Articles

Marc Rayman

Dawn is as far from Earth as the Sun.

Marc Rayman

Dawn continues its powered flight, having accumulated more than 100 days of ion thrusting since its launch nearly seven months ago. All systems are healthy as the probe patiently and persistently propels itself through the solar system.

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.

A.J.S. Rayl

Brandishing the trademark resilience that has endeared them to millions of people around the world, the Mars Exploration Rovers kept their robotic noses to the grindstone through March, soldiering on into their third Martian winter with slightly more power than predictions anticipated and enough proven mettle to dodge a budgetary pothole on Earth that might have taken one of them out of action. Now, 50 months after Spirit defied the odds and bounced safely to an upright landing and Opportunity followed with the impossible scoring of a 300-million-mile hole-in-one, the twin robot field geologists are driving the MER mission into new territory once again.

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.

Marc Rayman

Treating intercalary days just as it does most other days in its interplanetary cruise, today Dawn continues patiently and ever-so-gently reshaping its orbit around the Sun with the delicate yet persistent push from its ion propulsion system.

A.J.S. Rayl

With fall slowly passing in the southern hemisphere of Mars and winter looming on the horizon, the Mars Exploration Rovers carried on with business as usual in February, working as much as possible before the reduced sunlight and beyond-frigid temperatures of the dreaded season set in.

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

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a press release from the Cassini mission today about a pile of papers (14 of them!) being published in the journal Icarus about Saturn's icy moons. I haven't had time to read more than the overview article yet, but I wanted to come up with a graphic for an overview of Saturn's moons, and I couldn't resist delving into the massive database of Cassini images to produce something new

Emily Lakdawalla

Opportunity is now following a rather leisurely autumn schedule, according to the latest update on the mission website. Some of the work Opportunity is doing involves staring skyward, looking for patterns in the clouds that pass overhead at this time of year. One of the guys at unmannedspaceflight.com has put together some nifty animations of the wispy cloud patterns.