Articles

Ryan Anderson

So, you may have heard the news making the rounds last week that a new analysis of the Viking data suggests there may actually be organics and (dare I even say it?) life on Mars! Yawn. Consider me underwhelmed.

Emily Lakdawalla

I was busy with other projects today, so today's post just asks you to look at this gorgeous three-image mosaic of a crescent Dione, taken during Cassini's most recent flyby a week ago.

Emily Lakdawalla

Most of you have probably heard by now of two small asteroids, both in the neighborhood of 10 meters in diameter, recently discovered on trajectories that pass unusually close to Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Deep Impact is rapidly approaching its next -- and final -- target, comet Hartley 2, which it will fly by on November 4.

Emily Lakdawalla

Imagine this landscape: you're walking across an unusually smooth lunar surface, an impact melt sheet on the floor of a relatively recently formed crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

Coincidentally, two new images of Neptune were posted today, from two very different sources.

Bill Nye

Is Venus the forgotten planet, or just one that's hard to figure out?

Emily Lakdawalla

A couple of weeks ago Paul Schenk posted a few really cool videos to his personal blog. Paul's subspecialty is the topography of icy moons, and he's been doing a lot of work on the moons of Saturn lately.

Emily Lakdawalla

If I have to, I will drag reluctant people one at a time to plunge into NASA's Planetary Data System.

Björn Jónsson

This is a new, big mosaic of Voyager 1 images, this time showing the Great Red Spot at high resolution.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA announced today that they had placed several new sets of historical photos on their

Charlene Anderson

Visualization can help the brain comprehend what words and numbers can struggle to covey. There's a YouTube video posted by

Emily Lakdawalla

I've had a fun morning of noodling around learning how to write KML files, and have produced one for Google Mars that shows you all of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter tracks that cross the area Opportunity has driven through already, as well as the area of Endeavour crater.

Amir Alexander

Two nearly simultaneous announcements by scientists that they have detected entire planetary system deep in space have set the astronomical community abuzz.

Bruce Betts

One of the instruments on a 2016 mission to orbit Mars will provide daily maps of global, pole-to-pole, vertical distributions of the temperature, dust, water vapor and ice clouds in the Martian atmosphere.

Emily Lakdawalla

Amateur image mage Björn Jónsson has recently turned his attention back to Voyager 1's close-up images of Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rover fans have been excitedly watching the hills on Opportunity's horizon grow taller and taller as Opportunity rolls toward its destination, Endeavour crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

Following up on the story I first posted on August 22, the Jupiter impact fireball first noticed by Japanese amateur astronomer Masayuki Tachikawa has been independently confirmed by two other Japanese astronomers.

Emily Lakdawalla

This may be a very common event after all: another optical flash has been observed on Jupiter, again from an observer far east of the Greenwich meridian, though it was not Anthony Wesley (for once).

Emily Lakdawalla

It's high summer (in the northern hemisphere anyway) and many of you may be seeking shelter from the heat. If you need to collapse on the couch and watch TV, I have three space-y recommendations for you.