Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa has been riding an incredible wave of luck lately, resulting in the dramatic success of the sample grab last week. But it looks as though Hayabusa's luck may be running out.

Emily Lakdawalla

Remember how Hayabusa was virtually still for 30 minutes? JAXA is now saying that Hayabusa actually touched down -- and more than that, they may even have a sample.

Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa reached an altitude of about 560 meters above Hayabusa at 17:30 UTC. And at 18:00 UTC they are at 500 meters. This is still farther above the asteroid than the asteroid is big...there is still a long way to go before Hayabusa touches down...

Emily Lakdawalla

If I understand the various sources(and my somewhat vague memory) correctly, it now appears that Earth has rotated far enough to take the Deep Space Network station at Goldstone, through which Hayabusa has been transmitting, out of line with Hayabusa.

Emily Lakdawalla

In a further update on Hayabusa's status, we have been contacted by Kazuya Yoshida of the Space Robotics Laboratory at Tohuku University. Yoshida reports that the touchdown is now planned to take place

Emily Lakdawalla

There has been a delay of just about a day in JAXA's plans for landing Hayabusa on Itokawa.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tak Iyori from The Planetary Society of Japan has sent us a couple of updates on the status of Hayabusa and the mission's plans for landing on Itokawa.

Emily Lakdawalla

These photos pretty much speak for themselves. They are amazing. Hayabusa saw its own shadow on Itokawa, and took a photo of the released target marker.

Emily Lakdawalla

While I was at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Cambridge in September I had a chance to chat with David Atkinson, who's a member of the Doppler Wind Experiment team on Huygens. They and the other instrument teams have been plugging away at analyzing their data.

Emily Lakdawalla

After a 2-week delay in its schedule, the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft is back on track for launch.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers science team witnessed a bit of an expansion down here on Earth this month, while up on the Red Planet Spirit and Opportunity continued roving along. As Halloween nears, the twin robot geologists have put in another solid month's worth of work, overcoming every occasional

Emily Lakdawalla

I've just posted a very brief update on the upcoming Titan flyby, which will be the first to include RADAR imaging across the Huygens landing site.

Emily Lakdawalla

Back in August, there was a false alarm being circulated by email that Mars was going to be super-close to Earth on August 27.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just noticed this picture on the Cassini raw images website. I love these

Emily Lakdawalla

The images from Cassini's Dione encounter yesterday have started coming back, and there is a really cool set of 16 pictures of Dione and Rhea.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini is already on its way in to a close, 500-kilometer encounter with Dione -- it's less than four hours away now, at 17:52 UTC.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here is a gorgeous color mosaic of Hyperion assembled by amateur image processor Mattias Malmer from images from the recent flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, this quarter's release of Cassini data showed up at the Planetary Data System (PDS). The PDS is the public repository for all of NASA's data.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Hayabusa mission has proven to be a bit of a tease -- they were releasing lots of images to the public as they approached asteroid Itokawa, but once they arrived, the image releases shut down entirely. There is finally a little postage stamp of an image captured by Hayabusa at

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.