Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

There will be no planetary launches in 2012, but there is still plenty of deep-space activity to look forward to over the coming year.

Emily Lakdawalla

The twin GRAIL spacecraft are nearly at the end of their three-month cruises to the Moon. Currently being discussed is an extended mission for GRAIL that would begin after the June eclipse and last through most of December 2012.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a few of the amazing photos of Comet Lovejoy that have been taken from the southern hemisphere over the last few days. Comet Lovejoy is the first Kreutz sungrazer to have been discovered from the ground in 40 years, and after its surprising survival of its passage close to the Sun, it has been putting on a spectacular show in southern skies.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini flew close by Dione on December 12 and, as usual, the close pass provided opportunities for lots of dramatic photos, not just of Dione, but of other moons wandering by in the background.

Jason Davis

A timeline of one of the most memorable solar events in recent memory: the observations by six Sun-observing spacecraft of Comet Lovejoy making its perihelion passage.

Mat Kaplan

WhirledSol posted a cool Youtube tribute to the Planetary Society a year ago, and we just now found it! It has a nice explanation of why we are so passionate about space exploration.

Emily Lakdawalla

When I posted about the really cool Cassini SAR images of Enceladus a few weeks ago, I initially wrote that this was the first-ever SAR image of an icy moon other than Titan. Several people (some readers and two members of the Cassini science team!) corrected that statement: Cassini has performed SAR imaging of other icy moons (including Enceladus) before.

Emily Lakdawalla

A large team of researchers has announced in a Nature article the discovery of not one, but two, Earth-sized planets orbiting a star named Kepler-20. This article separates the observational facts from the quite-likely-to-be-true inferences from the downstream speculations.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Hasbro my3D viewer turns your phone into an electronic View-Master, making it easy to view color images in stereo.

Charlene Anderson

On December 16, 2011, the U.S. Senate voted down the House of Representatives bill that would have sliced an additional 1.83 percent from discretionary spending accounts, including NASA and NOAA.

Emily Lakdawalla

Abigail Fraeman took third place in the Washington Post's 2011 Style Invitational edible-art contest with her entry,

Jason Davis

An update on upcoming missions to the International Space Station (ISS).

Charlene Anderson

NASA had planned to release next Monday an RFP (Request for Proposals) in its Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. However, due to a funding shortfall, the agency will instead continue to use Space Act Agreements to contract for the development.

Charlene Anderson

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed appropriations bills that will provide $8.1 billion disaster aid for this year's

Emily Lakdawalla

A summary of a new article by Matt Tiscareno about planetary ring systems that reviews the known ring systems of the four giant planets and the prospects for ring systems yet to be discovered.

Emily Lakdawalla

An animation of comet Lovejoy entering the field of view of one of SOHO's Sun-monitoring cameras.

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily wakes up her 5-year-old daughter to experience her first lunar eclipse.

Emily Lakdawalla

Images from the Cassini spacecraft's flyby of Dione.

Emily Lakdawalla

A letter sent by Lev Zelenyi, director of the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI) to participants in the Phobos-Soil project about the mission's failure.

Emily Lakdawalla

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Mariner 9's November 13, 1971 arrival at Mars, Daniel Macháček has produced a morphed animation of the images that Mars' first orbiter took while approaching the planet.