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Emily Lakdawalla

Last week, planetary astronomers Anne Verbiscer, Michael Skrutskie, and Doug Hamilton published a paper in Nature succinctly titled

Emily Lakdawalla

Advance warning: this entry may be a little technical for some.

Emily Lakdawalla

Unmannedspaceflight.com member Astro0 was fiddling around with an interesting-looking sequence of Cassini images when he discovered their purpose -- they were gathered in order to see if Cassini could catch aurorae flaring into being near Saturn's north pole. Cassini sure did!

Emily Lakdawalla

The Palomar Observatory adaptive optics image of the crater Cabeus remains the best I've seen from ground-based telescopes of the LCROSS impact site.

Emily Lakdawalla

So the big drama on LCROSS is over.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Diviner team just released some preliminary views of their data taken during the LCROSS impact, which clearly shows the thermal signature from the crash into the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's been a little difficult to get a hold of the graphics that they used at this morning's press briefing.

Emily Lakdawalla

This plot just shows the aggregate radiance in ultraviolet and visible wavelengths -- all wavelengths -- seen by one of LCROSS' spectrometers after the Centaur hit the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

I am pretty sure this image shows the LCROSS impact plume and its shadow as seen from the MMT observatory in Arizona, but as Alan Boyle just pointed out, the time stamps indicate the photos were all taken before the nominal impact time.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's the sharpest optical image shown today of the Moon, from Palomar Observatory.

Emily Lakdawalla

Quite a night! I set my alarm for 3:15 am in order to get up and watch LCROSS crash into the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

I am having issues with TwitPic this morning, so will occasionally post new images from the LCROSS camera to this blog entry.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm back online and ready to watch LCROSS smash into the Moon this morning!

Emily Lakdawalla

Way early tomorrow morning, LCROSS and its Centaur upper stage will crash into the lunar south pole.

Emily Lakdawalla

The visualization studio at Goddard Space Flight Center has just posted some handy simulations of what we can expect the LCROSS impact to look like.

Emily Lakdawalla

As a reminder that we've been crashing stuff into the Moon for decades, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team released today a photo of the crater made by the spent upper stage of the Saturn rocket that lofted the Apollo 14 mission to the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

LCROSS and its Centaur upper stage have separated successfully, and the LCROSS shepherd spacecraft has braked in order to follow behind the Centaur when both impact the Moon tomorrow.

Emily Lakdawalla

The caption to today's image release from the MESSENGER team concerns their long-term campaign to study Mercury's brightness through a range of phase angles.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today's science press release out of the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting concerns changes in lakes near Titan's south pole observed during Cassini's mission. In brief, repeat Cassini RADAR observations of the same spots during different Titan flybys turned up places where there appeared to be dark lakes in earlier images and dry lakes in later images.

Ryan Anderson

Next up in my series of posts about the instruments on MSL is the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI).