Articles

Marc Rayman

Dawn usually interrupts ion thrusting once a week for about eight hours to point its main antenna to Earth. On November 30, however, instead of resuming thrusting, it dutifully followed different instructions that were stored onboard.

Bruce Betts

Congratulations to NASA's Kepler mission team on their announcement of the discovery of its first five exoplanets (planets around other stars).

Emily Lakdawalla

I know I already posted Earth once before. But I could not resist winding up the calendar with this view of a new Earth, for the new year.

Emily Lakdawalla

Did you think I was going to skip Uranus? How could I?

Emily Lakdawalla

I just got a press release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that made my heart sink; the extrication effort for Spirit is not going at all well. I did not want to keep sounding a knell of bad news. But once in a while, I do have to report bad news.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers quietly wrapped up 2009 this month: Spirit continued to valiantly spin its wheels in an attempt to get out of its embedded location on the west side of Home Plate in Gusev Crater; and Opportunity continued its investigation of Marquette Island, perhaps the oldest Martian rock it's found to date at Meridiani Planum.

Bruce Betts

NASA has selected three finalists for the next New Frontiers mission: a Venus lander, a near Earth asteroid sample return, and a lunar Aitken basin sample return mission.

Emily Lakdawalla

Looking over the list of planets, moons, and smaller bodies I posted so far, I realized I didn't have an image of a comet yet.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rhea? You might be asking. Rhea? When Saturn has so many more interesting moons? Hear me out.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's yet another of the moons of Uranus for you: Ariel, a near-twin in diameter to Umbriel, but apparently with more interesting geology.

Emily Lakdawalla

This one is fresh from the spacecraft! The data were captured yesterday, December 26, by Cassini during its best yet imaging encounter with the small ringmoon Prometheus, and showed up on the Cassini raw images website today.

Emily Lakdawalla

Titan is a weird alternate-universe Earth, surprisingly similar to our own planet in some ways, but not at all like our planet in others.

Emily Lakdawalla

To those of you who celebrate the holiday, merry Christmas! I hope Santa was good to you.

Emily Lakdawalla

This was so cute I had to repost it -- and record it too.

Emily Lakdawalla

I think if you polled most space fans about their favorite moons of Jupiter, Ganymede would come in a consistent third behind Europa and Io. It's just not fair.

Emily Lakdawalla

I love posting animations of Cassini images that I compose from frames grabbed from the mission's raw images website, but they are shoddy compared to the versions that eventually come out from the mission's imaging team.

Emily Lakdawalla

Miranda is the one moon of Uranus for which we have very good images from Voyager 2, and that was a stroke of luck, because low-resolution shots of all of Uranus' moons would have told us that it was, geologically speaking, the most dramatic of the five biggest ones.

Emily Lakdawalla

Iapetus! I'm always interested in Cassini images, but five years ago this month I was refreshing the Cassini raw images website several times a day, eagerly anticipating the mission's first good encounter with Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's Neptune, but not quite like you've ever seen it before.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini mission announced today the first observation of a specular reflection off of a lake on Titan. A specular reflection is a mirror-like flash, and you only get one when you have a mirror-like surface -- very, very smooth.