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If Venus's pass across the sun earlier this week yields a bounty of information for hunters of transiting worlds in other planetary systems, it's because Venus is a known entity. Studying the June 5 Venus transit as if it were a faraway exoplanet "gives us a reality check," says planetary physicist Colin Wilson of the University of Oxford. "We can check on all those exoplanet techniques to see how accurate they really are." Such data may enhance NASA's Kepler mission as well as the many ground-based campaigns using planetary transits to identify distant worlds, a method that has led to the discovery or characterization of more than 200 exoplanets.

News updates all day from your Fast Company editors. As suspected, Planetary Resources has revealed an insight into its plans, which are due for a full reveal later today: The effort led by X-Prize's Peter Diamandis will aim to mine our solar system's asteroids for profit, and with the goal of improving life on Earth

The planet Upsilon Andromedae b in close orbit to its parent star (NASA/JPL-Caltech) Understanding the structure, dynamics, and chemistry of planetary atmospheres is key to exoplanetary science. It’s sobering to realize that as of now it is still an enormous challenge to model even the atmospheres of planets in our own solar system

Several planets in our solar system have multiple moons.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft is starting to put the pieces together in its search for virtual Earth twins in other planetary systems. Kepler, which launched in 2009 , is on the lookout for planets that are about the size of Earth and have temperate surface conditions.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft is starting to put the pieces together in its search for virtual Earth twins in other planetary systems. Kepler, which launched in 2009 , is on the lookout for planets that are about the size of Earth and have temperate surface conditions. One half of that formula was realized on December 5 when mission scientists announced the discovery of a planet in the so-called habitable zone, called Kepler 22 b , a few times larger than Earth

Next month, researchers in the U.K. will start to pump water nearly a kilometer up into the atmosphere, by way of a suspended hose.

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazine Planetary scientists thought they knew what to expect when NASA's Dawn spacecraft returned the first close-up portrait of the giant asteroid Vesta last month. [More]

With all of the discussion about future U.S.

This morning, the world witnessed the safe landing of the space shuttle Endeavour, after a 16-day mission to the International Space Station. For those of us inhabiting Earth’s more western time zones, we got to watch the landing last night, with no inconvenience, other than having to divert from the Colbert Report. While I did not travel to the Kennedy Space Center for the landing and recovery of the Planetary Society’s experiment known as Shuttle LIFE, my experience was infinitely better than it was the last time that I had an experiment on a shuttle, when I did go to the Cape to attend the landing.