Planetary Society logo
  • “Exploration is in our nature.” - Carl Sagan
Author

All

Keyword

All

Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.

Solar system montage with eight planets

Watch this week's Google+ Space Hangout

This week's lineup is a largely astronomical crowd so most of the conversation concerned dark matter and boiling exoplanets and imaging the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Ebb and Flow in plastic canvas

The Dawn spacecraft, modeled in an unlikely medium

Last week when I joined the new weekly Space Hangout (a webcast video conference call of sorts), I realized I would need a 3D model of Dawn in order to explain what's going on with the mission right now.

Phobos-Grunt and Yinghuo-1 fairing encapsulation 3

Phobos-Grunt is no more

Phobos-Grunt has returned to Earth, a lot sooner than it should have. Yesterday, at approximately 17:45 UT, the Russian spacecraft and its passengers, including a Chinese orbiter and the Planetary Society's LIFE experiment, descended into Earth's atmosphere.

The LIFE Biomodule

Reflections on Phobos LIFE

We explore space for the noblest goals of science and exploration, and we often persevere in spite of challenges. But space exploration is fraught with bad things happening, or, to use the technical term, ouchies. The Planetary Society's Phobos LIFE biomodule will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in the next few days with the rest of the Phobos-Grunt mission.

Phobos-Grunt mission poster

Phobos-Grunt's upcoming demise: What we know and what we don't

I'm not looking forward to spending the weekend sitting deathwatch on Phobos-Grunt. It's not science, and it's a sad event, so my instincts would lead me to other subjects. But it contains the Planetary Society's Phobos LIFE experiment.

Mars from Hubble

A Tale of Two Martians

It's the best of times for Mars exploration because we've got three orbiters and a rover studying the Red Planet. It's also the worst of times for my Russian, European, and Chinese colleagues who were part of the Phobos-Grunt mission.

Dawn in survey orbit at Ceres

Dawn Journal: The Om of Orbit Adjustment

The Dawn mission's Project System Engineer Marc Rayman reports that Dawn concluded 2011 more than 40 thousand times nearer to Vesta than it began the year. It is now at its lowest altitude of the mission, conducting a detailed exploration of the protoplanet and continuing to make new discoveries.

GRAIL artist's concept

Ringing in the New Year with two new arrivals to the Moon

The twin GRAIL spacecraft are nearly at the end of their three-month cruises to the Moon. Currently being discussed is an extended mission for GRAIL that would begin after the June eclipse and last through most of December 2012.

Comet Lovejoy from the Space Station

A recap of Comet Lovejoy

A timeline of one of the most memorable solar events in recent memory: the observations by six Sun-observing spacecraft of Comet Lovejoy making its perihelion passage.

Blink animation between SAR and photo observations of Iapetus

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

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.

Earth-sized planets of Kepler-20

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

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.

< 1 ... 100 101102 ... 165 >