Science News

A huge, copper-toned formation in West Africa dominates a mesmerizing photo taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station.
Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers snapped this hypnotic image of the so-called Richat structure in Mauritania, as the space station flew over the Sahara Desert on the Atlantic Coast of West Africa. Erosion of the various rock layers created the ring-like features that make up the sprawling structure, but the origin of the Richat structure remains somewhat mysterious, geologists have said.

Researchers have developed a new method to identify ancient human settlements by using satellite imagery.

NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP, collected the images that went into this new view of our home planet.

Learn more about Russia's failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, which will fall to Earth in January, 2012 in this SPACE.com infographic.

A year in space: 30 pictures of Earth taken from the International Space
Station in 2011.

Figuring out how to sustain the world’s growing population is a challenge that satellites can help resolve.

Watch how NASA's Gravity and Climate Experiment is revealing an unprecedented view of our water planet...

How do you map the expansion of Earth's earliest civilizations? For years, researchers have tackled this daunting task on a settlement-by-settlement basis, searching for clues in mounds of earth throughout the Middle East.

More than half a million peices of "space junk" need to be cleared.

The Moon and the International Space Station appear as neighbors, though they are 384,400 kilometers miles apart.

Northwestern and central Argentina are subject to frequent dust storms, such as this one viewed in November 2011 from the ISS over South America.

A short information animation about all launched, decayed and orbiting satellites in space.