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Ice Cap to Ice Cap with Mars Odyssey
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/04/02 11:24 CDT | 2 comments
Explore the mysterious Martian landscape with the workhorse of the Solar System, Mars Odyssey.
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/03/25 11:53 CDT
A new slant on Martian landscapes from Mars Global Surveyor.
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/03/18 04:22 CDT
Some lovely, rarely-seen images from the MESSENGER mission.
Comet PANSTARRS from the other side of the Sun!
Posted by Karl Battams on 2013/03/14 05:21 CDT | 8 comments
Comet PANSTARRS is delighting northern hemisphere viewers right now. But it's also big, bright, and beautiful to the STEREO spacecraft.
Yes, it was once a Martian lake: Curiosity has been sent to the right place
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/03/12 05:36 CDT | 7 comments
The news from the Curiosity mission today is this: Curiosity has found, at the site called John Klein, a rock that contains evidence for a past environment that would have been suitable for Earth-like microorganisms.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/03/12 01:57 CDT | 2 comments
We don't have any spacecraft at Jupiter right now, which is a pity. Until we do, we have to rely upon Earth-based astronomers to monitor the changing face of the largest planet.
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/03/11 10:53 CDT | 3 comments
Nearly four decades before Curiosity, we dug into Mars for the first time. The pictures are still amazing.
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/03/04 12:25 CST | 2 comments
Look past the rings, and Saturn is even stranger--and more breathtaking.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/03/01 06:43 CST | 2 comments
Last week I trawled the archives to find all of Galileo's images of asteroid Ida; this week, I turned to Gaspra.
Posted by Ted Stryk on 2013/02/28 12:59 CST | 1 comments
Presenting a newly-processed version of Voyager 2's best images of Uranus' moon Umbriel.
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/02/25 12:44 CST | 4 comments
Nineteen years ago this month, the Clementine mission sent some amazing views from the moon.
Galileo got so many more images of Ida than I realized
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/22 04:14 CST | 1 comments
While writing up the cruise-phase issues of the Galileo Messenger a couple of weeks ago, I came across a fuzzy montage of images of Ida that I had not seen before. So I decided to spend some time digging into the Planetary Data System to see if there were more images to be found. I found lots and lots pictures that I'd never seen before!
Pretty picture: a moon transit
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/21 05:52 CST | 5 comments
A reader comment inspired me to dig up an oldie but a goodie: a sequence of photos of the Moon transiting Earth, seen from a very long way away,
Why don't we have any photos of asteroid 2012 DA14 if it came so close?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/19 03:13 CST | 2 comments
A frequently-asked question last week was: if asteroid 2012 DA14 is coming so close to Earth, why hasn't anyone taken any pictures of it? Now that 2012 DA14 has whizzed past us, we do finally have some radar pictures of it, but they still may not satisfy everyone.
Posted by Edward Gomez on 2013/02/18 05:14 CST | 4 comments
Mostly the Universe stays unchanged for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years. There are some cases however when some things change really rapidly. Recently I observed one of these rapidly changing, transient phenomena, as asteroid called 2012 DA14. I work for Las Cumbres Observatory and we have been trying to observe this asteroid since 5 February.
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/02/18 10:20 CST | 2 comments
When the sunlight catches it just right, Saturn's F Ring is something to see.
An evening that brought me very close to Curiosity
Posted by Damia Bouic on 2013/02/15 09:00 CST | 3 comments
Damien Bouic received some well-deserved recognition from the Chemcam team for his great Curiosity image processing work.
Why can Hubble get detailed views of distant galaxies but not of Pluto?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/14 12:37 CST | 15 comments
How come Hubble's pictures of galaxies billions of light years away are so beautifully detailed, yet the pictures of Pluto, which is so much closer, are just little blobs? I get asked this question, or variations of it, a lot. Here's an explainer.
A forgotten image of Earth and the Moon
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/13 07:45 CST | 4 comments
While researching another story, I came across an image I don't remember ever seeing before, of a moonrise from an unexpected source.
The Earth is a Planet: Why We Explore Space
Posted by Bill Dunford on 2013/02/11 10:50 CST
Why spend effort and scarce resources on space exploration when we have so many problems here at home? Turns out, there are some pretty good reasons.
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