Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily Lakdawalla

I've finally worked my way through all of the Hyperion images that were returned from the last flyby. It's a wonderful data set.

Emily Lakdawalla

...but this one is much closer to home than Katrina and Rita were.

Emily Lakdawalla

I received the following question by email last week:

Emily Lakdawalla

I got an email last night from Anne Verbiscer, whom I had contacted about rounding up some amateur astronomers to help the Cassini mission with some photometric observations of Hyperion.

Emily Lakdawalla

I received a press release in my inbox this morning that made me think. It came from the Royal Astronomical Society, and was titled

Emily Lakdawalla

Since the discovery of 2003 UB313, larger than Pluto, there's been a lively debate going on in many places about what makes a planet. There's now an article in Nature talking about a proposal that would address the controversy

Emily Lakdawalla

There were a few talks at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting dealing with a rare and fortuitous event that happened on January 13, 2005.

Emily Lakdawalla

At a press briefing, the co-discoverers of the so-called

Emily Lakdawalla

According to Jason Perry, the much-anticipated Titan-7 RADAR imagery across Titan's southern hemisphere may have been lost due to an error on Cassini's solid state recorder. That will be very sad if it turns out to be true.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today is the last day of DPS, and the first that has not had a press conference session at lunchtime, so I have a few moments here to do some catching up.

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily Lakdawalla

This lovely animation of Itokawa represents 20 individual images taken between 18:10 on September 5 and 00:30 on September 6, from a distance of less than 700 kilometers away.

Emily Lakdawalla

On August 2, 2005, MESSENGER flew by Earth at an altitude of a mere 2,347 kilometers above Mongolia.

Emily Lakdawalla

First, here's a nice shot of Epimetheus, which was taken about a month ago.

Emily Lakdawalla

Checking the Cassini raw images website, I found quite a few more images of Hyperion this morning. It looks like Cassini had a leisurely flyby of the little moon from roughly 700,000 kilometers' distance.

Bruce Betts

Following last year's Potentially Hazardous Asteroid and a few other non-main-belt discoveries, I looked into what improvements I could make to more efficiently image the sky. The major advance involved the design of a 3-lens corrector comprising 2 stock lenses and a custom lens I made myself.

Emily Lakdawalla

MESSENGER is now returning images as it is bearing down on Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini mission planner Dave Seal just gave me the latest reference trajectory for Cassini, so I've gone through and updated the flyby altitudes on the Cassini tour page.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's official: Enceladus has joined the rarefied community of Solar System objects that have been caught in the act of making new geology.