The third coronal mass ejection in two days erupted off the sun in the direction of Mercury on April 21, 2013. This image shows the CME shooting off to the right. (ESA&NASA/SOHO ) The sun has unleashed a trio of solar eruptions toward the planet Mercury in recent days, solar storms that may pass one NASA spacecraft while dealing a glancing blow to another, NASA officials say. (MORE: 10 Stellar Solar Moments) The three flares erupted from the sun over...

Minsk, Belarus The moon is seen from the Belarusian capital Minsk, during a partial lunar eclipse, late Thursday, April 25, 2013, as the Earth casts a shadow on the face of the moon. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) The moon dipped through Earth's shadow in a partial lunar eclipse on Thursday, the first of five eclipses of the moon and sun in 2013. The next eclipse, an annular solar eclipse, will make the star look like a May 10, according to SPACE.com....

(NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) Saturn's rings just can't catch a break. The billions of tiny particles of rock and ice orbiting Saturn are constantly hammered by other space rock fragments. Now, thanks to a rare occurrence, scientists have seen these cosmic impacts in action. (WATCH: Gorgeous Time-Lapse of the Sun) Saturn's orbit around the sun is equivalent to about 30 Earth years. On about the 15th year of that cycle — which happened most recently in 2009 — the lengths of...

BERLIN — Nets, harpoons and suicide robots could become weapons of choice to hunt down the space junk threatening crucial communications satellites currently in orbit round Earth, scientists said Thursday. Even lasers that act like "Star Trek" tractor beams were among the proposals put forward to protect some $100 billion worth of satellites from man-made cosmic garbage. "Whatever we do is going to be an expensive solution," Heiner Klinkrad, a space debris expert at the European Space Agency, said at...

This image of a coronal mass ejection (CME) was captured on April 20, 2013. The CME is headed in the direction of Mercury. The large bright spot on the left is Venus. (ESA&NASA/SOHO) Two NASA spacecraft are safe and sound, after the sun unleashed three intense back-to-back solar eruptions in their direction, scientists say. (WATCH: Space Junk Becoming Dangerous) NASA's Messenger spacecraft in orbit around Mercury and the Stereo-A, which studies the sun from Earth orbit, suffered no damage from...

New York New York City, posted on April 23, 2013. Cmdr. Chris Hadfield tweets: Incredibly clear, before the trees have filled with leaves. (Chris Hadfield/NASA) Orbiting some 230 miles above Earth, Chris Hadfield, commander of the International Space Station, has become something of a social media sensation. Since the Canadian astronaut arrived on the ISS on Dec. 19, he has been posting extraordinary images of Earth and uploading videos that answer our most pressing questions about life in space. This...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured stunning views of a monster hurricane at Saturn's North Pole. The eye of the cyclone is an enormous 1,250 miles across. That's 20 times larger than the typical eye of a hurricane here on Earth. And it's spinning super-fast. Clouds at the outer edge of the storm are whipping around at 330 mph. (More: ) The hurricane is parked at Saturn's North Pole and relies on water vapor to keep it...

BALTIMORE - The operators of the Hubble Space Telescope say the orbiting observatory has snapped photos of an approaching comet. The Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute says the Comet Ison is being called the "comet of the century" because it could be brighter than the full moon when it makes its closest pass by the sun in late November. (More: ) The institute says the pictures taken earlier this month show the comet slightly inside Jupiter's orbit, about 386 million...

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Thousands upon thousands of people say they're willing to take the trip of a lifetime - one from which they'll never return to earth. (WATCH: Say Goodbye to Earth Forever) The Mars One Project is supported by the Mars One non-profit group which aims to set up a human settlement on Mars by 2023. The catch: It's a one way trip. The winners will live out their days on the red planet, all in the name of research. Since Mars...

U.S. astronaut Karen Nyberg, left, Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, center, and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano pose for the media before their final preflight practical examination in a mock-up of a Soyuz TMA space craft at the Russian Space Training Center in Star City outside Moscow, Russia on Tuesday, April 30, 2013. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA is paying $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space, and the agency's leader is blaming...

A high-tech NASA telescope in orbit escaped a potentially disastrous collision with a Soviet-era Russian spy satellite last year in a close call that highlights the growing threat of orbital debris around Earth. NASA's $690 million — which studies the most powerful explosions in the universe — narrowly avoided a direct hit with the defunct 1.5-ton Russian reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 1805 on April 3, 2012, space agency officials announced Tuesday, April 30. NASA's 0 million Fermi space telescope was nearly...