Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Orientale is the youngest large impact basin on the Moon, which means that very little of it has been obliterated by later impacts.

Emily Lakdawalla

Almost a week after Rosetta flew past Lutetia, the asteroid is now a distant pinprick of light to the spacecraft, and the science team is getting down to the business of analyzing their data.

Emily Lakdawalla

Four times a year, the Cassini mission releases three months' worth of data gathered from Saturn and its moons to NASA's Planetary Data System.

David Kass

June 29, 2010 was the second Martian anniversary of the start of Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) observations at Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

OK, it's time to look silly in your red-blue glasses again! When Tanya Harrison sent me those awesome 3D views of Olympica Fossae from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's CTX camera, she sent me two other sets of 3D landscapes on Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

I saw these pictures for the first time just 10 minutes before boarding my flight back home, and forced myself to download everything I could find as quickly as possible without pausing to actually look at them.

Emily Lakdawalla

A quick post of just one of the gorgeous images from Rosetta's flyby of Lutetia today; for more, see the Rosetta Blog. But this one was just too pretty to wait for.

Emily Lakdawalla

All appears to be going very smoothly on Rosetta through, and after, its flyby today of asteroid (21) Lutetia.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rosetta's most important job over the last few months has been to observe how the position of asteroid (21) Lutetia shifts against the background of fixed (fixed, that is, as far as Rosetta can see) stars.

Emily Lakdawalla

On July 10, 2010, at 15:44:56 UTC, the Rosetta spacecraft will fly within 3,162 kilometers of the largest asteroid yet visited by a spacecraft.

Emily Lakdawalla

As promised last week, Cassini has delivered its best photos yet of the tiny moon Daphnis, the ringmoon that is responsible for carving out the skinny Keeler gap at the outer edge of Saturn's A ring.

Emily Lakdawalla

A very brief item posted on the Hayabusa website included two pictures of the interior of its sample return capsule, one of which shows a particle.

Emily Lakdawalla

It turns out that Saturn's not the only place that displays geometrical shapes in its atmosphere. Earth does too.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a name for that funny hummocky texture to the lunar landscape:

Emily Lakdawalla

Or: Emily reads you the table of contents of Icarus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here is a photo crafted from data that are nearly as old as I am, showing a beautiful sunrise on Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

In February, the Chandrayaan-1 science team had a meeting in Ahmedabad, India, to share their results with each other.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a pretty picture post, a dramatic Cassini shot on the outer edge of the A ring captured earlier this month.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's unimpressive now, but in a few weeks the pinpoint of light at the center of this photo of a starry sky will loom very large to Rosetta's cameras.

Emily Lakdawalla

When I wrote a post about Jupiter's missing South Equatorial Belt in May, I had three main questions: how long did it take for the belt to go away, has this happened before, and how can a planet as big as Jupiter change its appearance so quickly?