Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA recently shared a gloriously detailed image of an unusual clear day in Alaska as seen from the Terra satellite.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few presentation slides with pretty pictures, sized to scale, of the large moons of the solar system.

Mat Kaplan

The Planetary Science Institute's Amanda Hendrix is the guest for our July 1 episode. She finds water in the least likely places, including Luna.

Emily Lakdawalla

It had never occurred to me to think about geostationary satellites in Mars orbit before reading a new paper by Juan Silva and Pilar Romero. The paper shows that it takes a lot more work to maintain a stationary orbit at an arbitrary longitude at Mars than it does at Earth.

Bill Dunford

From far away, or from so near you could almost touch it, the moon is beautiful.

Jim Bell

I'm absolutely floored when I stop to think that our beautiful blue ocean is only one of perhaps a half dozen or more oceans on other worlds in our solar system, and only one of probably millions (or more) oceans on other Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Oceans abound!

Bill Dunford

Nothing reflects the romance of deep space exploration more than the evocative names of places on the planets and moons.

Bill Dunford

They look so similar they can be hard to tell apart, but each hides its own mysteries.

Bill Dunford

The first human beings to see the mysterious

Bill Dunford

Mars and Earth share a truly striking family resemblance, but there's no mistaking which one is home.

Bill Dunford

Dispatches from five different worlds--all sent by robotic spacecraft on the same day.

Emily Lakdawalla

Really cool movies from Jim Richardson propose to explain how the same physics of impact cratering can produce such differently-appearing surfaces as those of the Moon, large asteroids like Eros, and teeny ones like Itokawa.

Bill Dunford

Some lovely, rarely-seen images from the MESSENGER mission.

Bill Dunford

Nineteen years ago this month, the Clementine mission sent some amazing views from the moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

A reader comment inspired me to dig up an oldie but a goodie: a sequence of photos of the Moon transiting Earth, seen from a very long way away,

Mat Kaplan

Professor Bell's topic is

Emily Lakdawalla

While researching another story, I came across an image I don't remember ever seeing before, of a moonrise from an unexpected source.

Bill Dunford

Why spend effort and scarce resources on space exploration when we have so many problems here at home? Turns out, there are some pretty good reasons.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the Landsat Data Continuity Mission scheduled to launch on Monday, there's been a lot of Tweeting about Landsat, and through one such Tweet I learned about a resource that I hadn't known existed before: the LandsatLook Viewer. This is a graphical interface to more than a decade worth of Landsat data, a tremendous resource for anyone interested in Earth's changing surface, natural or manmade.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's taken me a year to face the emotionally draining task of reading and writing about Galileo's cruise phase as chronicled in the mission's newsletters.