Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

It looks like the European Space Agency was busy overnight -- lots of great Earth- and space- based images of the impact have been appearing on various websites.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here in Von Karman auditorium at JPL, as they get ready for the press conference, they are playing

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily Lakdawalla

The Deep Impact mission seems to have produced an impact crash beyond the expectations, but not the hopes, of the science team.

Emily Lakdawalla

I woke this morning to find a press release in my Inbox that said:

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft is set for its date with Comet Tempel 1.

Emily Lakdawalla

With four days remaining until Deep Impact crashes into comet Tempel 1, the comet is looming larger and larger in the public view.

Emily Lakdawalla

Apparently there is a bogus email circulating around the Web with the following text:

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini imaging team has released an image containing a feature unlike any other that they have seen on Titan. The very dark color, curvaceous outline, and sharp edge of the feature have led them to the conclusion that it could well be the long-theorized but never-before-seen body of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface of Titan.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini's been in orbit around Saturn for almost exactly a year now, and the mission seems pretty much to have dropped off of the public radar screen. But there's still three years to go on the primary mission, and lots left to do, and I for one am not at all bored.

Emily Lakdawalla

As MESSENGER began its approach for its August 2 flyby of Earth, its cameras have snapped their first images. The images clearly show a cloudy Earth—and, to scientists' surprise, the Moon as well.

Amir Alexander

During April 2005, the Mars Global Surveyor happened to pass relatively close to Odyssey and Mars Express. What resulted were remarkably clear pictures of human-made spacecraft orbiting and alien world.

Emily Lakdawalla

Although the two spacecraft traveled a billion kilometers together to study Titan, Cassini and Huygens are two very different types of missions.

A.J.S. Rayl

Astronomers have revised the Torino scale, the color-coded advisory system to assess the threat of asteroids and other near-Earth objects (NEOs) to make it easier for the public to understand.

Amir Alexander

To mark the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the planet Pluto, The Planetary Society presents to its readers the remarkable story of the discovery.

Amir Alexander

74 years after Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto as a faint dot on a pair of photographic plates, a modern group of astronomers made another remarkable discovery. On March 15, 2004, Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz of Yale announced the discovery of Sedna – the furthest object ever detected in the Solar System.

Amir Alexander

The discovery of Planet X was announced to the world on March 13, 1930, which marked the anniversary of William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1781 as well as Percival Lowell’s birthday. The observatory’s communiqué emphasized that the discovery was no coincidence, but the vindication of Lowell’s predictions made years before.

Amir Alexander

Since his teenage years Clyde Tombaugh had been an avid amateur astronomer and a gifted telescope builder. Based on instructions contained in an article from a boy’s Sunday school paper, he built a series of telescopes of increasing power and quality on the family farm.

Emily Lakdawalla

Scientists have released a new sound from Huygens, representing the radio signal that Cassini detected from the little probe as it descended to Titan's surface.

Amir Alexander

The discovery of Neptune accounted for nearly all the unexplained motions of the outer planets of the Solar System. Nevertheless, several astronomers insisted that some unexplained residual motions remained, pointing to the presence of a ninth planet beyond the orbit of Neptune.