by Emily Lakdawalla
Emily Lakdawalla
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Follow the thrilling adventures of planetary missions, past and present, and see the stunningly beautiful photos that they return from space!
Emily Lakdawalla • February 12, 2019 • 2
InSight has gone two for two, placing the second of its instruments gently on the Martian ground.
Emily Lakdawalla • February 08, 2019 • 1
A crescent view of MU69 reveals its bizarre shape. Let's look at lots of other fun-shaped space crescents.
Emily Lakdawalla • February 06, 2019 • 1
Curiosity completed work at Vera Rubin Ridge with an easy drilling activity at Rock Hall. Now it has finally driven on to mineral-rick rocks that were seen from orbit, long before Curiosity arrived. The team plans a lengthy traverse of the clay-bearing unit.
Emily Lakdawalla • February 04, 2019 • 1
InSight mission has successfully placed the wind and thermal shield over the seismometer. The seismometer will now be shielded from winds and kept warm over the cold Martian nights, so the quality of its data should dramatically increase.
Emily Lakdawalla • January 28, 2019 • 5
Look up at space at night from a dark location and you can see innumerable stars. Why, then, do photos of so many things in space show black space, devoid of stars?
Emily Lakdawalla • January 15, 2019 • 4
New Horizons is back in action after going quiet for a period of solar conjunction following the 1 January flyby of 2014 MU69 (informally nicknamed "Ultima Thule"). The spacecraft is returning new data, as exemplified by these images.
Emily Lakdawalla • January 09, 2019 • 2
Engineers have leveled the seismometer and made progress on adjusting the position of the tether so that it doesn't interfere for the experiment. Most significantly for the mission, they have balanced the Very Broad Band sensors -- 3 of SEIS’ 6 seismic sensors -- and confirmed that they are generating good data.
Emily Lakdawalla • January 02, 2019 • 8
The latest images downlinked from New Horizons show MU69 to be a textbook example of a contact binary. How do contact binaries form? Updated with images released on 3 January.
Emily Lakdawalla • January 01, 2019 • 2
New Horizons has "phoned home" as expected, 4 hours after its closest approach to 2014 MU69. Its brief transmission contained no science data, but gave the scientists welcome news: New Horizons has successfully pulled off the most distant flyby ever.
Emily Lakdawalla • December 31, 2018 • 1
Today at 19:43 UTC, OSIRIS-REx entered orbit at asteroid Bennu. In so doing, it accomplished both the tightest orbit (at an altitude under 2 kilometers) and the orbit of the smallest object ever. UPDATE: Early science results from OSIRIS-REx discussed at New Horizons MU69 flyby event.
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