Articles

A.J.S. Rayl

On January 24th, something wonderful happened on Mars. Opportunity completed her 11th year of exploring the surface of the Red Planet! The veteran rover couldn't exactly go to Disneyland to celebrate this amazing achievement, so she did what she loves to do – roved on.

Casey Dreier

NASA's 2016 budget request increases the space agency's budget by $519 million, starts a new mission to Europa, increases funds to Commercial Crew, and threatens some long-running planetary missions.

Donna Stevens

The winter issue of The Planetary Report continues to hit Planetary Society members’ mailboxes and, for those of you who want your copy in digital form, it’s now posted on our website.

Bill Dunford

More examples of imperfect--but tantalizing--images from deep space.

Mat Kaplan

Mat Kaplan honors the memory of a scientific pioneer.

Bruce Betts

Camera purchased with the support of a 2009 Shoemaker NEO Grant is now on a new telescope providing follow-up measurements for even fainter near-Earth objects.

Emily Lakdawalla

As I write this post, New Horizons is nearing the end of a weeklong optical navigation campaign. The last optical navigation images in the weeklong series will be taken tomorrow, but it will likely take two weeks or more for all the data to get to Earth. Two weeks! Why does it take so long?

Marc Rayman

Dawn's chief engineer Marc Rayman gives an update on the mission as it gets ever closer to its next target: The dwarf planet Ceres.

Jason Callahan

It takes a year to make, and is the starting point for all coming debate by Congress. It's the President's Budget Request, and understanding how it comes together is an important part of being an effective space advocate.

Jason Davis

Now that Boeing and SpaceX have won the high-profile privilege of carrying astronauts to the ISS, they must start making public appearances as reluctant equals.

Emily Lakdawalla

Chiron, which is both a centaur and a comet, may also have rings.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week's Dawn images of Ceres were just slightly less detailed than Hubble's best. This week's are just slightly better.

Emily Lakdawalla

The first results of the Rosetta mission are out in Science magazine. The publication of these papers means that the OSIRIS camera team has finally released a large quantity of closeup images of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken in August and September of last year. I explain most of them, with help from my notes from December's American Geophysical Union meeting.

Jason Davis

This May, the first of The Planetary Society's two member-funded LightSail spacecraft is slated to hitch a ride to space for a test flight aboard an Atlas V rocket.

Matthew Knight

Lowell Observatory's Matthew Knight addresses several points of confusion that have repeatedly come up in the coverage of Comet Lovejoy.

Deepak Dhingra

Deepak Dhingra shares some of the latest research on Enceladus' geysers presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco last month.

Larry Crumpler

Larry Crumpler gives an update on the status of Opportunity's traverse toward Marathon Valley.

Casey Dreier

The 2016 budget cycle for NASA kicks off on Feb 2nd, when the White House releases the President's Budget Request. Here's what to look for.

Emily Lakdawalla

Curiosity has spent the last two months completing a second circuit of the Pahrump Hills field site, gathering APXS and MAHLI data. The work has been hampered by the loss of the ChemCam focusing laser, but the team is developing a workaround. Over the holidays, the rover downlinked many Gigabits of image data. The rover is now preparing for a drilling campaign.

Emily Lakdawalla

Dawn has captured a series of photos of a rotating Ceres whose resolution is very close to Hubble's, and they show tantalizing surface details.