Though Mercury is generally thought of as an inhospitable, flaming ball of rock due to its close distance to the sun, its poles are permanently cast in shadow. In the past, work has shown that areas near Mercury’s poles reflect radar, which is something ice does. Now, it turns out, the Messenger probe has found that the radar patches near the shadowy poles actually line up with craters that are covered in shadow, which would make a perfect home for water-ice.

SpaceX’s Elon Musk is extremely passionate about space travel, and especially so about Mars. It’s no secret that he aspires to make SpaceX’s Dragon capsule the first commercial vessel to land on the red planet.However, in an interview with the BBC he claimed that not only could he do it, but that it would only cost a passenger $500,000. While Musk acknowledges that the price tag is immaterial — and conjectural — he did hint at big news coming soon.

While commercial spaceflight company SpaceX prepares for its long awaited first unmanned flight to the International Space Station, their engineers are hard at work to create a crewed version of the Dragon capsule. Until now, there hasn’t been much to go on except the volume specifications and the number of people slated to fly aboard. However, SpaceX recently completed its first NASA Crew Trial of a prototype manned capsule, giving us our first look inside the spacecraft.

Launched in 2009, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or WISE methodically snapped an infrared picture about once every 11 seconds for ten months — totaling around 2.7 million images — in an attempt to compile an atlas of the entire sky. This past Wednesday, NASA released the final version of their all-sky atlas and catalog of objects, which should keep scientists and astronomers busy for quite some time.

The moon may seem barren and boring, but each of those craters has a story, the story of an awesome space collision. Over its 4.5 billion year life, the moon has had an awful lot of those, turning it into the pockmarked celestial body we know and love today. Fortunately for you NASA’s Goddard Multimedia team has comprised this lovely little video that gives you the quick version. At a quick but impressive 2:42, it’s definitely worth a watch and sure beats staring at the sky, slack-jawed, for 4.5 billion years.

There are few things that NASA dislikes more than bunk science, and the space agency seems to have taken a particular dislike to unfounded claims that 2012 is the last year of existence. Addressing these apocalyptic “theories” is Jet Propulsion Lab senior research scientist Don Yeomans, who patiently refutes the Mayan calendar, pole shifts, planet X, and planetary alignments as end of the world scenarios. Trust him, he’s a scientist.

A huge solar flare that has erupted from the Sun has unleashed a massive solar storm that is headed toward Earth, and predicted to reach us tomorrow morning around 7 AM EST. A storm as powerful as this one hasn’t been seen in more than five years, and the effects of which are predicted to last 24 hours after the storm hits. It’s possible that the storm will cause interference with satellites in orbit and power grids on Earth, but people in the know don’t seem too worried. The above video of the solar flare, captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, is a gorgeous side effect of potentially dealing with interrupted power grids tomorrow. Good trade-off, right?

In the early afternoon of February 20, 1962, John Glenn climbed inside the cramped confines of Frienship 7. The spacecraft sat atop a modified Atlas missile, originally designed to ferry nuclear weapons towards targets toward the Soviet Union. However, in what might be the greatest triumph of the military-industrial complex, the rocket blasted off and made Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth, putting this country on the path to becoming a leader in space sciences.

In early February, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured footage of whirling tornado-like storm on the surface of the sun. This enormous mass of plasma raged for over a day and was estimated to be larger than the Earth. Of course, it’s not a tornado in the same way that we understand them here on Earth. It’s obviously way bigger, way more terrifying, and way weirder.

The President’s draft of NASA’s budget was released this morning, with cuts to some of the administration’s deep space exploration plans to Mars and the outer planets. The cuts come as Washington faces one of the most economically difficult times in recent memory, which have hit NASA particularly hard leaving the agency with the smallest budget in four years. Thankfully, it’s not all bad news.