Blog Archive
Goodies from the January 11 Rhea flyby
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/12 10:44 CST
Cassini got some incredibly tricky shots during its January 11 Rhea flyby!
Solar eclipses from space: Hinode and SDO
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/06 11:33 CST
Two spacecraft that keep their ever-watchful eyes on the Sun -- NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and JAXA's Hinode -- were doing their thing, when something large wandered past: the Moon.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/05 11:38 CST
These two movies were posted to the JPL website a couple of weeks ago, and they are just amazing.
Happy 2011, and an end to the 2010 advent calendar
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/01 11:43 CST
Welcome 2011! I can't wait for what this year has in store. The prize for all of you who have enjoyed opening each door in the Planetary Society's 2010 advent calendar is one of the best views we can get of one of the biggest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta.
Door 11 in the 2010 advent calendar
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/12/11 02:35 CST
Time to open the eleventh door in the advent calendar. Until the New Year, I'll be opening a door onto a different landscape from somewhere in the solar system. Where in the solar system are these sinuous ridges?
Jupiter's outbreak is spreading
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/11/22 11:03 CST
Jupiter, always a pretty sight in the sky, is now worth visiting every day; the "outbreak" that heralds the return of Jupiter's formerly red, now fadedsouth equatorial belt is expanding and multiplying.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/11/11 10:48 CST
Jupiter's faded belt may be coming back.
Posted by Rosaly Lopes on 2010/10/07 05:22 CDT
Rosaly Lopes relates her time at a workshop in Piton.
The August 20, 2010 Jupiter fireball -- and the March 5, 1979 one
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/08/24 11:36 CDT
Following up on the story I first posted on August 22, the Jupiter impact fireball first noticed by Japanese amateur astronomer Masayuki Tachikawa has been independently confirmed by two other Japanese astronomers.
Yet another Jupiter impact!? August 20, seen from Japan
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/08/22 05:03 CDT
Yet another Jupiter impact!? August 20, seen from Japan
Posted by Jason Perry on 2010/08/20 05:15 CDT
Thanks to its active volcanic activity and sulfur-rich surface, Io is one of the most colorful worlds yet seen in the Solar System, save the Earth of course
Jupiter's faded belt: It's happened before, and it'll happen again
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/06/16 05:07 CDT
When I wrote a post about Jupiter's missing South Equatorial Belt in May, I had three main questions: how long did it take for the belt to go away, has this happened before, and how can a planet as big as Jupiter change its appearance so quickly?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/05/10 05:22 CDT
Via Daniel Fischer's Tweet about a blog entry by Astro BobI learned of something which should be obvious to anyone who has trained even a rather small telescope on Jupiter over the past few weeks: one of its iconic stripes is just plain gone.
Titan and Dione: The same, but different
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/04/22 05:29 CDT
Here's a new lovely color composition of Titan and Dione captured by Cassini. This one was taken on April 20, 2010; a set of 15 raw images taken of the two moons just showed up on the Cassini raw images website.
Pretty (strange) picture from HiRISE: Dust flow crater?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/04/08 11:38 CDT
Yesterday was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE team's latest flood of archived images, 1,025 of them. I skipped forward to page 42 (what other number would I pick?) and started browsing from there.
Pretty picture: An unexplained chain of elliptical craters on the Moon
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/04/02 02:41 CDT
Pretty picture: An unexplained chain of elliptical craters on the Moon
Lunokhod found on the Moon -- and on Earth, too
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/03/17 12:26 CDT
Yesterday I posted a bit of a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera image showing the tracks of the Russian Lunokhod 2 rover. Today, I can post for you an image showing the rover's final resting place
New maps of Pluto show pretty amazing amounts of surface change
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/02/04 02:17 CST
I just posted my writeup of today's press briefing on a new map of Pluto produced from Hubble images. The main conclusion was that Pluto has shown an astonishing amount of changes across its surface between 1994 and 2002 -- more, in fact, than any other solid surface in the solar system.
Mars Express animation of Phobos' shadow transiting Mars
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/02/02 12:08 CST
For the first time ever, Mars Express' Visual Monitoring Camera has imaged the shadow of Mars' moon Phobos crossing the surface of Mars.
Cassini Aegaeon and Prometheus awesomeness
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/28 12:38 CST
There were many, many treats waiting on the Cassini raw images website this morning. Yesterday, Cassini traversed the G ring, taking photos all the way.











