Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

The Phoenix mission confirmed it this morning: the disappearing act pulled by those chunks of bright material in the Dodo trench pretty much nails the identification of the bright material as ice, which is great news for the mission. Ice is what Phoenix went all the way to Mars to study; it's what the team has been aiming for all these years.

Jim Bell

One of the ways that planetary scientists try to understand the origin and evolution of landforms on other planets is by studying similar kinds of landforms or

Emily Lakdawalla

JAXA has posted a note on their website on the status of Hayabusa, which apparently reached aphelion in late May. Hayabusa is Japan's amazing ion-powered mission to asteroid Itokawa, which touched down on Itokawa to grab a sample in mid-November 2005, but suffered an injury that has left in doubt its ability to return the sample capsule to Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily hits the high points of today's press conference.

Emily Lakdawalla

A majority of the people who work in planetary geology are usually associated with one or maybe two missions, doing all their research on the results from one instrument on one mission. But there are a few people whose expertise cuts across many space missions, and an even smaller number of people who seem to work on almost everything. Randy Kirk is one of those people.

Emily Lakdawalla

I apologize for the long hiatus in this White Rock series, but I hope this entry will be worth the wait.

Emily Lakdawalla

I thought it would be fun to start the week by taking stock of what's going on with all the active planetary missions out there.

Emily Lakdawalla

I recently found the focus to work on a big project: namely, downloading and examining every Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera image of Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is from the

Emily Lakdawalla

As New Horizons continues its journey (it's now approaching the orbital distance of Saturn, though it's very far from that planet in space), the mission is taking advantage of the recent experience with the Jupiter flyby to plan out the science operations for the Pluto-Charon encounter.

Emily Lakdawalla

When we last visited White Rock on Mars, both Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey were mapping the planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

I thought that today's image release from the Cassini imaging team was exceptionally pretty.

Emily Lakdawalla

The HiRISE instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter really is a spy camera in space. Check out this sequence of nine images from the HiRISE archives, which Doug Ellison pulled together into an animation covering more than a year of Spirit's mission.

Ryan Anderson

Exploring another planet is an expensive business. We all know this, but sometimes it hits home harder than others. Today was one of those times.

Ted Stryk

I spent a large portion of the day at the Lunar and Planetary Institute's library and presented my own poster during the poster sessions, so my coverage of Thursday's sessions is limited.

Bruce Betts

Last week Mars Climate Sounder collected its 20 millionth sounding at Mars. Mars Climate Sounder is scanning without problems, collecting science observations of the atmosphere of Mars. Mars Climate Sounder has now been observing Mars for over 17 months (three quarters of a Mars year and also approximately three quarters of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter primary science mission).

Emily Lakdawalla

In the fourth installment in my look at one spot on Mars as seen through the eyes of different spacecraft, we finally get to a mission that is still operational: 2001 Mars Odyssey.

Ryan Anderson

Last time, I gave some of the background information about my research. Now, armed with that knowledge, we can press forward and talk about what I do.

Ryan Anderson

The mantra of Mars exploration is

Emily Lakdawalla

We first spotted the strange bright feature colloquially known as