure a grueling two-year journey. By using a technique called aerobraking, the van-sized probe will skim the planet's thick, h…
65. After a decade of discovery, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft prepares for its final Mercury impact.Launched in 2004, the MESSENGER probe spent over ten years navigating the inner solar system. After orbiting Mercury for four years and capturing hundreds of thousands of images, …
66. Why studying 'dead' planets is the key to finding lifeTo find life beyond Earth, scientists aren't just looking for habitable worlds; they are studying the ones that failed. By examining why Venus became a furnace and Mars a desert, …
67. The final descent of a pioneer into the Venusian atmosphereAfter eight years of uncovering the mysteries of our nearest planetary neighbour, ESA's Venus Express prepared for a dramatic end. From mapping surface topography through thick cl…
68. Unveiling the mysteries of Earth's mysterious sister planetThis video explores the findings from the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission. By orbiting the planet directly, the spacecraft has provided scientists with a unique pers…
69. Navigating the extreme terrain of Eve in Kerbal Space ProgramJoin Scott Manley as he attempts to explore the surface of Eve. This episode follows a mission to reach the planet's highest mountain using a submersible and the EESS launch vehic…
70. Preparing for the historic flyby of the dwarf planet PlutoAs the New Horizons spacecraft approaches its primary target, NASA officials provide a critical status update on the mission's instruments and spacecraft health ahead of the histo…
71. Evidence suggests liquid water still flows across the Martian surfaceFor years, scientists suspected that liquid water might still move on the Red Planet. New data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided the strongest evidence yet, rev…
72. Mars is losing its atmosphere at a rate of one quarter pound per secondThe Red Planet is slowly bleeding into the void. NASA's MAVEN mission has revealed that the solar wind is stripping away Martian gas at a steady, relentless pace. This atmospheric…
73. How solar winds stripped the Martian atmosphere and changed its climate foreverThis video explores how NASA's MAVEN mission quantified the rate at which Mars loses gas to space. By analyzing argon isotopes, scientists have uncovered the mechanism behind the …
74. What lies ahead for the European Space Agency in 2016This ESA TV overview previews a pivotal year for space exploration, ranging from the depths of Earth observation to the dusty plains of Mars.
75. How a single spacecraft uses a polar orbit to unveil Jupiter's secretsTo study the King of Planets, NASA's Juno must dance around a lethal radiation belt. By following a north-south path, the orbiter avoids deadly particles while peering deep into t…
76. Venus: The enigmatic neighbor hiding secrets beneath a crushing atmosphereFor centuries, Venus has served as a mirror for our own world, yet it remains one of our most inhospitable neighbors. After nearly twenty years without a U.S. mission to its surfa…
77. Venus: the enigmatic neighbor that holds the key to our place in the universeFor nearly twenty years, the United States has sent no missions to our sister planet. Yet, observations of Venus—from the ancient heliocentric models of Galileo to modern climate …
78. Why has our closest planetary neighbor been left in the shadows?While robotic explorers aggressively map the red deserts of Mars, our sister planet, Venus, has faced a period of relative neglect. Despite its profound importance to our understa…
79. How a solar-powered detective is stripping away Jupiter's cloudsFor years, Jupiter’s true nature remained hidden behind a veil of storms. Now, NASA's Juno spacecraft is piercing that haze, using a unique polar orbit to reveal a world that defi…
80. How saltation triggers the massive seasonal dust storms on MarsThis video captures the Anemoi4 team from Duisburg Essen University conducting the WINDMILL experiment. They used a parabolic flight in a Zero-G aircraft to study the specific con…
81. A dual-orbiter odyssey to the solar system's most extreme furnaceFor eight years, BepiColombo has trekked through the inner Solar System. Now, it faces its final hurdle: navigating the intense heat of Mercury. This joint European and Japanese e…
82. From robotic Martian explorers to the next generation of deep space observatoriesNASA’s reach extends from the frozen cracks of Antarctica to the far reaches of our solar system. While robotic pioneers study the history of Mars, new telescopes are being prepar…
83. The ancient dust of asteroid Bennu may hold the recipe for EarthNASA's OSIRIS-REx mission has returned a piece of the primordial solar system. By analyzing the isotopic makeup of Bennu's regolith, scientists are uncovering whether this asteroi…
