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The Planetary Society Blog
Archive
Archived posts are listed in reverse chronological order.
Mar. 25, 2011 | 13:46 PDT | 20:46 UTC
Checking in on Jupiter: the belt is coming back
Since it's been several months since I last took a look at Jupiter, I thought it was time to see what's up with the South Equatorial Belt. For those of you who may have forgotten, Jupiter typically has two dark red stripes crossing its belly, the... More»
Mar. 25, 2011 | 13:44 PDT | 20:44 UTC
The end of Stardust
So, it's over. Stardust's last transmission to Earth was yesterday, March 24, 2011 at 23:33 UTC. Its final act was to burn up all of its last remaining fuel, a move intended to help engineers validate their guesses for how much fuel actually... More»
Mar. 24, 2011 | 14:32 PDT | 21:32 UTC
In honor of Stardust: The Annefrank encounter
Since Stardust is being decommissioned today I thought it'd be fitting to take a look back at one of its data sets. I hadn't fiddled with the Annefrank data set before, and it was small and easy to deal with. I found as I was working with it that... More»
Mar. 23, 2011 | 20:28 PDT | Mar. 24 03:28 UTC
Tomorrow is Stardust's very last day
What's that in my eye? Must be a piece of stardust that's making my eyes water as I read that Stardust will be given its very last command tomorrow, a command that'll end its long life, but give its builders one more piece of valuable data in the... More»
Mar. 23, 2011 | 15:05 PDT | 22:05 UTC
A zoomable MastCam is not going to make it to Mars
I hate being the bearer of bad news, but here it is. Amid all the building excitement for Curiosity -- the successes in testing, the delivery of the instruments, the fun of tuning in to Curiosity Cam to peek in on engineers doing their work in... More»
Mar. 23, 2011 | 12:51 PDT | 19:51 UTC
LPSC 2011: Sponge-moon Hyperion
Almost two weeks since the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and I'm still getting notes on talks! This writeup came from Mike Malaska. By day, Mike is a Ph.D. organic chemist leading drug discovery projects for a pharmaceutical company. By... More»
Mar. 22, 2011 | 14:40 PDT | 21:40 UTC
Evidence for rain on Titan
Last week, Zibi Turtle and Jason Perry and a dozen other coauthors published a paper in Science discussing evidence for rain on Titan. I don't write about Titan much on this blog, which is a shame because Cassini has been assembling a vast trove of... More»
Mar. 22, 2011 | 09:05 PDT | 16:05 UTC
Encouragement from space for Japan
I saw this posted by @Akatsuki_JAXA (the Akatsuki Venus mission's official Twitter identity) and thought it was cute so I'm sharing it here. Thanks to translation help from Twitter I can tell you that it shows Japan's spacecraft offering... More»
Mar. 21, 2011 | 15:00 PDT | 22:00 UTC
Dawn's instruments are being roused for Vesta approach
Today the Dawn imaging team released a photo from the main camera, the Framing Camera, symbolizing that they're preparing to start Dawn approach science; the other two science instruments, a spectrometer and a neutron detector, are also being turned... More»
Mar. 21, 2011 | 11:37 PDT | 18:37 UTC
Neat video of Curiosity drive testing (plus a code-cracking challenge)
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted a short video showing some recent testing of an engineering model of the Mars Science Laboratory in their outdoor Mars Yard; they're testing the performance of the rover's driving capability over slopes of... More»
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