Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just received one of those chillingly-titled missives from JPL:

Ryan Anderson

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.

A.J.S. Rayl

Despite some struggles with terrain and technology, the Mars Exploration Rovers moved their missions forward in February, as Spirit and Opportunity pressed on toward their next major Martian attractions.

Emily Lakdawalla

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.

John Spencer

It seems like no time since we selected Cassini's extended mission tour of the Saturn system, in early 2007. Now we're flying that tour, which extends Cassini's original four years in Saturn orbit for another 27 months, until September 2010. So now we're looking into the future- far into the future.

Emily Lakdawalla

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here is every single image of the last two moons discovered prior to the Voyager 2 encounter, Titania and Umbriel.

Marc Rayman

Dawn continues to close in on Mars, ready for the gravitational slingshot that will help it on its expedition to the asteroid belt and its quest to gain insights into the evolution of the solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

After posting my brief

Emily Lakdawalla

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

There have been a couple more releases from JPL in recent days updating the slightly worrisome announcement about Spirit that came out on January 28.

Ryan Anderson

Google Earth's latest edition was just released and guess what? It has a Mars setting!

Emily Lakdawalla

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.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rover mission crossed the finish line of another major milestone this month, marking its fifth anniversary of exploring the Red Planet. As team members celebrated and shared stories in events all around Los Angeles, Spirit and Opportunity kept on roving, bucking up under the inevitable pains of growing older. They're heading now for their next major destinations.

Marc Rayman

Dawn continues on course for its pas de deux with Mars on February 17. The planet's gravity will gracefully assist the spacecraft on its way to rendezvous with its intended celestial partners Vesta and Ceres in the more distant asteroid belt.

Emily Lakdawalla

In which I discover Earl Slipher's Mars: The Photographic Story.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rather than try to interpret what's going on, I'm just going to repost in full a

Emily Lakdawalla

Next in The Planetary Society's 365 Days of Astronomy doubleheader is Planetary Society President Jim Bell, whose show, airing today, is on

Emily Lakdawalla

Spirit's been getting some nice views of the spot it spent all of 2008 in,