Blog Archive

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.

Pretty pictures from Cassini's recent Dione flyby

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/12/22 11:52 CST

Cassini flew close by Dione on December 12 and, as usual, the close pass provided opportunities for lots of dramatic photos, not just of Dione, but of other moons wandering by in the background.

Blink animation between SAR and photo observations of Iapetus

More radar images of icy moons from Cassini: Iapetus, Enceladus, and Rhea

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/12/21 12:10 CST

When I posted about the really cool Cassini SAR images of Enceladus a few weeks ago, I initially wrote that this was the first-ever SAR image of an icy moon other than Titan. Several people (some readers and two members of the Cassini science team!) corrected that statement: Cassini has performed SAR imaging of other icy moons (including Enceladus) before.

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.

Do you have an iPhone? Do you like the Mars rovers? Check out the awesome my3D viewer.

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/12/19 06:57 CST

The Hasbro my3D viewer turns your phone into an electronic View-Master, making it easy to view color images in stereo.

NASA, NOAA Spared Further Cuts for Now

Posted by Charlene Anderson on 2011/12/17 04:31 CST

On December 16, 2011, the U.S. Senate voted down the House of Representatives bill that would have sliced an additional 1.83 percent from discretionary spending accounts, including NASA and NOAA.