Articles

Charlene Anderson

In the last couple of weeks, media outlets around the world have been reporting that NASA recently convened a private meeting at JPL to identify the worst movies ever made, scientifically speaking. It seemed like a good story. The problem was that it wasn't true.

Emily Lakdawalla

Quick -- where is this? Is it one of Venus' iconic volcanoes? Or maybe Mars'?

Emily Lakdawalla

Earlier this week I got all excited about the Orcus-Vanth system. It turns out there was a math error in the version of the paper that I read, which resulted in the notion that Vanth could be nearly as big as Orcus.

Emily Lakdawalla

In the past couple of months I've received several emails from scientists offering clarifications, corrections, or alternative points of view to previous posts, which is awesome and something that I enthusiastically encourage. Here's one of them.

Emily Lakdawalla

A terrific set of Goldstone radar images of a good-sized near-Earth asteroids named 2010 JL33 was posted to the JPL website yesterday. They also posted a movie version but something about these pixelated radar image series absolutely begs for them to be displayed as an old-school animated GIF, so I made one.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini got some incredibly tricky shots during its January 11 Rhea flyby!

Emily Lakdawalla

Today the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast aired my contribution, Unmanned Space Exploration in 2011, about what to look forward to in solar system exploration this year.

Emily Lakdawalla

In a lovely talk, in his uncommonly engaging way, Steve Squyres presents the portrait of him that now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

Charlene Anderson

A young and enthusiastic NASA supporter has married Carl Sagan's writing with images to create a YouTube video in the hope of helping NASA engage the public in its mission of exploration.

Emily Lakdawalla

As part of a big, ongoing project to make a comparison chart of the dimensions and physical properties of solar system objects I've spent the morning tackling the difficult problem of summarizing the physical characteristics of the biggest things that are out there beyond Neptune.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Kepler exoplanet hunting mission has made news today with a report of

Emily Lakdawalla

Stardust is healthy after performing a

Emily Lakdawalla

Two spacecraft that keep their ever-watchful eyes on the Sun -- NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and JAXA's Hinode -- were doing their thing, when something large wandered past: the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

There are two intriguing possibilities being discussed in the Japanese media for what to do with Akatsuki, a space probe in orbit near Venus with a fully functional, highly capable suite of cameras but a damaged main engine.

Emily Lakdawalla

These two movies were posted to the JPL website a couple of weeks ago, and they are just amazing.

Marc Rayman

Dawn finishes 2010 much as it began the year, thrusting with its ion propulsion system in steady pursuit of a distant world.

Emily Lakdawalla

I was browsing JPL's Planetary Photojournal today and noticed that they've posted an updated artist's concept of the Juno spacecraft, which is set to launch in August for a 2016 arrival at Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just snapped another photo of Opportunity sitting on the ground on Mars. These pictures never get old.

Emily Lakdawalla

While I was writing yesterday's blog entry on Mars Express' Phobos flybys I realized that I didn't understand Mars Express' orbit very well. So I sent an inquiry to the Mars Express blog, which they answered in a blog entry today.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Mars Express blog has been reactivated today, as a new series of Phobos flybys is already underway.