Color the Glory Spacecraft

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will swoop through the Sun’s atmosphere 24 times. The spacecraft will carry more than scientific instruments on this historic journey — it will also hold more than 1.1 million names submitted by the public to go to the Sun.

Scheduled to launch no earlier than May 22, the twin satellites of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission will continue the work of monitoring changes in the world's water cycle and surface mass.

NASA's Curiosity rover could soon be drilling rocks on Mars again. Engineers have been working for the past year to restore the rover's full drilling capabilities, which were hampered in 2016 due to a mechanical problem.

Asteroid 2010 WC9 will make a close approach to Earth today (5/15/18) at 3:04 p.m. PDT (6:04 p.m. EDT, 22:04 UTC). At the time of closest approach, the asteroid will be no closer to Earth’s surface than about 120,000 miles (200,000 kilometers), which is about half the distance between Earth and the Moon.

NASA's Voyager 1 took a classic portrait of Earth from several billion miles away in 1990. Now a class of tiny, boxy spacecraft, known as CubeSats, have just taken their own version of a “pale blue dot” image, capturing Earth and its moon in one shot.

Scientists re-examining data from an old mission bring new insights to the tantalizing question of whether Jupiter’s moon Europa has the ingredients to support life. The data provide independent evidence that the moon’s subsurface liquid water reservoir may be venting plumes of water vapor above its icy shell.