Jupiter’s moon Io, seen here in a photo from the Galileo spacecraft, is the most volcanically active body in the solar system.
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Planetary Science
Juno reveals dozens of lava lakes on Jupiter’s moon Io
NASA’s Juno spacecraft identifies over 40 enormous lava lakes on Io, shedding light on the extreme volcanism sculpting Jupiter’s moon.
Planetary Science
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Uranus may have looked weird when NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by
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Scientists have finally observed plastic ice (illustrated), a sort of hybrid phase between solid ice and liquid water that may form in the interiors of icy worlds like Neptune and Jupiter’s moon Europa. In plastic ice, the individual molecules are held in fixed positions within a crystal lattice, as if solid, while also being able to rotate, as if liquid.
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Two grand canyons on the moon extend like bunny ears from the Schrödinger impact basin near the lunar south pole, as seen in this image taken from lunar orbit.
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This open pit mine in Anshan, China, contains rocks from the Archean Eon, 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, that help pinpoint when rivers began operating on a global scale.
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Disintegrating exoplanets, like the one illustrated here, spill their guts into space in a long cometlike tail.
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The New Horizons spacecraft flyby in 2015 captured these images of Pluto (lower right) and its large moon Charon (upper left). While this is a composite, and not to scale, new simulations reveal the pair’s close relationship.
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Prior to summiting Jezero Crater on Mars, the Perseverance rover explored ancient rocks near the crater rim in this area known as the Pico Turquino Hills.
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Supercomputer simulations showed how an unlucky asteroid could be shredded as it passed close to Mars and eventually turn into a moon-forming ring of debris around the Red Planet.
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The Chinese Chang’e-6 lander, shown, gathered samples from the farside of the moon in early June.
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When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus (shown here in a false-color infrared image), the probe detected a strange magnetic environment around the planet. That may have been a fluke of timing.
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