Articles

Jason Davis

At 5:57AM EDT (9:57 UTC) this morning, Atlantis gracefully rolled to a stop on runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center Landing Facility, completing the 135th and final mission of the space shuttle program that started in 1981.

Emily Lakdawalla

That's right: Hubble observations have yielded the discovery of a third small body orbiting Pluto and Charon.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yet another sharp-eyed reader (I love my readers!) pointed out to me that the German-language release on the MPS website about the latest Vesta image from Dawn included what looked like a tiny thumbnail of a color view.

Jason Davis

The final installment of my three-part series on the basics of shuttle launches and landings. Part III: de-orbiting, re-entering and landing.

Emily Lakdawalla

A sharp-eyed reader noticed that a size comparison montage posted by the Dawn mission today included an image of Vesta that had not yet been released separately to the public, and it is a very cool one.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a new orbital mission on the map! As of Friday, the relatively small mass of the asteroid Vesta has finally taken hold of its new artificial satellite, Dawn.

Louis D. Friedman

Good news from Russia today: after 20 years of development they have finally launched their RadioAstron satellite (the official name is Spektr-R) into a high elliptical orbit around Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

With all the turmoil over the House's cancellation of the James Webb Space Telescope it seems an appropriate time to post this YouTube video.

Emily Lakdawalla

The program and abstracts for the next big space meeting have now been posted, and there's a lot of great stuff to look forward to.

Charlene Anderson

Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representative's Appropriations Committee marked up the bill covering NASA's budget that was sent to it by the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) Subcommittee, and the results will not make Planetary Society supporters happy.

Frank Trixler

The Origins 2011 conference, which took place last week in Montpellier, France, was dedicated to the origins of life and its occurrence in the universe. At this meeting, scientists from very different disciplines came together to share their ideas.

Charlene Anderson

Today, 12 July 2011, the Planetary Society submitted into testimony a written statement to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives for their hearing on NASA's Space Launch System.

Emily Lakdawalla

I had an amazing opportunity back in April: an invitation to go inside the fabled Spacecraft Assembly Facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to see the next Mars rover up close.

Charlene Anderson

Shudders are still rolling through the space-exploration community after the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee voted on July 7 to slash NASA's budget by $1.9 billion.

Bill Nye

Today the U.S. House of Representative subcommittee charged with appropriating funds to NASA mandated a draconian cut of almost $2 billion from the space agency's proposed budget.

Ryan Anderson

Well, after three days of fascinating science and heated discussion, the fifth and final MSL landing site workshop has come to a close, and the consensus is -- that all of the sites are pretty darn interesting.

Bill Nye

The Hubble Space Telescope has recorded its millionth observation. The planet is designated HAT-P-7b.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm headed off today for my other summer vacation, and will again be going totally offline.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a photo of Vesta that was released by the Dawn team on Friday. I didn't post it right away because the version of the image in the official release has some bizarre processing artifacts that make it look as though the image had been made by cutting construction paper.

Emily Lakdawalla

JAXA held a press conference on June 30 about the latest report from the review board that is charged with finding out what exactly caused Akatsuki's failure to enter orbit at Venus, and what that implies for the possibility of Akatsuki to try again when it returns to Venus in 2015 or 2016.