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"tarting 35 years ago, our view of the solar system was forever changed. The launch of the Voyager 1 probe on Sept. 5, 1977 ushered in a golden era of planetary exploration. Along with its sister probe, Voyager 2, the spacecraft took the first detailed images of planets in the outer solar system, discovering magnificent rings, churning atmospheric processes, and volcanic activity on tiny moons. Voyager 2 actually launched on Aug. 20, slightly earlier than its counterpart, but took a longer route to reach Jupiter and Saturn after Voyager 1. The Voyager probes were a scaled-back version of a proposed "Grand Planetary Tour" mission, which would have used a rare alignment in the outer solar system to swing from planet to planet with minimal fuel. In the original plan, four spacecraft would have visited all the gas giants and even tiny Pluto (then still a planet). But without budgetary support from President Nixon and Congress, the ambitious mission was canceled. Since the 1977 planetary configuration occurred only once every 177 years, NASA engineers decided to go forward with a new plan - the Voyager probes, two identical robots that would travel to Jupiter and Saturn and, if successful, on to Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 ultimately performed a closer encounter with Saturn's moon Titan that flung it out of the solar system, and only Voyager 2 made it to the latter planets."

"The Milky Way hosts at least 17 billion Earth-size alien planets, and probably many more, a new study reveals. Astronomers have determined that about 17% of stars in our galaxy harbor a roughly Earth-size exoplanet in a close orbit. Since there are 100 billion or so stars in the Milky Way, that works out to a minimum of 17 billion small, rocky alien worlds, or an Earth-size planet around one of every six stars. And there are probably many more such planets orbiting at greater distances from their stars, some of which may even be "alien Earths" capable of supporting life as we know it."

Venus may have once possessed strange oceans of carbon dioxide fluid that helped shape the planet's surface, researchers say.

PLAY VIDEO
60 Billion Planets Could Harbor Life
For years, we've believed that around 2 billion planets in the galaxy are able to support alien life. But what if we were wrong? Anthony discusses how new knowledge of the 'Goldilocks Zone' could mean life on up to 60 billion planets.
Venus is often described as Earth's twin planet because it is the world closest to Earth in size, mass, distance and chemical makeup. However, whereas Earth is a haven for life, Venusis typically described as hellish, with a crushing atmosphere and clouds of corrosive sulfuric acid floating over a rocky desert surface hot enough to melt lead.

""I think that when people see Pluto (during the New Horizons flyby), they're going to figure out what a lot of planetary scientists have already figured out," Stern said. "Is that the outer solar system is teeming with small planets ... (Pluto) is admittedly a new "species" of planet if you will." "It's as if we had traveled the world and only found large dogs like the Labrador and never found the Chihuahuas. Well, would we say they're not dogs just because there's too many of them and we can't keep track of their names and they are smaller?""

"Enter the planetary defenders, a group of astronomers, physicists and aerospace engineers who have since the early 1990s been locating flying space rocks, painstakingly plotting their orbits, and thinking of ingenious schemes to drag them off course or blow them up should they be on a trajectory toward us. Finally, they have been imagining how the fractious family of man might come together with a contingency plan to literally save the planet, like Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in Hollywood's Armageddon. NASA has identified 94% of the huge, potentially civilization-ending asteroids nearby (none of which is on an earth-trajectory for now). But only about 1 percent of the 500,000 Near Earth Objects around the size of 2012 DA14 orbiting near earth's orbit have been tracked. The space agency's global Spaceguard program connects professional and amateur telescopes looking for smaller NEOs. A telescope in Spain picked 2012 DA14 when it was 2.7 million miles away, and reported it to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge. Later,scientists calculated its trajectory, based on a few plot points of its movement."

"Astronomers have a mind-blowing new theory: that there are 17 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy. They don't yet know how many of these worlds are in habitable zones, but the implications of this discovery are amazing. So much that some claim the "quest for a twin Earth is heating up." Simply put: If there are 17 billion Earth-sized worlds in our galaxy, it's clear that the Universe is bubbling with life."

This year will be another exciting one for space exploration. While 2014 will be remembered as the year we landed on a comet(!), 2015 may be known as the year of Pluto (and other dwarf planets). The New Horizons spacecraft begins its approach to Pluto this month, and will get closest to the dwarf planet in July, taking in the best view ever of the icy, remote world-possibly revealing a dramatic landscape with mountains, volcanoes, and geysers. In March, the Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is another icy world, possibly with liquid water under a frozen surface, making it potentially habitable for life.

A Discovery News bit that details the rather amazing statistic that almost 60 BILLION Planets could harbor life. Explains how we come up with statistics like that by studying the Goldilocks zone.

