Explore Worlds
Find Life
Defend Earth
All
All
Sun
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Two new names in the solar system: Herse and Weywot
Via the USGS I learned that Jupiter has passed a milestone of sorts, and now has fifty named satellites.
Tracking the stars -- and Earth
This was a neat photo from ESA today.
Rosetta is homing in on Earth
Heads up! ESA's Rosetta spacecraft is approaching for its last flyby of Earth, on Friday, November 13.
Four moons and a ring
Thanks to Mike Malaska for the tip on this one. The image is part of an animation that ends with Rhea transiting Saturn.
Planetary Radio Q and A: Are meteorites on Mars actually interesting?
The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been studying a lot of meteorites. That made me wonder, why study meteorites on Mars when we can study them in hand on Earth? How are Mars meteorites interesting?
She moves! "First drive sequence in 145 sols" for Spirit
It's been an awful long time since we've seen one of these from Spirit: an animation of four Navcam frames documenting motion!
MESSENGER Rewrites Mercury Textbooks Even Before Entering Orbit
As MESSENGER zoomed toward Mercury for its third flyby, it was commanded to rotate in a maneuver that would help it test a surprising result from the second flyby.
Planetary Radio Q and A: Not-so-gassy giants
On Planetary Radio's
Data from Kaguya's prime mission to the Moon has been released
Yesterday, the Japanese space agency announced the public release of the data from the primary mission of the Kaguya (a.k.a. SELENE) lunar orbiter.
Voting is Fixed!
There were some issues with the voting widget on the University Science Writing competition, but they have been resolved, and it turns out it was counting the votes all along! So go vote for my post if you haven't done so yet today!
Another marvelous image from Cassini's Nov 2 Enceladus flyby
This image goodie was produced from the raw images from Cassini's close encounter with Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus yesterday by Gordan Ugarkovic.
Cassini's Enceladus encounter, with bonus Tethys
Raw images from Cassini's close pass by Enceladus today started appearing on the JPL raw images website, and some less-compressed versions of a few of them showed up on the CICLOPS website.
Vote Early and Often!
Remember when I mentioned a few weeks ago that I submitted a blog post about MSL as an action-adventure hero to ScientificBlogging's science writing competition?
Fun Friday photo: Titan and Rhea
Cassini recently captured a series of images documenting Rhea passing behind Titan.
FINDS Exo-Earths Starts Up: Testing the Prototype
The prototype that Julien constructed in the lab was taken to Lick Observatory, and we had our first-light run with the fiber in July.
HiRISE sees Phoenix in the Martian spring
These Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE images of the defunct Phoenix lander in the early dawn light of northern spring have been out for some time, but no one had accomplished the difficult task of locating the Phoenix hardware in them until this week.
Gorgeous high-res image of the Apollo 17 landing site
The LROC team posted today a new image of the Apollo 17 landing site, captured after Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter had gotten in to its 50-kilometer mapping orbit, so this is much more detailed than the previous view.
What "phase angle" means
As is probably obvious by now, I love playing with spacecraft image data. I am always looking for excuses to dive into space image archives to unearth images of stuff in space that haven't really been seen by very many people before.
Carnival of Space #126, plus more from Jupiter's moon Io
The 126th Space Carnival is live over at Jason Perry's always-excellent (if rather narrowly focused) Io blog The Gish Bar Times.