Articles

Alan Stern

Today, I'm kicking the week off with a look at the unusually intense confluence of far flung planetary exploration that's just around the corner, starting the middle of next year.

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

A very pretty picture of a moon among stars. Happy 2009, everyone!

Emily Lakdawalla

This time around DPS features three separate oral sessions on Titan, indicating just how much attention that moon is getting from the scientific community right now. From the first session, on Titan's lower atmosphere, I'm just covering the two talks on Titan's lakes.

Emily Lakdawalla

A press release from the Cassini VIMS team today is titled

Emily Lakdawalla

One of my favorite amateur image magicians, Gordan Ugarkovic continues to play around with the amazing data recently released by the Cassini mission, covering the Iapetus encounter of last September. Here's a lovely mosaic he just put together of the Voyager Mountains.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's what's happening on active planetary missions this week.

Emily Lakdawalla

I thought it would be fun to start the week by taking stock of what's going on with all the active planetary missions out there.

Emily Lakdawalla

I thought that today's image release from the Cassini imaging team was exceptionally pretty.

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.

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

One of the major results from the Cassini mission last year was the production of a mosaic of images from its RADAR instrument covering Titan's north pole. Titan's north pole has lakes upon lakes, some big, some small, but everywhere you look, there they are.

Emily Lakdawalla

Antares dims and brightens as it passes behind the rings as seen from Cassini in this animation.

Emily Lakdawalla

Lakes have been spotted near the south pole of Titan before, in this image by the ISS team, which was considered compelling but not conclusive at the time.

Doug Ellison

Emily Lakdawalla

There's been quite a lot of Mars on this page for the last week; it's time to remind ourselves that there are other places besides Mars in the solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

The other day I posted a global view of Titan featuring new territory near the north pole. Now the imaging team has released a much higher resolution version of this view.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here we bring you fifteen different Cassini views of the same world, a cratered ball of ice called Tethys.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is a cool picture that was released a couple of weeks ago by Cassini's camera team.

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.