Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

MESSENGER is in a unique position in the solar system, orbiting the Sun well within the orbit of Venus. From there, it can gaze outward from the Sun to search for tiny objects that may possibly be traveling in the same region, called vulcanoids.

Emily Lakdawalla

This news is no surprise, but I think it's the first such discovery I've heard of: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team has identified a new crater on the Moon, one that wasn't there when Apollo 15 flew over.

Emily Lakdawalla

Three months ago, grandiosely, I announced that I was going to survey volcanism across the solar system, and I began the journey on Earth. Then I failed to follow up.

Emily Lakdawalla

Orientale is the youngest large impact basin on the Moon, which means that very little of it has been obliterated by later impacts.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a name for that funny hummocky texture to the lunar landscape:

Emily Lakdawalla

Or: Emily reads you the table of contents of Icarus.

Emily Lakdawalla

In February, the Chandrayaan-1 science team had a meeting in Ahmedabad, India, to share their results with each other.

Emily Lakdawalla

Speaking of spacecraft crashing...

Emily Lakdawalla

Exploring Earth analogues of space landscapes is a valuable activity that can help planetary scientists correctly interpret what their instruments are telling them.

Emily Lakdawalla

Coming closer every day, Mr. Hayabusa has sighted his final destination: his homeworld, Earth, and its attendant Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm delighted to point you to a citizen science project for wannabe space geologists like me: Moon Zoo.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the recent Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaging of the Lunokhod 1 rover, scientists on the APOLLO project were finally able to do something that scientists have been dreaming of for more than three decades: shoot the rover with a laser.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to believe it's been going strong for so many years.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've reported before about the detection of water on the surface of the Moon by the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter and the Deep Impact and Cassini spacecraft, but what I'm about to tell you about is actually more exciting: the direct detection of water in the lunar atmosphere by the Chandrayaan-1 Moon Impact Probe.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's the first cool pic I've managed to produce from the recently-released Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera data set.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's been two weeks since Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission released a flood of data to the Planetary Data System, but I haven't posted any pictures dug out of the camera data yet. This post will explain why.

Emily Lakdawalla

Check out this watery world! It's clearly a computer simulation of something, but of what? Can you guess?

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a piece of the Lunar-Reconnaissance-Orbiter-spots-the-Lunokhods story that I was intrigued by but just didn't have the time this week to investigate properly.

Emily Lakdawalla

I am delighted to report that within a day of the first view of Luna 21 and Lunokhod 2 since the end of that mission in 1973, the sister mission, Luna 17 and Lunokhod 1, has also been found.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday I posted a bit of a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera image showing the tracks of the Russian Lunokhod 2 rover. Today, I can post for you an image showing the rover's final resting place