Vesta's Surface Comes into View

The Cassini mission’s epic 13-year exploration of Saturn is coming to a close. On Sept. 15, the spacecraft will make a planned plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn in order to protect pristine icy ...

The beauty and spectacle of celestial motion is captured in this short movie of a moon shadow darting across Saturn's rings.

On Nov. 30, 2016, NASA's Cassini mission begins a daring set of ring-grazing orbits, skimming past the outside edge of Saturn's main rings.

This movie shows Mercury's globe as it rotates. 

  This video drops in on mission control for NASA's Voyager spacecraft as Voyager 1 sends back data from the far reaches of our solar system.

View this beautiful visualization of the Dawn spacecraft on its journey to the main asteroid belt to Asteroid Vesta and Dwarf Planet Ceres.

Animated Spacecraft

Sungrazing comets are a special class of comets that come very close to the sun at their nearest approach, a point called perihelion.

Jupiter Magnetosphere

Mating of LVA

As millions of people observed the total lunar eclipse on October 8, 2014, MESSENGER was also watching from Mercury.

Giovanni Cassini, the astronomer, discovers a moon near Saturn. Half is dark as coal. The other half, bright as snow. Three centuries later, Cassini, the spacecraft, flies by for a close look.

Rotating asteroids have a tough time sticking to their orbits. Their surfaces heat up during the day and cool down at night, giving off radiation that can act as a sort of mini-thruster.

The six Apollo landing sites are revealed chronologically as the phase and libration of the Moon is shown throughout the Apollo era. 

The history-making Viking 1 mission launched 35 years ago.

This infrared movie from NASA's Cassini mission shows the churning of the curious six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole known as "the hexagon."

The tumbling and irregularly shaped moon Hyperion rotates away from the Cassini spacecraft in this movie taken during a distant encounter in Dec. 2005.

This animation shows a color-coded map from NASA's Dawn mission revealing the highs and lows of topography on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres.

What might a wet Mars have looked like? This artist's concept attempts to fill in the blanks.

With kaleidoscopic forms and hues, these two false-color views from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show the patterns that come and go in the course of one Saturn day within the huge storm in the planet'...

The heavens often seem vast and unchanging as seen from Earth, but movement in the skies is the norm. The relative motions of both Cassini and Enceladus over a 15-minute period create the movement ...

Animation of Cassini's final orbit, leading to a pass by the moon Titan which sends the spacecraft plunging into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017. 

This movie captured by NASA'S Cassini spacecraft shows a south polar vortex, or a swirling mass of gas around the pole in the atmosphere, at Saturn’s moon Titan.

NASA’s Cassini mission will come to a spectacular close on September 15, 2017 after almost two decades in space since its launch in 1997.

The flight over Charon begins high over the hemisphere New Horizons saw on its closest approach, then descends over the deep, wide canyon of Serenity Chasma.