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.
Spirit puts the pedal to the metal
Way to go, Spirit! The last two drives for the five-wheeled rover have taken it a total of about 40 meters west, traveling around the north edge of Home Plate. If I'm not mistaken, that's more than Spirit has driven in the last 400 sols combined.
Give MSL a Real Name!
The voting has begun to give the Mars Science Laboratory a genuine, non-acronym name!
Planetary Surface Processes Field Trip: Day 7
Friday was the last day of the field trip, and we spent it at the Petrified Forest National Park.
Planetary Surface Processes Field Trip: Day 6
Today we visited Grand Falls and the nearby dune field. Grand Falls is especially interesting because it combines many of the processes that are active in shaping planetary surfaces.
Planetary Surface Processes Field Trip: Day 5
Today was a long and awesome day. We started out at Meteor Crater, the youngest and best preserved impact crater on Earth!
Planetary Surface Processes Field Trip: Day 4
Today we visited the Grand Canyon. If you haven’t been there before, there is no way to convey what it is like.
Planetary Surface Processes Field Trip: Day 2
Today we made our way from Phoenix north to Flagstaff, and on the way stopped to check out some interesting geology in Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon.
Planetary Surface Processes Field Trip: Day 3
Today was all about volcanoes.
Planetary Surface Processes Field Trip: Day 1
After a hectic week of tying up loose ends and running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I now have my proster done for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and am in Phoenix for the Planetary Surface Processes field trip, led by my adviser Jim Bell.
What are the rovers up to? March 2009
As usual, troubled Spirit's progress sometimes amounts to only centimeters, while golden child Opportunity has already clocked four kilometers on its trek toward Endeavour.
The Reasons Behind the MSL Delay
There are a pair of excellent articles in this week's Space Review by Adrian Brown, looking at the Technical and Budgetary reasons that the Mars Science Lab launch was delayed until 2011.
Mapping Mars, now and in history
Planetary cartographer Phil Stooke has been working on a cool project to compose and compare maps of Mars that show how we saw the planet throughout the Space Age.
Looks like the Dawn flyby of Mars went well
Looks like the Dawn flyby of Mars went well: here' a photo of Mars taken by Dawn near its closest approach to Mars during its February 17 flyby.
What do we know about Uranus' moons? Part 2
Here is every single image of the last two moons discovered prior to the Voyager 2 encounter, Titania and Umbriel.
Hooray for Hayabusa!
According to JAXA (the Japanese space agency), poor little Hayabusa has successfully restarted its ion engine and has resumed powered flight today. Hooray! This is good news for Hayabusa's eventual return to Earth.
New Google Mars
Google Earth's latest edition was just released and guess what? It has a Mars setting!
A pretty new Hubble image of Mars
A set of Mars image data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a year ago was just released to Hubble's data archive. It was captured by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on January 30, 2008 when Mars was about 115 million kilometers from Earth.