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The Planetary Society Blog
Archive
Archived posts are listed in reverse chronological order.
Jul. 15, 2008 | 10:38 PDT | 17:38 UTC
Buzzed by a binary
Yesterday, 600-meter-diameter asteroid 2008 BT18 and its 200-meter-diameter companion passed within about 2.3 million kilometers of Earth. This is both far away from us (six times the distance from Earth to the Moon and nowhere near as close as... More»
Jul. 15, 2008 | 07:45 PDT | 14:45 UTC
Welcome to the Solar System, Makemake
Actually, Makemake has (probably) been in the solar system for billions of years, long before there were ever humans around who cared about how to name them. But there are humans now, and we care a lot about names, so it's a great relief that the... More»
Jul. 14, 2008 | 11:54 PDT | 18:54 UTC
Earth, nearly 40 years ago
A very long time ago a reader wrote to me to point out that my Images of Earth from Planetary Spacecraft page was lacking most of the photos taken by the Zond program (the unmanned Soviet lunar program that was flying at the same time as the... More»
Jul. 14, 2008 | 08:59 PDT | 15:59 UTC
What's up in the solar system for the week of July 14
What's new in the solar system this week?
As has been the trend for the last few weeks, there aren't a lot of close encounters planned for the Cassini mission, which continues its stable once-per-week orbits of Saturn; it just this morning passed... More»
Jul. 11, 2008 | 10:47 PDT | 17:47 UTC
"Ulysses is not dead yet."
ESA issued a statement in February saying that, as Ulysses' radioisotope thermoelectric generators were running out of power, the spacecraft would likely die some time this year. The actual death blow to the spacecraft was likely to be the freezing... More»
Jul. 11, 2008 | 10:11 PDT | 17:11 UTC
Hey, Lou! You get a medal!
Congratulations to the Society's esteemed leader Lou Friedman, who was awarded on July 7 (his birthday!) the Yuri Gagarin medal, by The Russian Federation of Cosmonautics. Lou was pleased to get the prize but was more excited about the fact that... More»
Jul. 11, 2008 | 06:42 PDT | 13:42 UTC
Progress on the Phoenix Mission Success Panorama
I mentioned on Wednesday that Mark Lemmon said he had pronounced the data acquisition for Phoenix' Mission Success Panorama to be complete -- and I predicted we'd see a version from one of the amateurs out there on the Internet before it came out... More»
Jul. 10, 2008 | 12:09 PDT | 19:09 UTC
More things to see in the amazing HiRISE image of Phoenix' descent
I have posted several times about the amazing photo captured by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's spy camera in space, HiRISE, of Phoenix under its parachute as it descended. There have been two common questions I've received about the photo: was there... More»
Jul. 10, 2008 | 10:25 PDT | 17:25 UTC
Carnival of Space #62
Dave Mosher at Space Disco hosts the Carnival of Space this week, and he did it in a neato easy-to-read slideshow format.
What's new on the Society's website? Lou Friedman writes in a new "From the Executive Director" letter about The Planetary... More»
Jul. 9, 2008 | 17:59 PDT | Jul. 10 00:59 UTC
Water on the Moon, a big impact on Mars
There's a story in this week's issue of the journal Nature that says that there are parts of the lunar mantle (the part of the interior of the moon that is made of rock, as opposed to the deeper interior, which is made of metal) that contain "a few... More»
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