What can you see in the December sky? Beautiful pairings of Venus, Saturn and Mars with the crescent Moon throughout the month, at sunrise and sunset.

Every year, intrepid Antarctica explorers hunt for space rocks that have fallen to Earth.

What's in a name? Whether you call it a planet or an asteroid, missions that explore small worlds are always exciting.

Could Mars ever have supported life? In the Australian Outback, scientists from NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 mission and their counterparts from the joint European-Russian ExoMars mission visited the oldest convincing evidence for life on Earth to prepare for their own searches for signs of ancient life on Mars. The field lesson in astrobiology in the Pilbara region is being applied in the near term by NASA, ESA and Roscosmos for mission planning, and will also pay dividends when both rovers begin to send back science data and imagery from the Red Planet.

See how the odd orbits Neptune's inner moons Naiad and Thalassa enable them to avoid each other, as they race around the planet. Researchers call it a "dance of avoidance." An observer sitting on Thalassa would see Naiad in an orbit that varies wildly in a zig-zag pattern, passing by twice from above and then twice from below. This up, up, down, down pattern repeats every time Naiad gains four laps on Thalassa. This repeating pattern is called a resonance.

Asteroids, ho! Pioneering space miners dream of Psyche, the largest metal asteroid in the solar system.

Why are missions like OSIRIS-REx bringing pieces of an asteroid back home?

Highlights of the November sky include how to watch as Mercury transits the Sun on Nov. 11, plus how to observe the regular dimming and brightening of the "Demon star," Algol, with your own eyes. Additional information, along with still images from the video, and the video transcript, are available at https://go.nasa.gov/34hp376 . Algol animation is licensed as CC-BY-SA 3.0. Video credit NASA-JPL/Caltech.

Unlike the dinosaurs, we have a space program. There are many ways we could steer an asteroid off its path towards Earth.

If a big asteroid is heading our way, how does NASA prepare for the oncoming disaster?