compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

-NASA

How NASA’s Curiosity Rover Weighed a Mountain on Mars
With a bit of technical improvisation, scientists worked out that the bedrock of Mount Sharp appeared to be less dense than had been expected.
For more than four years, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring Mount Sharp…more

-NASA

Nasa’s InSight mission: Mars sensor gets its protective ‘hat’
The US space agency’s (Nasa) InSight mission has reached a new milestone in its quest to understand the interior of the Red Planet.
The probe has spent the weeks since its landing in November positioning a seismometer instrument on the surface…more

-NASA

Cosmic pile-up gives glimpse of how planets are made
Astronomers say they have the first evidence of a head-on collision between two planets in a distant star system.
They believe two objects smacked into each other to produce an iron-rich world, with nearly 10 times the mass of Earth…more

Edwin Hubble -Getty Images

Have Dark Forces Been Messing With the Cosmos?
Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation…more

-Alexander Kuznetsov/Reuters

The Northern and Southern Lights Are Asymmetric Dancers in the Dark
Our planet’s auroras do not mirror one another, and their varying shapes result from the interplay of the sun and Earth’s magnetic fields. Earth’s auroras, popularly known as the Northern and Southern Lights, are indisputably beautiful. They are also, perhaps surprisingly,…more

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Island-Dan Slayback

A Young Island on Earth May Reveal Clues to How Water Shaped Mars
NASA has closely studied the island, created four years ago by a volcanic eruption in the Pacific. Recently, one of its scientists was able to travel there to take on-the-ground measurements.
The island’s evolution could hold clues to how water might have shaped similar features on Mars billions of years ago, NASA officials believed, so the space agency began…more