On February 3, 2024, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a second close flyby of Io, the fifth of Jupiter’s moons and the third largest. Like the previous flyby on December 30,…
From detailed analysis of Mimas’ orbital motion based on data from NASA’s Cassini mission, planetary researchers from Sorbonne Université, Nantes Université, Queen Mary University of London, Université de Franche-Comté and…
The violent nature of Jupiter’s atmosphere has long been a source of fascination for scientists. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has had a ringside seat to the goings-on since it entered the…
Saturn’s rings could have evolved from the debris of two progenitor icy moons that collided and shattered a few hundred million years ago; debris that didn’t end up in the…
Saturn’s ring system may well have formed when dinosaurs were still walking on the Earth, and will last only another few hundred million years at most, according to two new…
The most feasible explanation is that icy ring particles raining down onto Saturn’s atmosphere cause this heating, according to a team of astronomers who analyzed several datasets obtained by the…
The radar properties of icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn commonly differ by more than an order of magnitude from those of rocky planets because of the lower absorptivity of…
Saturn is known for its iconic, pristine rings. However, the main B ring can have splotches and streaks of darker or lighter material, known as spokes, that may be tied…
Using data from NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA’s Juno spacecraft, two teams of astronomers have examined the distribution of…