Ron Cowen

All Stories by Ron Cowen

  1. Planetary Science

    Renegade moon

    Saturn's outlier moon Phoebe didn't coalesce from material near the ringed planet but was captured from the distant Kuiper belt.

  2. Planetary Science

    Mars Polar Lander: Lost but now found?

    A reanalysis of an image taken 5 years ago suggests that planetary scientists have found the remains of the Mars Polar Lander, which vanished minutes before it was supposed to touch down on the Red Planet.

  3. Planetary Science

    Craft show

    The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft recently imaged Mars Odyssey and Mars Express, marking the first time that a spacecraft orbiting a planet other than Earth has captured images of other craft circling the same planet.

  4. Planetary Science

    Roaming Giants: Did migrating planets shape the solar system?

    New simulations suggest that the solar system's four biggest planets were once bunched together, setting up a planetary bowling game that rapidly and violently rearranged the structure of the outer solar system and tossed chunks of debris inward.

  5. Planetary Science

    Ringing in a new moon

    The Cassini spacecraft has spotted a new moon of Saturn, only the second known to lie within the planet's main rings.

  6. Planetary Science

    Roving on the Red Planet

    Scientists review the discoveries made by the Mars rovers after nearly 18 months on the Red Planet.

  7. Planetary Science

    Saturnian moonscape

    Planetary scientists have obtained their closest image yet of Epimetheus, one of Saturn's tiny moons.

  8. Astronomy

    Spotty neutron stars

    Astronomers have for the first time discerned hot spots on the surfaces of neutron stars.

  9. Astronomy

    Fleeting Flash: Pinpointing a short gamma-ray burst

    An invisible, highly energetic flash detected by a spacecraft early this week may have given astronomers their first glimpse of two neutron stars colliding to forge a black hole.

  10. Astronomy

    Planetary Picture? Criteria for planethood cloud object’s identity

    Astronomers are debating whether an image of a planetary-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf qualifies as the first image of an extrasolar planet.

  11. Astronomy

    Shell of a finding

    A new X-ray portrait of a supernova remnant suggests that this shell of hot gas may be hard to discern if the interstellar medium around the exploded star has extremely low density.

  12. Planetary Science

    Far-out science

    New measurements show that the planetoid Sedna spins more rapidly than earlier observations had suggested.