Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Every time Cassini gets reasonably close to one of the moons of Saturn, whether the close approach is a targeted one or just an opportunistic encounter, its planners usually take advantage of the proximity to take a bunch of photos.

Ryan Anderson

Through a crazy random happenstance, I was just interviewed by a friend of a friend of a friend at Australian radio station 'triple j' for a feature on lasers!

Emily Lakdawalla

It's the solstice on Mars today: summer in the north, winter in the south.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm delighted to point you to a citizen science project for wannabe space geologists like me: Moon Zoo.

Emily Lakdawalla

A good start to my day today: The New York Times' Lens Blog featured the

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, this is a cool paper. Here's the gist: the Cassini RADAR team has spotted some river channels on Titan that shine so brightly in radar images, there must be something special going on to explain that brightness.

Emily Lakdawalla

Via Daniel Fischer's Tweet about a blog entry by Astro BobI learned of something which should be obvious to anyone who has trained even a rather small telescope on Jupiter over the past few weeks: one of its iconic stripes is just plain gone.

Emily Lakdawalla

On Mars, at 15:00 local true solar time on May 2, a solitary rover gazed southward across her own dusty deck and snapped three photos, actually three sets of three photos, which were combined to make this view.

Emily Lakdawalla

A recent entry by Bethany Ehlmann from the blog of the Planetary Geomorphology Working Group of the International Association of Geomorphologists demonstrates how you can combine the power of different types of data to tease out a rich story of the past history of one spot on Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

A lot of readers have expressed interest in the origin of Saturn's north polar hexagon. The hexagon is a long-lived pattern in the clouds surrounding Saturn's north pole, which has been observed since the Voyagers passed by in 1980 and 1981.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a linky post today, as I am nanny-less.

Ryan Anderson

We started off Day 2 of the field trip by driving up onto the eroded rocks of what used to be the tidal flats of the ancient reef, between the shore and the continental shelf.

Emily Lakdawalla

A contest has just been announced that appears to create a pathway for schoolchildren to suggest names to the International Astronomical Union for minor planets -- all those small things in the solar system that don't orbit the eight big ones.

Emily Lakdawalla

That's a bit of an overdramatic title, but it's true that the most efficient way for us to reduce the risk we face from asteroids that have a very small chance of hitting Earth in the future is to determine their orbits more precisely.

Emily Lakdawalla

Every time I post a radio telescope image of a near-Earth asteroid, I get at least one reader question asking me to explain how radio telescopes take photos, so I'm hereby writing a post explaining the basics of how delay-Doppler imaging works.

Emily Lakdawalla

Either Spirit is the longest-lived landed Mars mission ever, or she is not. We won't know for certain unless we manage to observe a radio signal from her.

Emily Lakdawalla

I learned today from Jason Perry that 42 new crater names have been approved by the International Astronomical Union for Rhea, the second largest of Saturn's moons.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the recent Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaging of the Lunokhod 1 rover, scientists on the APOLLO project were finally able to do something that scientists have been dreaming of for more than three decades: shoot the rover with a laser.

Emily Lakdawalla

Got some 3D glasses handy? Check out this awesome view of a very strange feature on Mars, courtesy of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Context Camera (CTX).

Ryan Anderson

Hello everyone, I’m back from the MarsSed 2010 meeting in El Paso!