All Stories

Over six missions, the Apollo astronauts collected and brought back 842 pounds of Lunar samples. Who decides what rocks go where? And how did the National Cathedral get a rock to put in a stained glass window??

Europa Clipper is soon to be on its was to the outer solar system to study one of Jupiter's most interesting moons. In addition to the really awesome science it will do, the spacecraft will carry a "message in a bottle" etched with your names and a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

Scientists are excited about Enceladus as a potential place for life and, more important, as a planet where we can look for life using existing technology and even predict, with some precision, the locations on the icy moon Saturn where we would most likely find this life.

Spacecraft face a dramatic range of conditions, from airless worlds bombarded by tiny meteorites to environmental extremes, when exploring our Universe. 

There is no place like home—at least in our neighborhood.

Scientists believe our planet has a metallic inner core, but we can’t exactly crack it open and check. Instead, NASA is sending a mission to an asteroid named Psyche, which appears to be a nickel-iron planetary core a lot like the one at the center of the Earth.

The international community has contributed more to the exploration of space and our understanding of the universe than you might think. From India to Israel, lots of countries are sending missions to Mars, landing on comets, and observing Earth from orbit.

This past August, CEPS scientists traveled to Iceland to study geologic features known as pit chains, which form in a similar way to pit chains on Saturn’s icy moon, Enceladus.

The annual Perseid meteor shower is at its peak (August 11-13). Meteor showers occur when the Earth’s orbit around the Sun takes us through a debris field, which is often a trail of cosmic dust left behind by a comet.

On  6 April 2012, the following notice appeared in the Minor Planet Circular, under the category “Names of New Minor Planets”: (4262) DeVorkin = 1989 CO Discovered 1989 Feb. 5 by M. Arai and H. Mori at Yorii. David H. DeVorkin (b. 1944)