JPL

In 2018 astronomers announced the discovery of lakes of liquid water on Mars at the south pole. Sadly, a trio of new papers refutes the claim, with new experiments suggesting that the “water” signal was more likely produced by frozen clay instead.

Editor’s note: New details about this fascinating object have emerged since we wrote this article – here's the latest update.

A team has made some intriguing discoveries in the outer regions of the Milky Way. Astronomers mapped the fringes of the sparse halo that envelops our home galaxy, and found the wake of a dwarf galaxy on an eventual collision course with the Milky Way.

A growing body of evidence points to the Red Planet being much bluer in its ancient past. Where all that water went is a key question, with many scientists believing it escaped into space. New analysis suggests another answer: it retreated underground.

A quantum internet would be much faster and more secure than the regular web – and now it may be one step closer to reality. Scientists have used quantum teleportation to send information over long distances, with a higher fidelity than ever before.

Voyager 2 has been going strong for over 40 years, but it’s beginning to show signs of its age. NASA is reporting that a fault has caused the spacecraft to lock itself down in safe mode, as engineers work to get it back up and running again.

In NGC 6946, better known as the Fireworks galaxy, an extremely bright flare of X-rays was seen to appear and disappear within a matter of weeks.

This week DARPA kicks off a competition called the Subterranean Challenge, where hordes of robots are unleashed into caves and tunnels to test how well they can autonomously navigate these environments. One team's designs could lead to robots that explore caves on other planets.

A solar eclipse is an amazing sight to behold, and it's an astronomical event that's not limited to Earth. NASA's Curiosity rover has captured images of Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, as they passed between the Red Planet and the Sun.

Earth’s pleasant, life-giving atmosphere is turning out to be somewhat of an oddity. To get a better understanding of exoplanets, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has recreated one of these alien atmospheres in the lab.

NASA’s ongoing Operation IceBridge has found a gigantic cavity underneath Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, which shows that the area has suffered even more drastic ice loss in recent years than previously thought – and it’s accelerating.

A new study shows how fluoride might be put to work in better batteries. Researchers at Caltech, JPL, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Honda Research Institute have developed fluoride-based batteries that could potentially last much longer than existing lithium-ion-based devices.