Our journalists and guest bloggers bring you stunning imagery and the space stories that matter most.
Van Kane • January 09, 2017 • 9
Last week, NASA selected its thirteenth and fourteenth missions in its low cost Discovery program.
Emily Lakdawalla • October 01, 2015 • 3
This is the first in a series of posts in which scientists share favorite planetary science plots. For my #FaveAstroPlot, I explain what you can see when you look at how asteroid orbit eccentricity and inclination vary with distance from the Sun.
Van Kane rounds up some of the latest NASA Discovery mission proposals aiming to explore our solar system's smallest bodies.
Emily Lakdawalla • January 27, 2015 • 3
Chiron, which is both a centaur and a comet, may also have rings.
Emily Lakdawalla • March 27, 2014
On Wednesday, March 26, two important discoveries in the outer solar system were announced: the discovery of the second confirmed member of the Inner Oort Cloud (2012 VP113) and the discovery of rings around the planetesimal Chariklo. In a Hangout on Air, a rag-tag group of planetary scientists and astronomers active on Twitter talked about the discoveries.
Alex Parker • March 27, 2014 • 7
Yesterday, a team of astronomers announced that they discovered a set of planet-like rings around Chariklo, an asteroid-like body that currently resides in the unstable region between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus.
Alex Parker • April 30, 2013 • 2
This month my latest paper made it to print in the Astronomical Journal. It's a short piece that describes a serendipitous discovery that my collaborators and I made while searching for a distant Kuiper Belt Object for the New Horizons spacecraft to visit after its 2015 Pluto flyby.
Emily Lakdawalla • March 14, 2013
This week I'll be talking with NEOWISE principal investigator Amy Mainzer about moving objects that the WISE mission has spotted both inside and outside our solar system.
Alex Parker • January 25, 2013 • 2
Recently, several of the Kuiper Belt Objects our team has discovered while searching for New Horizons post-Pluto flyby candidates have been submitted to the Minor Planet Center and their orbital information is now in the public domain.
Alex Parker • October 09, 2012 • 1
2011 HM102 is an L5 Neptune Trojan, trailing Neptune by approximately 60 degrees. This object was discovered in the search for a New Horizons post-Pluto encounter object in the Kuiper Belt.
Become a member of The Planetary Society and together we will create the future of space exploration.
Help advance robotic and human space exploration, defend our planet, and search for life.