You may not know that nearly every year a handful of asteroids skim past Earth at distances that are startlingly close in astronomical terms.
Buzz Lightyear's 'to infinity and beyond' in Toy Story was meant as an impossible boast. Voyager, however, has given it unexpected meaning -- not because it will ever reach infinity, but because for it the beyond is already in progress
NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the 'habitable zone' around a sun-like star.
Rediff.com takes a look at spacecraft that have successfully made it to Mars.
Planet Nine, if it exists, is somewhere between 6-10 times the mass of Earth, and it may have an orbit that takes it around the sun once every 1,500 Earth years or more.
Led by a team of scientists of Indian-origin, NASA's Curiosity rover has found new evidence of water on Mars, indicating that the planet most like Earth in the solar system was suitable for microbial life.
Since its August 2012 landing inside Mars' Gale Crater, Curiosity has been studying the planet's ancient and modern environments.
The solar-powered spacecraft which left Earth five years ago finally reached its destination and entered into Jupiter's orbit.
Researchers at the University of Arizona in US imaged the picture of the planet residing in a gap in LkCa1's disk, despite the disk's considerable distance from Earth and its gaseous, dusty atmosphere.
Scientists have recorded haunting sounds cast by Jupiter's auroras, captured by NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft during its first full orbit around the king of planets.
The researchers, led by Matias Jones of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, used the 1.5 m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and the 2.2 m telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, and the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian telescope in Australia.
Brown dwarfs are thought to be the missing link between planets and stars, with masses up to 80 times that of Jupiter.
The colour image shows atmospheric features on Jupiter, including the famous Great Red Spot, and three of the massive planet's four largest moons.
Curiosity has detected traces of nitrogen on Mars surface, adding evidence that the red planet could have once supported life.
No spacecraft has ever ventured so close to the planet before, NASA said.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mars rover Curiosity has made the first definitive detection of organic molecules, the building blocks of all known forms of terrestrial life, on the surface of the Red Planet.
"We have been able to detect NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Indian Space Research Organisation's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in lunar orbit with ground-based radar," said Marina Brozovic, a radar scientist at JPL and principal investigator for the test project.
The presence of phosphine in Venus's thick atmosphere has revived the age-old question: Are we alone?
