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Scientists using the huge telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano have discovered the world's most obvious space joke. "Uranus smells like farts" is an actual, and correct, headline making the rounds ...

Scientists face a desperate race against time after it was confirmed that the Rosetta probe Philae is stuck on its side on comet 67P with two legs on the ground and one stuck in the air. In a press conference Esa has revealed they aren't quite sure where Philae is on the surface but it is thought to have either fallen into a cave or next to a cliff in darkness based on images returned from the surface. With limited access to sunlight, and only a maximum of 30 hours of charge in its battery, European scientists must now attempt...

The European Space Agency’s Philae lander has made space history by successfully reaching the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The landing, which took place at 11.03 AM ET, was accompanied by rapturous scenes at the ESA’s control room in Darmstadt, Germany. Philae is the first probe to land on a comet. …

BREAKING NEWS: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY'S TINY PHILAE LANDER (inset within artist's conception) makes history, landing on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko billions of miles away and traveling at speeds of up to 84,000 mph.

Aerojet, a GenCorp company, celebrates NASA's recent announcement that Voyager 1 has reached a point at the edge of our solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind. Now approximately 10.8 billion miles from the sun, Voyager 1's passage through the heliosheath, the turbulent outer shell of the sun's sphere of influence, and the spacecraft's upcoming departure from our solar system, mark a major milestone as it will become mankind's first interstellar probe. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of...

Thirty years ago, NASA scientists noticed that two of their spacecraft, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, were veering off course slightly, as if subject to a mysterious, unknown force. In 1998, the wider scientific community got wind of that veering—termed the Pioneer anomaly—and took aim at it with incessant, mind-blowingly detailed scrutiny that has since raised it to the physics equivalent of cult status. Now, though, after spawning close to 1000 academic papers, numerous international conferences, and many entire scientific careers, this beloved cosmic mystery may be on its way out. Slava Turyshev, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

A European spacecraft zoomed by past a mysterious asteroid Saturday to take the first-ever close look at the space rock while flying more than 282 million miles from Earth. The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta space probe flew past the asteroid Lutetia, an object discovered in 1852 that appeared only as a bright speck in the sky to astronomers until today. The first new photos of the asteroid revealed Lutetia to be a lumpy rock with a potato-like appearance. Rosetta was about 1,900 miles (3,100 km) from the asteroid at its closest approach. The enigmatic space rock, which is about...

NASA's plucky Voyager 2 spacecraft has hit a long-haul operations milestone - operating continuously for 12,000 days. For nearly 33 years, the venerable spacecraft has been returning data about the giant outer planets, and the characteristics and interaction of solar wind between and beyond the planets. Among its many findings, Voyager 2 discovered Neptune's Great Dark Spot and its 450-meter-per-second (1,000-mph) winds. The two Voyager spacecraft have been the longest continuously operating spacecraft in deep space. Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, when Jimmy Carter was president. Voyager 1 launched about two weeks later on Sept. 5. The two...

One flip of a bit in the memory of an onboard computer appears to have caused the change in the science data pattern returning from Voyager 2, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday, May 17. A value in a single memory location was changed from a 0 to a 1. On May 12, engineers received a full memory readout from the flight data system computer, which formats the data to send back to Earth. They isolated the one bit in the memory that had changed, and they recreated the effect on a computer at JPL. They found the...

The plume is seen as an umbrella-shaped feature in the long exposure image to the right Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back images of a huge volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io.A massive dust plume, estimated to be 150m (490ft) high, can be seen erupting from the Tvashtar volcano on Io. On Wednesday, the US probe flew by Jupiter, using the planet's gravity to boost its speed, reducing the travel time to its ultimate target of Pluto. New Horizons also took photos of the icy moons Europa and Ganymede in the run-up to its encounter with Jupiter. Turning...

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - New images from the Cassini space probe show Saturn being adorned by a 60,000-kilometer (37,000-mile) "string of pearls", NASA scientists announced. A statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said the "pearls" seen in a stunning infra-red image were actually clearings in Saturn's deep cloud system. It is the first time such large cloud clearings have been observed around Saturn, indicating that they may be a result of a large planetary cloud formation that might encircle the whole planet. Cassini was launched in October 1997, carrying with it the...

Scientists study pieces from NASA's Genesis probe after it crashed into the Utah desert in 2004. LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A report released Tuesday blamed a design flaw for the 2004 crash of a NASA space probe carrying solar wind atoms back to Earth and criticized engineers for failing to detect the error. The 231-page document prepared by independent investigators found that gravity switches on the Genesis probe designed to trigger the deployment of its parachutes were installed backward. Genesis' chutes never opened and it slammed into the Utah desert on September 8, 2004, after a three-year mission collecting...