Nasa, Jupiter | featured news

There’s an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighborhood. It’s a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it’s out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. (In astronomical terms, that’s close.)

For explorers searching for life beyond Earth, the siren song of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, trills sweetly. “Europa has the best chance of having life there today,” said Britney Schmidt, who studies the moon at the University of Texas at Austin. Astrobiologists think so because NASA’s Galileo probe found strong evidence for a deep, briny ocean covering the entire moon deep under the icy surface.

NASA is on the verge of launching a new solar-powered spacecraft all the way to Jupiter....

NASA's upcoming mission to Jupiter can't get much greener than this: a solar-powered, windmill-shaped spacecraft....

NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Saturday became the first probe ever to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Scientists don't know quite why, but one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has disappeared -- again.

Images taken by NASA early Monday show a scar in the atmosphere near the south pole of the gas giant.