Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Fourth MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 3: Engineering constraints

Emily Lakdawalla

Lou Friedman congratulates China

Emily Lakdawalla

Chang'E 2 launches to the Moon

Ryan Anderson

With the details of all four landing sites on the table, we started day 3 of the meeting by hearing from the engineers and several scientists about the properties of the ellipses, the risks for landing and the capabilities of the landing system.

Louis D. Friedman

Japan's IKAROS team stole the show at the International Solar Sailing Symposium in New York City, where they announced that their spacecraft had achieved controlled solar sail flight.

Emily Lakdawalla

Division of Planetary Sciences meeting next week; Career Panel Sunday

Susan Lendroth

The 61st International Astronautical Congress (IAC) is being held in Prague in the Czech Republic, and Bill Nye is attending on behalf of the Planetary Society.

A.J.S. Rayl

As Opportunity picked up the pace to Endeavour Crater this month and crossed the halfway point on the long journey from Victoria Crater and Spirit continued sleeping in hibernation mode, the Mars Exploration Rovers chalked up their 81st month of what was supposed to have been just a three-month tour of the Red Planet.

Susan Lendroth

With the astronomical community is buzzing with news of an exoplanet found in a star's habitable zone, The Planetary Society will co-sponsor a special event that will be streamed live on Monday, October 4.

Emily Lakdawalla

Carnival of Space #171 is live over at Starry Critters. Every week, a different webmaster or blogger hosts the Carnival, showcasing articles written on the topic of space.

Emily Lakdawalla

I left the first day of the Fourth Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Community Workshop on Monday just as they were getting in to the site-specific presentations. I left with no concern that I'd miss anything, though, because I knew that once he got done presenting his own work on Gale Crater, Cornell grad student Ryan Anderson would be taking notes and blogging the presentations on the other three sites.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here are a few photos of Chang'E 2 meeting its launch vehicle in Xichang. It's a beautiful view of the spacecraft.

Emily Lakdawalla

Out in space, the most exciting things cooking this month are on Deep Impact, which is fast approaching comet Hartley 2 for a November 4 encounter, and at the Moon, which should soon see a second orbiter, China's Chang'E 2, which is set to launch Friday.

David Kass

Two weeks ago Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) started a four-week campaign to support entry, descent, and landing phase for the next Mars rover, Mars Science Laboratory (or

Ryan Anderson

Today was jam-packed with interesting stuff about Mawrth, Holden, and Eberswalde! I took tons of notes, and I will try to use those to assemble a coherent picture of what was presented and discussed today.

Ryan Anderson

The second site that we discussed yesterday was Holden Crater, a 155 kilometer crater that formed right in the middle of a huge drainage system.

Ryan Anderson

The final site of the four that we discussed yesterday was Eberswalde, which of course is interesting because of the big delta that is preserved in the western part of the crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

I apologize in advance for the expanse of text, but I hope that some of you will find the details interesting.

Emily Lakdawalla

Via the Lunar Listserv this morning I learned of the impending launch of a new lunar orbiter, Chang'E 2, planned for this Friday, October 1, from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan.

Ryan Anderson

Today was the first of a three day workshop in which the Mars science community gathers together and hashes out what we know and what we don't know about the four finalist MSL landing sites.