items tagged with Solar system

The UK and the US have signed a memorandum of understanding that paves the way for closer collaboration on missions to explore our solar system, including robotic exploration of the moon and trials of technology that could one day be sent to Mars.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Evidence of water has been detected for the first time in a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer said on Tuesday, a tantalizing find for scientists eager to know whether life exists beyond Earth.

Physicists have been hearing this afternoon about attempts by UK astronomers to find evidence of alien life - buried in over 2000 hours of archived telescope data.

China is planning to send a nuclear powered rover to the moon in 2012 on its first unmanned mission to our natural satellite.

Astronomers using the Spitzer space telescope have discovered that, contrary to expectations, twin-star systems are actually more likely to have indictors of planetary systems than single stars are.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China and Russia will mount a joint effort to explore Mars and one of its moons in 2009, Chinese state media reported on Wednesday following an agreement to boost cooperation between the two ambitious space powers.

New data from the European Space Agency's Cluster satellites show a magnetic reconnection event taking place, even in the turbulent plasma around our planet.

Networked storage has proved a boon for US scientists studying high-res images of Mars, which can have file sizes in excess of 2GB.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - X-ray images taken from a new international spacecraft show that the Sun's magnetic field is much more turbulent than scientists knew, NASA reported on Wednesday.