Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

A helpful reader has sent me copies of three recently published papers on China's first planetary probe, the Yinghuo-1 orbiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Most of you have probably heard by now of two small asteroids, both in the neighborhood of 10 meters in diameter, recently discovered on trajectories that pass unusually close to Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Deep Impact is rapidly approaching its next -- and final -- target, comet Hartley 2, which it will fly by on November 4.

Emily Lakdawalla

Imagine this landscape: you're walking across an unusually smooth lunar surface, an impact melt sheet on the floor of a relatively recently formed crater.

Susan Lendroth

Lou Friedman handed off the keys to the Planetary Society -- and a few worlds as well -- to new Executive Director Bill Nye.

Emily Lakdawalla

Coincidentally, two new images of Neptune were posted today, from two very different sources.

Bill Nye

Is Venus the forgotten planet, or just one that's hard to figure out?

Emily Lakdawalla

A couple of weeks ago Paul Schenk posted a few really cool videos to his personal blog. Paul's subspecialty is the topography of icy moons, and he's been doing a lot of work on the moons of Saturn lately.

Marc Rayman

Dawn is now so far from the sun that even with its tremendous solar arrays, it does not receive enough sunlight to generate sufficient electrical power to operate all systems and still achieve maximum thrust.

Emily Lakdawalla

If I have to, I will drag reluctant people one at a time to plunge into NASA's Planetary Data System.

Björn Jónsson

This is a new, big mosaic of Voyager 1 images, this time showing the Great Red Spot at high resolution.

Bill Nye

Nobel Prize laureates and former NASA officials have come together to express concern over the House of Representatives Science Committee's proposed budget for NASA.

A.J.S. Rayl

With the Sun beginning to warm the landscape in the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet and winds whipping up here and there forming dust devils that kick the powdery, rust-colored topsoil into the atmosphere, the Mars Exploration Rovers have been experiencing sure signs of a Martian spring this month.

Emily Lakdawalla

This month there will be approximately a hundred different planetary science meetings (a list of which is at the end of this post).

Emily Lakdawalla

Congratulations to the Mars Climate Sounder team on winning a spot for a successor instrument aboard the next Mars orbiter, the joint NASA-ESA ExoMars, set to launch in 2016.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA announced today that they had placed several new sets of historical photos on their

Charlene Anderson

Visualization can help the brain comprehend what words and numbers can struggle to covey. There's a YouTube video posted by

Emily Lakdawalla

I've had a fun morning of noodling around learning how to write KML files, and have produced one for Google Mars that shows you all of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter tracks that cross the area Opportunity has driven through already, as well as the area of Endeavour crater.

Amir Alexander

Two nearly simultaneous announcements by scientists that they have detected entire planetary system deep in space have set the astronomical community abuzz.

Bruce Betts

One of the instruments on a 2016 mission to orbit Mars will provide daily maps of global, pole-to-pole, vertical distributions of the temperature, dust, water vapor and ice clouds in the Martian atmosphere.