Articles

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers are now well into their second Martian winter and, all things considered, both Spirit and Opportunity are faring pretty well for being, essentially, aging Baby Boomers on bitter cold, dusty alien planet some 50 million miles away from home.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the Aurora program under way, the next European mission to Mars will be a rover named ExoMars, to be launched in 2011.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week's releases from the Mars Odyssey THEMIS team included a gorgeous one of the layered interior of Gale crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

OK, I finally got a story written about the latest and greatest of the Cassini RADAR data based upon a conversation I had with with Ralph Lorenz late last week.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since the last Titan flyby on April 30, the Cassini RADAR team has been releasing quite a large number of pieces of the swath to the Web.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week's Cassini Significant Events Report included a detailed play-by-play of the frightening morning of Mayday. I thought it was a very interesting read on how a mission deals with an

Emily Lakdawalla

After the political discussions of the morning, Mike Brown stood up to give the

Emily Lakdawalla

The Outer Planets Assessment Group opened with the status of two of the three actual outer planets missions, Cassini and Juno.

Emily Lakdawalla

Next up at the Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting was an overview of the plans for future Europa missions.

Emily Lakdawalla

Before I get to my notes from OPAG I want to minimally acknowledge today's news, which I'll have to get to in more detail later.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just wanted to point out a couple of new items on the website.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since January 1, 2004—the beginning of the Saturn phase of the mission—Cassini has radioed almost 139 Gigabytes of science data to Earth.

A.J.S. Rayl

Two years and 3 months after they bounced to landings at Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum, the Mars Exploration Rovers are heading into their second, long cold Martian winter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Get used to this view of Home Plate and Husband Hill, because Spirit will be seeing a lot of it over the next 8 months, whenever power levels permit the rover to eke a little bit of science activity out of the day.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today is the day that New Horizons passes Mars' orbit (not that Mars is anywhere close to New Horizons right now).

A.J.S. Rayl

As autumn falls toward winter on the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet, the Mars Exploration Rovers are on the move again. Although the twin robot field geologists are roving as quickly as possible to their next major destinations, the pace is slowing down.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini planner Dave Seal gave me a newly updated list of times and dates for Cassini's ongoing tour of the Saturn system, so I went through and compared my table to his and made updates to flyby distances.

Emily Lakdawalla

A news update from the MESSENGER mission last Friday included a news item that piqued my interest: they reported that the MESSENGER science team website is now live.

Emily Lakdawalla

The audience was rapt as Project Manager Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi stood up to give an introduction to the Hayabusa spacecraft and described the saga of the mission to date.

Emily Lakdawalla

So after those two rover talks I skipped over to the other large room to listen to what the Cassini science teams had to say about Enceladus.