Space, Astronomy and Planetary Science News

At the end of the Pleistocene era, woolly mammoths roamed North America along with a cast of fantastic creatures – giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, camels, lions, tapirs and the incredible teratorn, a condor with a 16-foot wingspan.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is examining several features on Mars that address the role of water at different times in Martian history.

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has discovered entrances to seven possible caves on the slopes of a Martian volcano. The find is fueling interest in potential underground habitats and sparking searches for caverns elsewhere on the Red Planet.

A groundbreaking study has provided new insight into the way the first stars were formed at the start of the Universe, some 13 billion years ago.

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have discovered in a single pass about a dozen otherwise invisible galaxies halfway across the Universe.

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google Inc. announced on September 13 the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a $30 million prize purse.

Using NASA's Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellites, astronomers have discovered one of the most bizarre planet-mass objects ever found.

For the first time, a CSIRO radio telescope has been linked to others in China and Europe in real-time, demonstrating the power of high-speed global networks and effectively creating a telescope almost as big as the Earth.

The impactor believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other life forms on Earth some 65 million years ago has been traced back to a breakup event in the main asteroid belt.

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge have developed a new camera that produces much more detailed pictures of stars and nebulae than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and it does all this from here on Eart