Blogs

Chandrayaan-2 Launches for the Moon

Jatan Mehta • July 22, 2019

Liftoff atop the country’s GSLV Mk III rocket occurred on 22 July at 14:43 IST (09:13 UTC).

Live Coverage: LightSail 2 Sail Deployment

Jason Davis • July 19, 2019 •

Visit planetary.org/live for video and audio from mission control, located at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California.

Pacific Ocean and Mexico from LightSail 2

LightSail 2 Sail Deployment Scheduled for Tuesday

Jason Davis • July 19, 2019

The target ground station pass for deployment starts 23 July 2019 at roughly 11:22 PDT (18:22 UTC).

LightSail 2 Team Continues Tweaks and Tests for Sail Deployment

Jason Davis • July 17, 2019 •

Spare bandwidth during ground station passes has allowed flight controllers to downlink 2 new high-resolution images.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragment D and G Impact Scars on Jupiter

What the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Impact Taught Us

Heidi Hammel • July 15, 2019 •

Twenty-five years ago, multiple fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, changing the face of the planet and the course of planetary science.

Scenes of triumph at mission control after confirmation of success.

Hayabusa2 makes second touchdown on asteroid Ryugu

Andrew Jones • July 11, 2019

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft has touched down on Ryugu for a second time, bagging samples which hopefully contain material from the subsurface of the asteroid.