Mission Overview: Why Go to Pluto ? Planetary exploration is a historic endeavor and a major focus of NASA. New Horizons is designed to help us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of Pluto and Charon - a "double planet" and the last planet in our solar system to be visited by spacecraft. Then, as part of an extended mission, New Horizons would visit one or more objects in the Kuiper Belt region beyond Neptune.

"Curiosity, you are such an amazing space mission that we will sacrifice a thousand blog posts, a million gallons of newsprint even, in your honor. But can you do this? NASA's Cassini probe, not content to be forgotten in its faraway orbit around Saturn and its moons, has beamed back new natural-color images of the ringed planet that are absolutely breathtaking. Released yesterday, they show a very different planet than the one Cassini arrived at eight years ago."

"Join astronomers in a race to find a planet that can sustain life. Amid all the space in the universe, is there another world like ours? Astronomers studying a nearby star say they've found the first potentially habitable planet."

The first color pictures from the NASA space probe expedition to Mars have now been published. They look like -- well, they look like pictures of a lifeless, distant planet. They show blank, empty landscapes. They show craters and boulders. They show red sand. Death Valley, the most desolate of American deserts, at least contains strange cacti, vicious scorpions, the odd oasis. Mars has far less than that. Not only does the planet have no life, it has no air, no water, no warmth. The temperature on the Martian surface hardly rises much above zero degrees Fahrenheit, and can drop several hundred degrees below that.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Mr Baumgartner, who became the first man to break the sound barrier after leaping from 128,100ft above the Earth almost two weeks ago, urged the US Government to divert the money it spends on Mars toon environmental projects on Earth.
"A lot of guys they are talking about landing on Mars," he said. "Because [they say] it is so important to land on Mars because we would learn a lot more about our planet here, our Earth, by going to Mars which actually makes no sense to me because we know a lot about Earth and we still treat our planet, which is very fragile, in a really bad way.
"So I think we should perhaps spend all the money [which is] going to Mars to learn about Earth. I mean, you cannot send people there because it is just too far away. That little knowledge we get from Mars I don't think it does make sense."

Since its inception in 1958, NASA has accomplished some pretty spectacular feats of science. Our country has landed humans on the Moon six times. We've successfully put laboratories onto the surface of Mars, and we've flown by every single planet in our solar system, including the recently promoted asteroid-turned-dwarf planet, Ceres.
Despite decades of scientific and technological achievements, some people still think that funding NASA is a waste of money. However, when you do the calculations, it turns out we are actually getting a great value from this government-run agency.

Rap Battle looking at what are the / how do we qualify something to be a planet 

This got us thinking: What happens when smaller (and bigger) objects fly into our atmosphere? We used Purdue University's "Impact: Earth!" simulator to find our answers. Our own Bob Al-Greene illustrated the results, as seen in the gallery above.

Some highlights: Rocks the size of basketballs enter our planet about once a month; most burn apart in the atmosphere before they reach the surface. Objects as long as standard school buses (roughly 12 meters around) only sneak into the Earth every 20 years or so - but, as seen in Chelyabinsk, the damage can be much greater.

All results assume the object is traveling at a 45-degree angle, with a density level of 3000 kg/m^3 and a velocity of 11 km/s. Everything is assumed to be seen from 100 kilometers away from the direct impact zone.

Click "Show As List" on the bottom-left of the gallery to view larger images. And check out our Google Hangout with asteroid experts to learn more about what's being done to fend off space rocks, from basketball-sized to London-sized.

A father of four, who applied for a one-way-ticket to live on Mars, could be looking at a divorce as a result of his extraterrestrial ambition.

Ken Sullivan made it the next stage of the Mars One project, which could potentially see him making a new life on Mars - but his wife and children are not happy about the news.

Mr Sullivan, who lives in Utah, is among the 1,058 applicants selected so far who could colonise the red planet and never return to their families and friends on Earth.

National Geographic Channel is taking viewers around the world-literally-in this spectacular two-hour television event broadcasting LIVE from the International Space Station (ISS) and Mission Control in Houston, Texas. Made in collaboration with NASA, we'll go into orbit with astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata as they fly at 17,500 mph nearly 250 miles above the earth's surface on the International Space Station, while astronaut Mike Massimino joins host Soledad O'Brien on the ground at Mission Control in Houston. From space, Mastracchio and Wakata will give viewers a fully guided tour, showing us how they live for months in microgravity. They'll conduct never-before-broadcast experiments that demonstrate the real-world value of the science conducted on the floating laboratory. Plus get ready for stunning shots of Earth, from sunset and sunrise, to city lights and green aurora, to lightning storms and shooting stars. You've never seen our planet like this before.

The New Horizons mission will help us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt - a relic of solar system formation.