Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Today is the very last day to add your name to the great big birthday card that The Planetary Society is sending to Ray Bradbury on the occasion of his 90th birthday (which will be on August 22)!

Ryan Anderson

Well, the field trip is over and I am happy to say that I was not eaten by any bears. They seemed much more interested in the huckleberries.

Emily Lakdawalla

We brought in the big scissors to inaugurate our new Planetary Society headquarters. Incoming Executive Director, Bill Nye, cut the red ribbon at the Open House held August 5, 2010.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've posted animations from Cassini before in which there are multiple moons moving around, but this is one of the coolest such sequences I've seen yet.

Emily Lakdawalla

Acidalia Planitia is a large basin in Mars' northern lowlands, a dark splotch visible even from Earth telescopes.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tomorrow the Planetary Society is hosting an open house at our new headquarters, and that fact was front page news at our local newspaper, the Pasadena Star-News, this morning!

Emily Lakdawalla

It seems like a good time to feature the profiles of women space scientists that have been gracing the pages of Susan Niebur's Women in Planetary Science Blog.

Ryan Anderson

The other day in Mars journal club, we took a look at a paper about the

Emily Lakdawalla

I've spent a pleasurable hour or so browsing over the latest release of images from Cassini to the Planetary Data System.

A.J.S. Rayl

Winter lingers in the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet, but the Sun is beginning to rise higher in the sky and temperatures are slowly rising, signs the Mars Exploration Rovers are heading into spring. While Spirit continued hibernating, Opportunity took in the warmth of the Sun, captured its first dust devil, and picked up the pace in Meridiani Planum on the long journey to Endeavour Crater. Together, the rovers marked six and a half years of exploration.

Ryan Anderson

Well folks, I'm headed off to Big Sky Country tomorrow (aka Montana)! I'll start the week at the MSL camera team meeting, where I will get all sorts of cool news about the MastCam, MAHLI and MARDI cameras which I will not be able to share with you.

Emily Lakdawalla

Spirit hasn't talked to Earth since March 22 -- so what new information could they have received that would make them pronounce Spirit's possible death? Is there some new analysis of the last bit of telemetry? Some new model indicating Spirit's survival was less likely than previously thought?

Louis D. Friedman

Yesterday, the Planetary Society issued a statement about the request that the U.S. House of Representatives suspend the rules when voting on the NASA Authorization bill, saying, in part,

Jim Bell

If you've never seen a total eclipse of the Sun, make sure to put one on your bucket list!

Emily Lakdawalla

It seems it'll be a relatively routine month for our solar system explorers (if one can ever consider the exploration of an entire solar system by billion-dollar artificially intelligent robots

Ryan Anderson

I'm a little late on this, but I thought I should share the news: MSL now has a good head and neck on its shoulders, and has officially

Marc Rayman

Dawn is flying smoothly through the asteroid belt, now less than a year from entering orbit around Vesta, the first of its two cosmic destinations.

Emily Lakdawalla

This news is no surprise, but I think it's the first such discovery I've heard of: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team has identified a new crater on the Moon, one that wasn't there when Apollo 15 flew over.

Emily Lakdawalla

Three years after New Horizons flew past Jupiter on its way to Pluto, the spacecraft has imaged the giant planet again.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here are two newly processed portraits of Saturn, showing the planet just after its equinox.