Jason Davis • October 08, 2012
SpaceX successfully sent their first paid Dragon capsule towards the International Space Station Sunday night. But the bigger story happened on the way to orbit.
Emily Lakdawalla • October 08, 2012
It's a quarterly feast day for me: the day that the Cassini mission delivers three months' worth of data to NASA's Planetary Data System. Here's a few images processed from the October 1, 2012 data release.
Emily Lakdawalla • October 04, 2012
Engineers requested that Curiosity be driven to a "nice sandbox" to play in for the first soil sample, and it appears that a sand drift named Rocknest satisfies that requirement.
Emily Lakdawalla • October 03, 2012
Curiosity has been shooting photos of the Sun as Phobos and Deimos cross its face, and -- as far as I can tell -- captured sunspots as well.
Emily Lakdawalla • October 01, 2012
A beautiful panoramic view of the varied rocks of Glenelg has been transmitted from Curiosity on Mars. But before going any further, it's time to run the first Martian sand through the soil sampling system.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 28, 2012
Curiosity has pulled up to the edge of Glenelg, its first destination within Gale crater.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 26, 2012
Curiosity has successfully photographed a crescent Phobos in a bright daylit Martian sky.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 17, 2012
An amateur-processed mosaic of some intriguing-looking broken rocks along Curiosity's traverse. They were intriguing enough to photograph with the Mastcam -- but not enough to stop and check them out, as Curiosity has already rolled on.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 13, 2012
Amateur image processor Tom Dahl's spectacularly high-resolution version of Buzz Aldrin's panoramic view of the Apollo 11 landing site.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 10, 2012
We're still working on migrating content from the old to the new website. This week, that means I am looking, one by one, through some great amateur-processed space images.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 10, 2012
MAHLI opened its "eye" on sol 33, seeing Mars clearly for the first time. On sol 34, Curiosity used MAHLI to survey the parts that Mastcam can't see, including a view right underneath the rover.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 07, 2012
Curiosity's much-anticipated self-portrait with the MAHLI camera just arrived on Earth, and even though it was shot through the dust cover it is AWESOME.
Stuart Atkinson • September 07, 2012
Oppy is opening an exciting new chapter in her adventure at Cape York. Having driven down to, over and past Whim Creek, she has now explored halfway down Cape York, to a promising fin-like ridge of dark rock.
Björn Jónsson • September 06, 2012
Back in 1979 the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Some of their images were processed into color images and mosaics that have appeared countless times in books, magazines, on TV and on the Internet. Many of these images and mosaics are spectacular but they were processed more than 30 years ago using computers that are extremely primitive by today's standards. It's possible to get better results by processing the original, raw images from the Voyagers using modern computers and software.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 06, 2012
A wonderfully strange photo from Opportunity's exploration of Cape York, Endeavour Crater.
Emily Lakdawalla • September 06, 2012
I noticed today that I hadn't seen any amateur-processed versions of Voyager's departing shots of Uranus, so I decided to give it a try.
Emily Lakdawalla • August 24, 2012
If you've been obsessively checking the Curiosity raw images websites for new pictures from Mars, you might have noticed something weird: a bunch of Mastcam images and a few from MARDI that are black-and-white instead of color, and which have a peculiar checkerboard pattern.
Emily Lakdawalla • August 23, 2012
The top of the mountain has finally been filled in, and Damien Bouic has produced what I think is the definitive version of Curiosity's first color panorama.
Emily Lakdawalla • August 22, 2012
New Hubble photos show that Uranus has both dark and bright spots!
Jim Bell • August 22, 2012
Ray Bradbury explored Mars, and the future of humanity, through words and ideas--vehicles of the imagination. He was a visionary author and, through his writings and lectures, was a direct or indirect mentor to so many of us involved with designing, building, and operating the actual space vehicles of today. I think it is so fitting, then, that the MSL team has memorialized Ray's contributions to the exploration of the planets -- and especially Mars -- by naming Curiosity's landing site in his honor.
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