Space

This article was originally published at Eos. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The solar system’s oddball planet has some pretty odd moons, too. The first infrared spectra of Uranus’s small inner moons, which will be presented on 18 December at the 2025 AGU Annual Meeting in New Orleans, have shown that their surfaces…

In the middle of Mauritania’s Sahara Desert, surrounded by an ocean of sand, lies a colossal stone spiral that seems almost too perfect to be natural. From orbit, in a recent image taken by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite mission, it looks like a target etched into the desert: the Richat Structure, better known as the Eye of the Sahara. What is it? The…

In a hangar outside Zurich, a veteran of low Earth orbit lay under a kind of medical scanner no spacecraft was ever designed for. The patient was the European Retrievable Carrier mission, or EURECA, a 16.-4-foot-long (5 meters) European satellite that flew on the space shuttle Atlantis in early 1992 and, unusually for a satellite, actually came home. Instead of engineers with wrenches, its exam…

Astronomers have spotted a distant world “shedding” its atmosphere into space in real time, creating a giant companion cloud of gas that travels ahead of the planet as it orbits its star. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an unprecedented view of helium gas evaporating from a distant, giant exoplanet called WASP-107b. The escaping gas stretches…