Signal
16 articles covering "planetary-science"
New 3D simulations matched against 1990s Magellan imagery suggest some Venusian rift valleys are widening 3 to 10 centimeters a year, indicating recent tectonic activity.
Science paper details the bilobate asteroid Lucy flew past in 2025: a slow end-over-end tumble, a 26.5-day wobble, and iron-rich clays that hint at ancient liquid water.
After a year in transit, Tianwen-2 has rendezvoused with the tiny near-Earth asteroid and will map it before attempting to collect a sample for return to Earth.
NASA declared MAVEN unrecoverable on June 3, 2026, six months after the orbiter went silent and was found spinning at 2.7 rpm.
James Webb observations show Saturn's apparent spin change is driven by a feedback loop in which its aurora heats the atmosphere, generating winds and currents that sustain the aurora.
A Nature Communications study argues Kamo'oalewa likely came from the Flora asteroid family, not the Moon, weeks before Tianwen-2 reaches its target.
A Science Advances study using Webb data finds Nereid's icy composition rules out a Kuiper Belt origin, making it the sole intact remnant of Neptune's primordial moon system.
ESA's Mars Express has released a new HRSC image of Shalbatana Vallis, a 1,300 km equatorial channel that was carved when groundwater erupted onto the Martian surface roughly 3.5 billion years ago.
A Mura et al. preprint using Juno's JIRAM data argues prior single-band thermal estimates of Io's paterae missed the colder crust that dominates output, lifting one lava lake's estimate from 7 GW to 80 GW.
A Nature Communications paper published April 21 reports that the first off-Earth TMAH thermochemolysis experiment, performed on a clay-rich sample in Gale crater, expanded Mars's known organic inventory and detected a candidate nitrogen heterocycle for the first time on the surface.
A new Nature study identifies a continental-shelf-like band wrapping the Martian northern hemisphere, suggesting a stable ocean once covered roughly a third of the planet's surface.
The TOI-201 system hosts a super-Earth, a warm Jupiter, and a record-setting brown dwarf whose gravitational interplay drives orbital shifts observable on human timescales — within 200 years its planets will stop transiting.