Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

I practically fell out of my chair when I saw this movie.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini has just begun its 44th orbit of Saturn (called Rev 43), and is starting it off with lots of views of famously two-faced Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini got a nice

Emily Lakdawalla

According to a press release issued this morning by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the enormous solar flare that erupted on December 5 and 6 last year was accompanied by an intense radio burst that caused large numbers of Global Positioning System recivers to stop tracking the signal from the orbiting GPS satellites.

Bruce Betts

Two months after the start of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's primary science phase, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument has already acquired more than four million soundings, building toward a vast data set on the three-dimensional structure of Mars' atmosphere over the full Martian year of the orbiter's nominal mission.

Emily Lakdawalla

This image is beautiful for many reasons. It was captured by the MVIC imaging spectrometer, part of the Ralph instrument, on New Horizons, as it left the Jupiter system on March 2, 2007.

Emily Lakdawalla

The last one of New Horizons imaging instruments has finally checked in with a lovely image from the Jupiter flyby

Emily Lakdawalla

What should arrive in my inbox today but a press release from the Cassini RPWS and magnetometer teams saying, in part,

Anne Verbiscer

I received this report on the Tuesday afternoon special session on volcanism and tectonism on Saturn's satellites from Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer from the University of Virginia who I first met at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in 2005.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Tvashtar eruption continues to amaze. All this time between Galileo and New Horizons, Io's volcanoes have probably continually produced spectacular eruptions like these.

Jason Perry

Jason Perry, a member of the Cassini Imaging Team and an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona, reports from the Titan sessions.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since late January Cassini has been acquiring several sets of images that show all of Saturn's globe and ring system at once from perspectives well above and below the ring plane.

Bruce Betts

Thanks to The Planetary Society Shoemaker Grant, the 1.06-meter KLENOT telescope optics was completed at the Klet Observatory. Regular observations of the KLENOT project started in March 2002 under the new IAU/MPC code 246, so we can now present results covering 5 years of this work.

Emily Lakdawalla

OK, I had planned to confine my posts this week to Rosetta and New Horizons, but I could not let these images sit on my computer until next week.

Emily Lakdawalla

According to a press release issued minutes ago, New Horizons has successfully completed its close flyby of Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

There were two new pictures posted on the New Horizons Science Operations Center website this morning, of Io, and if you enhance the images a bit, there are two clear volcanic plumes visible on the limb -- Tvashtar and Prometheus are active!

Emily Lakdawalla

This amazing view was captured by the CIVA camera on Rosetta's Philae lander just four minutes before its closest approach to Mars on February 25, 2007. The spacecraft was only 1,000 kilometers above the planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

Iapetus is one of the many fascinating bodies in the Saturn system.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's easy to forget that Mars is another such world with cloudy weather and seasonally varying climate. This lovely image release from the CRISM instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter brings that point home.

Emily Lakdawalla