84. The missing molecule: NASA solves a long-standing mystery on Saturn's moonWhile Titan's landscape of methane rain and hydrocarbon lakes feels Earthlike, its chemistry has always held a strange gap. This video explores how NASA's Cassini spacecraft final…
85. Why Mars lost its atmosphere to the solar windBefore it launches from Cape Canaveral, NASA’s MAVEN mission prepares to decode the history of the Red Planet. This briefing explains how the spacecraft will investigate the atmos…
86. How did Mars transform from a watery world into a dry desert?Explore the mystery of the Red Planet's atmospheric loss. This presentation by Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky examines how Mars evolved from a hospitable environment into th…
87. How the solar wind stripped Mars of its atmosphereNASA's MAVEN spacecraft is currently investigating the violent interaction between the Martian atmosphere and the solar wind. This video explains how these cosmic forces transform…
88. Did an ancient ocean once cover twenty percent of Mars?For decades, scientists have debated how much water the Red Planet lost over time. This video explores new isotopic measurements that reveal a much wetter Martian past than previo…
89. Why the Moon is constantly being reshaped by small impactsWhile the lunar surface looks static, new craters are regularly forming. This video explores how high-resolution imagery from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter allows scientists…
90. How did Mars lose its water and its life-sustaining atmosphere?NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is looking upward rather than downward to solve a planetary mystery. By observing how starlight changes as it passes through the Martian atmosphere, scient…
91. How astronauts learn to hunt for life across the solar systemThe European Space Agency is training astronauts to act as planetary geologists. This video explores how the Pangaea course prepares crews to identify significant rock samples and…
92. A rare look inside the cleanroom preparing for MercuryGo behind the scenes at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou to see the BepiColombo mission undergoing its final preparations for its journey to the inner Solar System.
93. A joint mission to explore the mysteries of MercuryWitness the launch of BepiColombo, a collaborative venture between ESA and JAXA designed to investigate the smallest and least understood planet in our inner solar system.
94. Is a bolide a flash in the sky or a world-ending impact?The term bolide is a linguistic chameleon. To an astronomer, it is an exceptionally bright, exploding meteor. To a geologist, it is a massive, crater-forming projectile capable of…
95. Beyond Earth: Could distant worlds be composed of mountains of solid diamond?While Earth is a silicate-oxygen world, theoretical carbon planets suggest a vastly different chemistry. These hypothetical spheres, potentially rich in graphite and diamond, woul…
96. Could these scorched, metallic worlds be the exposed cores of evaporated gas giants?Chthonian planets are a hypothetical class of celestial objects born from catastrophe. When a gas giant drifts too close to its host star, intense radiation strips away its hydrog…
97. What does it actually mean for a planet to clear its orbital neighbourhood?In 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined a planet by its ability to clear its orbital zone of other bodies. But what does this mean, and is it even possible? Scientis…
98. Why the definition of a planet is one of astronomy's most contentious debatesFor centuries, humanity viewed the heavens through a simple lens, counting seven planets. Today, the definition is a battlefield. When the discovery of Eris in 2005 challenged Plu…
99. Are we alone, or is the universe teeming with hidden Earth-like worlds?Searching for an Earth analog—a planet or moon with conditions similar to our own—is the holy grail of astrobiology. While we have yet to find a true twin, statistical models sugg…
100. We have yet to confirm a single exomoon, but the hunt is intensifying.An exomoon is a natural satellite orbiting an exoplanet or other non-stellar body. While none have been officially confirmed to date, astronomers are using innovative methods—from…
101. Beyond Earth, the solar system is a chaotic theater of swirling, alien stormsVortices are not just terrestrial weather events; they are a universal phenomenon. From the scorching upper atmosphere of Venus to the icy poles of Neptune, these spinning masses …
102. Why some moons in our solar system appear brighter than a perfect mirrorIn astronomy, geometric albedo measures how much light a celestial body reflects compared to an idealized, perfectly scattering disk. Surprisingly, some airless bodies like Saturn…
