The Harrowing Descent to Mars
Video: Curiosity Rover’s View of the Harrowing Descent to Mars On Aug. 6, NASA pulled off an incredible feat, landing its Curiosity rover safely on Mars through a series of incredible complex maneuvers...
View ArticleLast Transit of Venus of Your Lifetime
This year, our list of most popular stories was dominated by 2012's most famous robot, a long-sought subatomic particle, 10 billion exoplanets and an amazing new spider species. Above: Watch Live: Last...
View ArticleRock Type Never Before Seen on Mars
Curiosity Rover Finds Rock Type That’s Never Been Seen on Mars Just about anything a robot does on another planet is awesome, but apparently finding a kind of rock that's never been seen on that planet...
View ArticleHuman Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase If you could escape the human time scale for a moment, and regard evolution from the perspective of deep time, in which the last 10,000 years are a short...
View ArticleHow the Higgs Boson Could Break Physics
How the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Could Break Physics In the run-up to the announcement of the Higgs boson discovery, we wondered what finding the elusive particle would mean for physics. Turns out...
View Article10 Billion Earth-Like Exoplanets
10 Billion Earth-Like Planets May Exist in Our Galaxy Our readers love exoplanets, and one or more of them usually turns up in our top stories list. This year, 10 billion of them did. On Mar. 28, we...
View ArticleCuriosity’s High-Res Photo Looks Like Earth
Curiosity’s Latest High-Res Photo Looks Like Earth To round out our top 10, why not another story sent to us from Mars by Curiosity? The fourth rover story on the list from Aug. 14 features a high-res...
View ArticleSpaceX Gets Real
3. Private Spaceflight Takes Off … For Real This Time The private space industry has been making noise for a while now, signing up willing customers for suborbital flights and casting reality shows to...
View ArticleExoMars Disappointment
6. A Disappointing Budget Not all was exciting new discoveries and dramatic Mars landings in the world of space exploration: The proposed FY2013 NASA budget put a damper on scientific successes by...
View ArticleGRAIL Lunar Gravity Mapping
5. The Holy GRAIL of Lunar Gravity Mapping The GRAIL mission comprised twin spacecraft – with two of the best names in recent memory, Ebb and Flow – tasked with mapping the Moon’s gravitational field...
View ArticleSad Farewells
7. Departures This year saw the departures of two giants in American space exploration history. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and a passionate advocate of science education, died in...
View ArticleSpace Shuttle Victory Lap
8. Space Shuttle Fly-Overs With NASA’s manned spaceflight workhorses –- the Space Shuttles –- out of commission to make way for the Space Launch System, the agency moved the remaining orbiters to...
View ArticleDec 28, 2012
Sparkling Galaxy Reveals Black Hole The spiral galaxy NGC 3627 is located about 30 million light years from Earth. This composite image includes X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue),...
View ArticleDec 29, 2012
Tri-Color Sun This composite image combines EIT images from three wavelengths (171Å, 195Å and 284Å) into one that reveals solar features unique to each wavelength. Since the EIT images come to us from...
View ArticleCuriosity Rover's First Self Portraits
Curiosity Rover’s Self-Portraits Transport You to Mars We've seen much more impressive images sent back to Earth from Curiosity, but on Aug. 17, this collection of some of the first photos from Mars...
View ArticleEnvisat's 10th Anniversary
10 Years of Gorgeous Images of Earth From Space On Mar. 1, the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite passed its 10 year mark after more than 50,000 trips around the Earth. We celebrated the day...
View ArticleSolar-Storm-Fueled Auroras
Solar-Storm-Fueled Auroras Make for Awesome Backyard Photography This year, the sun began waking up after several quiet years and bombarded the Earth with two consecutive solar storms in January. Many...
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