Researchers have been busily building a prototype of a 33-pound (15 kg) lunar mini-robot, set to be the key instrument in a future mission aimed at capturing high-definition images of moon pits.

The Mars Ice Mapper is a proposed Mars satellite being developed by NASA in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency. Its job is to create detailed geographic maps of water ice across the surface of the red planet.

Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe unusual weather on the planet Neptune, not observed until now. They saw a large, dark storm on Neptune unexpectedly changing direction, thereby saving itself from looming destruction and possibly producing a smaller companion storm.

A study of oppositely charged magnetic field bands, moving in the sun's northern and southern hemispheres, suggests the coming sunspot cycle - Cycle 25 - will be a particularly strong one. This result contradicts an earlier expert forecast, suggesting a weak Cycle 25.

A new spin on the Nutcracker Suite, featuring the moons of Saturn.

Astronomers with Breakthrough Listen have detected a mysterious radio signal coming from the direction of the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri. But is it really an alien signal or something more terrestrial?

Astronomers used radio waves to study conditions in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. The results suggest Proxima's 2 known planets are likely bathed in intense radiation from this star, casting doubt on the planets' potential for life.

China's robotic Chang'e 5 launched successfully last month atop a Chinese Long March 5 rocket. Now it's returned to Earth, loaded with moon rocks - the first since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976.

A severe climate change event on Venus may have transformed an Earth-like climate to the current uninhabitable-to-humans state.

A popular theory of galaxy formation suggests that small galaxies merged to form larger ones. But galaxy C1-23152 - 12 billion light-years from Earth - apparently formed itself from gas in the early universe, via exceedingly rapid star formation.