Space Station Threshold

Still seven years away from its rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was awoken from hibernation for the second annual checkout of all systems. The spacecraft and its team back on Earth will also undergo three months of operations as the New Horizons will make observations of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. But [...]

With all of the press going to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, it's about time that Neptune got a turn. Triton – one of the moons of Neptune – is curious, with large swaths of the planet resembling the skin of a cantaloupe and a retrograde orbit (opposite that of Neptune's rotation). Its surface [...]

We’ve reached Neptune, the final planet in our tour through the solar system – but don’t worry! The tour’s not over, but after this week we’ll be all out of planets. Neptune has a controversial story about its discovery, some of the strongest winds in the solar system and some weird moons. Click here to download [...]

Here on Earth we think of the poles as cold places, but on Neptune, it's just the opposite. New images of the planet's southern pole show that it's actually 10-degrees warmer than the rest of Neptune. Now don't pack your bathing suit just yet, Neptune's average temperature is still -200 degrees Celsius (-328 F); so [...]