Talk about flying close to the wind. A Japanese interplanetary spacecraft will begin its travels to Venus next week, to get the clearest ever view of massive gusts in the planet’s atmosphere. The Venus Climate Orbiter, called AKATSUKI, aims to find out why blistering winds zip around the planet at speeds of up to 400 kilometres per hour. The upper clouds can...

A lake of asphalt may be the closest thing on Earth to the hydrocarbon seas on Saturn’s moon Titan — and our asphalt lakes are teeming with microbial life. Not only could these findings help in the search for aliens in our own solar system, but they could provide insight into the evolution of life on this planet. The largest naturally occurring asphalt lake...

A humanoid robot could be walking on the moon – and drawing the Japanese flag on its surface – by 2015, according to a plan proposed by a group of Japanese companies. Experts say wheeled or many-legged robots would be easier to operate on the moon’s uneven terrain, but backers of the proposal say a two-legged android would make a bigger splash in the public...

The asteroid belt is classically considered the domain of rocky bodies, being too close to the Sun for ice to survive. Or so we thought — not only is ice present, but at least one asteroid is covered in it. From high atop the summit of Mauna Kea, where, fittingly, snow often falls in the otherwise tropical Hawaiian islands (Fig. 1), two teams, Rivkin and Emery1 (page...

NASA is preparing to send its first humanoid robot into space. Robonaut first twitched to life in September 1999 and, after a decade of tests, the 140-kilogram R2 model will finally be launched to the International Space Station on the space shuttle Discovery’s last mission in September. With continual maintenance work needed on the ISS, the idea is to give...

The Earth has entered a new age of geological time – the epoch of new man, scientists claim. Humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes on the planet that we may be ushering in a new period of geological history. Through pollution, population growth, urbanisation, travel, mining and use of fossil fuels we have altered the planet in ways which will be felt...

The heart of Venus may belong to Earth. Our planet could be tugging on the core of Venus, exerting control over its spin. Whenever Venus and Earth arrive at the closest point in their orbits, Venus always presents the same face to us. This could mean that Earth’s gravity is tugging subtly on Venus, affecting its rotation rate. That idea, raised decades ago, was disregarded...

Forty years ago the U.S. raced to plant the first foot on the moon. Now, as India, Russia, South Korea and China compete to return for further exploration, the U.S has all but dropped out — and even Buzz Aldrin thinks that may be okay. If the U.S. won’t be going to the moon again anytime soon, who is? Forty years ago the U.S. raced to plant the first foot on the...

Scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have taken the most detailed pictures ever of the former planet Pluto, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope. The pictures reveal that the dwarf planet has a dramatically ruddier hue than it did just a few years ago, the scientists said on Thursday. The remarkable colour shift, which apparently took place...

The biggest Full moon of 2010 will rise in the east tonight, and it’ll appear with a bright sidekick: Mars will cozy up just to the left of the supersize moon. January’s full moon is also called the wolf moon, according to Native American tradition associating this month’s full moon with wolves howling in the cold midwinter. The 2010 wolf moon will appear...