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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Hubble turns 20
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to believe it's been going strong for so many years.
Titan and Dione: The same, but different
Here's a new lovely color composition of Titan and Dione captured by Cassini. This one was taken on April 20, 2010; a set of 15 raw images taken of the two moons just showed up on the Cassini raw images website.
Hayabusa's coming home
It really looks like Hayabusa is going to make it home. Hayabusa's sample return capsule will be returning to Earth on June 13, 2010, landing in the Woomera Prohibited Area, Australia at about 14:00 UTC.
Hey, I'm on APOD today!
A big thanks to Bob Nemiroff, editor of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website, for picking my composition of a set of Cassini photos of Dione and Titan for today's offering.
Volcanism across the solar system: Earth
Yesterday I asked for suggestions for topics to write about, and you readers seem to have volcanoes on your minds!
A calming Titan
Usually I like Mondays, but today I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. When I get overwhelmed, I look at pictures from Cassini.
Off to MarsSed 2010
I’m headed off to El Paso Texas tomorrow! Why? Because that’s where the Mars Sedimentology and Stratigraphy workshop is!
21 Lutetia, Rosetta's July target
While I was waiting for President Obama's speech yesterday, I read over a paper by I. N. Belskaya et al titled
What it looks like when a CME explodes toward us
The animation I posted yesterday, of a huge coronal mass ejection exploding away from the Sun, caused several people to ask if it could do Earth any harm.
Stellar explosion
The Sun just spat out a huge coronal mass ejection, an event made visible by the watchful cameras on SOHO.
Dione and Titan
It's axiomatic that as soon as I post about pretty Cassini pictures, another set of pretty photos will appear on the raw images website.
A feast of pretty pictures from Cassini
Cassini has it almost too easy. Point at anything in the Saturn system and you're guaranteed of a shot that looks, at least, pretty.
Venus Express evidence for recent hot-spot volcanism on Venus
Venus? What? Somebody still studies that planet? Yes, and in fact there's an active spacecraft there: Venus Express, the poor little sister to Mars Express.
A busy day for Cassini: Dione plus bonus Enceladus and Janus
The Cassini Saturn orbiter just completed its second very close flyby of Saturn's mid-sized iceball moon Dione, and the images from that encounter have been streaming onto the Cassini raw images website this morning.
Pretty (strange) picture from HiRISE: Dust flow crater?
Yesterday was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE team's latest flood of archived images, 1,025 of them. I skipped forward to page 42 (what other number would I pick?) and started browsing from there.
Water on the Moon: Direct evidence from Chandrayaan-1's Moon Impact Probe
I've reported before about the detection of water on the surface of the Moon by the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter and the Deep Impact and Cassini spacecraft, but what I'm about to tell you about is actually more exciting: the direct detection of water in the lunar atmosphere by the Chandrayaan-1 Moon Impact Probe.
Pretty picture: Rhea, rings, and two little moons
Here's a lovely picture whose components came down from Cassini a few days ago.
Pretty picture: Fly through the aurora
Space Station astronaut Soichi Noguchi is an awesome photographer. This image is going straight into the
Strong geomagnetic storm today
This morning I received a bulletin warning of a
Pretty picture: An unexplained chain of elliptical craters on the Moon
Here's the first cool pic I've managed to produce from the recently-released Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera data set.



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