Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

A report on the press briefing and talks from the Fall 2011 American Geophyisical Union meeting about the data on Vesta collected so far by Dawn.

A.J.S. Rayl

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has discovered gypsum and its

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily reports from the Fall 2011 American Geophyisical Union meeting about advancements in space weather prediction.

Jason Davis

Observations of the newly sighted Kreutz sungrazer comet C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy) from the ground and from SOHO (a joint NASA/ESA satellite) and STEREO (NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory).

Emily Lakdawalla

A report on a press briefing about Voyager 1 at the Fall 2011 American Geophyisical Union meeting. The spacecraft has entered a new region between our solar system and interstellar space, which scientists are calling the stagnation region.

Jason Davis

With a new rover, Curiosity, on its way to Mars, Jason Davis takes a look at what we knew - or thought we knew - about the planet back in 1935.

Emily Lakdawalla

OK, this is my last pile of book reviews for this year: a collection of good books for kids older than mine.

Emily Lakdawalla

After modifying two antennas and attempting to send commands to Phobos-Grunt for weeks without success, ESA has made the decision to stop tracking support.

Emily Lakdawalla

A presentation providing a correctly scaled, reasonably correctly colored view of the largest bodies in the solar system is made available for use by teachers, professors, and informal educators.

Marc Rayman

In this update on the Dawn mission, project system engineer Marc Rayman reports that the probe is headed for its low altitude mapping orbit (LAMO), where it will focus on making a census of the atomic constituents and on mapping the gravity field in order to determine Vesta's interior structure.

Emily Lakdawalla

A fun video of Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa playing baseball aboard the ISS.

Emily Lakdawalla

On the November 6, 2011 flyby of Enceladus -- the third such flyby in just a few weeks -- the Cassini mission elected to take a SAR swath instead of using the optical instruments for once. So here it is: the first-ever SAR swath on Enceladus. In fact, the only other places we've ever done SAR imaging are Earth, the Moon, Venus, Iapetus, and Titan.

Emily Lakdawalla

As I do every year, I've collected a bunch of new (or relatively new) books and other products on space themes for children.

A.J.S. Rayl

Opportunity roved toward the end of its eighth year of exploration on the Red Planet and chalking up yet another

Emily Lakdawalla

What's going on with our planetary explorers in December?

Emily Lakdawalla

A few fortunate (and forward-thinking) skywatchers looked upward in the hours after Curiosity's launch and were able to see the spacecraft leaving Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

I was inspired by my recent trip to Goldstone to put together this poster showing all three of the great 70-meter dishes of the Deep Space Network. There's one at each of the three complexes, at Goldstone, at Robledo (near Madrid, Spain), and at Tidbinbilla (near Canberra, Australia).

Emily Lakdawalla

Maybe it's because I was a kid during the Cold War; I always assume that information about anything nuclear only comes out on that

Emily Lakdawalla

It was a textbook launch for the Atlas V 541 today at 15:02 UTC, and within an hour after liftoff, the Centaur second stage had sent Curiosity on its way for an 8.5-month journey to Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

Jason Davis put together this neat summary of the checkered history of Mars exploration.