Blog Archive

Figuring out orbital positions from orbital elements

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/16 05:03 CST | 6 comments

A few times a year I find myself confronting a table full of numbers describing the orbits of things in the solar system, and cursing at myself because I've forgotten,�again, what all these numbers mean and how to manipulate them to get the particular numbers I want.

Has Mars Express MARSIS data proved that Mars once had a northern ocean?

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/07 05:46 CST

There's been a bit of buzz on the Web this week regarding an ESA press release titled "ESA's Mars Express radar gives strong evidence for former Mars ocean." I don't ordinarily write about press-released science papers, but am making an exception for this one

The Arecibo Trip

Posted by Bill Nye on 2012/02/03 01:09 CST | 1 comments

I have just returned from my first Planetary Society-sponsored trip to Puerto Rico and this historic, remarkable, big idea of a telescope.

Guest Post: Patrick Donohue: Six days in the crater (day one)

Posted by Pat Donohue on 2012/02/03 10:02 CST

Guest Post: Patrick Donohue: Six days in the crater (day one)

Project for Awesome Video On Behalf of the Planetary Society

Posted by Mat Kaplan on 2011/12/22 12:22 CST | 1 comments

WhirledSol posted a cool Youtube tribute to the Planetary Society a year ago, and we just now found it! It has a nice explanation of why we are so passionate about space exploration.

Separating fact from speculation about Kepler-20's Earth-sized planets

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/12/20 04:53 CST

A large team of researchers has announced in a Nature article the discovery of not one, but two, Earth-sized planets orbiting a star named Kepler-20. This article separates the observational facts from the quite-likely-to-be-true inferences from the downstream speculations.