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A rock came off the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in 2008. Cataloged as DOM 08006, for the Dominion Range where it was collected, it is one of the most primitive meteorites ever recovered, a lump that…
Follow the Moon through a month and its brightness does something that simple arithmetic cannot account for. It climbs as the lit crescent fattens, roughly in step with the growing area of sunlit…
Line up the rocky part of Earth against the Sun, element for element, and most of the list matches. Then you reach the elements that boil off easily, the ones that need somewhere cool and quiet to…
In March 1974, as Mariner 10 swept past Mercury for the first time, its instruments recorded something nobody had ordered: bursts of energetic electrons, arriving in gusts, around a planet that had…
For decades, every thermometer pointed at Io read the same thing: its skin. Infrared cameras aboard Galileo, and more recently Juno's own JIRAM instrument, catch the glow of the surface and the lava…
For decades the recipe for an aurora seemed to demand something Mars simply does not have: a planet-sized magnetic field. Earth's aurora is fed by one. So is Jupiter's, and Saturn's. Mars lost its…
Earth has almost no memory of its own violent childhood. Plate tectonics keeps recycling the crust, erasing the scars of the asteroid barrage that battered every young world in the inner Solar…
Every so often a meteorite punches through the dust of the Martian midlatitudes and leaves something startling behind: a splash of bright white ice at the bottom of a fresh crater, visible from orbit…
Ryleigh Davis was not looking for clay. She and her colleagues at Caltech had aimed the James Webb Space Telescope at Neptune's rings and three of its small inner moons to answer a plainer question:…
Kallichore is not the kind of moon that makes it onto posters. Less than four kilometers across, it circles Jupiter at hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth, one of dozens of small, dark…