103. Why the search for alien life is focused on the Goldilocks zoneThe habitable zone is the orbital sweet spot around a star where conditions are just right for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. While it is our best lead in the search…
104. Could a planet made of iron be the ultimate cosmic cannonball?While Earth is a silicate world, the universe hides a rarer breed of planet: the iron-rich super-Mercury. These dense, metallic spheres lack the rocky mantles we take for granted,…
105. Earth is protected by a vast, comet-shaped magnetic bubble that sustains life itself.Our planet sits inside a dynamic, invisible shield called the magnetosphere. Generated by the churning of molten iron in Earth's core, this magnetic environment deflects solar rad…
106. The mantle is the hidden engine that defines the scale of our solar systemBeneath the thin crust of every terrestrial planet lies a massive, viscous layer of rock or ice. These mantles are the largest components of planetary bodies, driving geological e…
107. Millions of meteors strike our atmosphere daily, yet most remain entirely unseen by us.A meteor is a glowing streak created when a small body, often just a grain of sand, hits Earth's atmosphere at high speed. While these events occur constantly, most go unnoticed b…
108. Are asteroids lonely? Far from it, hundreds of minor planets have their own moons.We once thought of asteroids as solitary rocks drifting through the void. Today, we know that hundreds of minor planets host their own satellites, ranging from tiny moonlets to ma…
109. Mercury is essentially a giant cannonball with a massive, solid iron heart insideMercury has long puzzled scientists because its metallic core fills nearly 85 percent of the planet's volume. New analysis of gravity and spin data from the MESSENGER mission conf…
110. Planetary differentiation is the hidden engine that shaped Earth from a hot, chaotic sphere.Planets are not uniform lumps of rock. Through a process called differentiation, they sort their internal materials by density and chemical affinity. This thermal evolution, drive…
111. Why the search for life beyond Earth is moving beyond the classic habitable zoneThe traditional habitable zone is a convenient starting point, but it is far from the whole story. While we look for liquid water on planetary surfaces, life may thrive in hidden,…
112. Planetary science reveals how our solar system formed and where life might exist elsewherePlanetary science explores the history and evolution of celestial bodies, from rocky planets to distant asteroids. By analyzing the chemistry of unfamiliar worlds and mapping zone…
113. Are these ancient space rocks the secret to how our entire solar system began?Planetesimals are the building blocks of planets, solid objects formed 4.6 billion years ago. Acting as cosmic time capsules, these remnants of the early solar system offer a pris…
114. Is Earth a cosmic fluke, or is complex life common throughout the universe?The Rare Earth hypothesis suggests that the evolution of complex life requires an improbable sequence of astrophysical and geological events. While the universe is vast, this theo…
115. Trillions of rogue planets wander the Milky Way, outnumbering stars six to oneMost planets are not tethered to a sun. Instead, these galactic nomads drift through the void, invisible to traditional telescopes. By bending space-time, these rogue worlds revea…
116. Beyond the atmosphere: how artificial satellites transformed our view of the universePlacing instruments in space liberated astronomy from the distorting veil of Earth's atmosphere. Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, artificial satellites have provided the stabi…
117. Why some comets choose to dance with the sun and risk total destructionSungrazing comets are celestial daredevils that swing within 850,000 miles of the sun. This proximity subjects them to intense radiation, solar winds, and crushing gravitational s…
118. Super-Earths are a diverse class of planets that do not exist in our solar system.These mysterious worlds are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, ranging up to ten times our planet's mass. Because we have no local examples to study, their true nature re…
119. Celestial hitchhikers: how small bodies share orbits with planets and moonsTrojans are small celestial bodies that share the orbit of a larger object, tethered to stable gravitational pockets known as Lagrange points. While Jupiter is famous for hosting …
120. Why bringing a piece of an asteroid back to Earth changes planetary science foreverRemote sensing can only tell us so much about the building blocks of our solar system. By physically retrieving pristine material from the asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx mission a…

All of Space Open the feed Latest A–Z