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The Planetary Society Blog
Archive
Archived posts are listed in reverse chronological order.
Jul. 31, 2008 | 13:58 PDT | 20:58 UTC
Highlights of the Phoenix sol 64 press conference
The Phoenix mission held a televised press conference this morning. A. J. S. Rayl will be writing up a detailed report later, so I'll just post some of the highlights here.
Michael Meyer was there from NASA Headquarters to formally announce that... More»
Jul. 30, 2008 | 17:02 PDT | Jul. 31 00:02 UTC
Proof for liquids on Titan
There's an article just published in Nature by the Cassini Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) team, led by Robert Brown, titled "The identification of liquid ethane in Titan's Ontario Lacus." The associated press release is titled... More»
Jul. 30, 2008 | 10:13 PDT | 17:13 UTC
New photos of Phobos!
A week ago today Mars Express flew past Phobos for its closest encounter yet, and it snapped some gorgeous views onto the trailing hemisphere of the moon. I don't have time right now to say much more, but here's a photo, which I've rotated so that... More»
Jul. 30, 2008 | 07:09 PDT | 14:09 UTC
Ustream chat archived
Watch my UStream webcast about what Cassini has told us about Enceladus here. You can download the chat log and the powerpoint presentation through the "Video Archives" link to the left. Note I forgot to turn on my mic so there's no sound for the... More»
Jul. 29, 2008 | 12:09 PDT | 19:09 UTC
E pur si muove
Well, that's the biggest earthquake I've felt since moving to southern California. Although not a Big One, it was long -- I counted more than thirty seconds of ground shaking -- and it was forceful enough for some precariously balanced stuff to... More»
Jul. 29, 2008 | 11:39 PDT | 18:39 UTC
A launch slip for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (not their fault)
Bruce Betts sent me some notes he took when he attended the NLSI Lunar Science Conference held at NASA's Ames Research Center last week. Included in his notes was the news (reported already elsewhere) that the launch of Lunar Reconnaissance... More»
Jul. 28, 2008 | 11:01 PDT | 18:01 UTC
What's up in the solar system for the week of July 28
Let's check in on the twenty spacecraft exploring the solar system. First up: I was expecting this morning to find some images from Mars Express' closest-ever encounter with Phobos, but so far there's nothing new on the ESA website. I'll keep... More»
Jul. 26, 2008 | 15:37 PDT | 22:37 UTC
Phoenix sol 60: not enough sample to TEGA
Well, according to a release just posted on the Phoenix website, despite the success of the rasping efforts, not enough sample got in to the TEGA instrument for it to shut the doors over the sample. This time the problem was not with TEGA. The... More»
Jul. 26, 2008 | 14:29 PDT | 21:29 UTC
Phoenix Sol 60 rasping and dumping successful -- but we don't yet know if it got inside TEGA
EDIT: Now we know that there wasn't enough sample delivered to TEGA -- see the next post.Lots of pictures have come down from Mars this morning showing that many of the steps required to get that all-important ice-rich soil sample to TEGA seemed to... More»
Jul. 25, 2008 | 21:14 PDT | Jul. 26 04:14 UTC
Earth to Phoenix: You are "go" to grab an ice sample for TEGA
The commands have now been sent to Phoenix for it to spend the early hours of sol 60 rasping into Snow White, getting that ice sample into the scoop, and dumping it on to TEGA, all in a short enough amount of time to prevent any ice from sublimating... More»
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