Instrument succeeds in capturing first soil sample, allowing Mars Phoenix Lander team to begin scientific studies.

New photos of collisions in one of Saturn’s rings provide a local lab for understanding the interactions that might shape young solar system formation.

Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet known that is beyond the solar system and orbits an ordinary parent body.

In its seventh day after successfully landing on the Red Planet, the Phoenix Lander digs its first trench and is ready to start its ice-hunting.

The good news is a tentative sighting of ice by the Mars Phoenix Lander. The bad news is the discovery of a glitch in the system that will analyze soil samples.

After a day’s delay, the robotic arm on the Mars Phoenix Lander is free of its shackles and is preparing to dig for ice.

Water believed to flow on the Red Planet would have been too salty to foster life, scientists suggest.

A camera on a Mars-orbiting spacecraft caught an image of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute just before it descended onto the Red Planet’s northern plains on May 25.

The first close-up color images of the northern arctic circle on the Red Planet were recorded by the Mars Phoenix Lander spacecraft only a few hours after its flawless descent at 7:38 p.m. EDT, May 25. The detailed images suggest ice lies beneath the hard soil.

Less gravity on Mars means wind-driven grains of sand travel up to 10 times faster than those blowing along Earth’s surface, new analyses suggest.

Astronomers, for the first time, have imaged dusty clumps surrounding young stars that could be planets in the making. (p. 211)

NASA's Cassini spacecraft had a close encounter with the giant vapor plume gushing from Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus. (p. 195)

A new study suggests that many, or perhaps most, sunlike stars have planets much like Earth. (p. 67)

The first spacecraft to visit Mercury in 33 years imaged 25 percent of the crater-pocked surface that had never before been seen close-up. (p. 51)