Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

It turns out that Saturn's not the only place that displays geometrical shapes in its atmosphere. Earth does too.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a name for that funny hummocky texture to the lunar landscape:

Bill Nye

Bill gives an introduction about his feelings on his new position here at The Planetary Society.

Louis D. Friedman

LightSail 1, the Planetary Society's new ultra-light Cubesat-based solar sail spacecraft, has passed its Critical Design Review.

Emily Lakdawalla

Or: Emily reads you the table of contents of Icarus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here is a photo crafted from data that are nearly as old as I am, showing a beautiful sunrise on Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

In February, the Chandrayaan-1 science team had a meeting in Ahmedabad, India, to share their results with each other.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tomorrow the family heads away from home for three weeks, two weeks of which I plan not to work at all.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a pretty picture post, a dramatic Cassini shot on the outer edge of the A ring captured earlier this month.

A.J.S. Rayl

Mars Exploration Rover Spirit continued to hibernate this month, parked in place near an old volcanic formation called Home Plate. At the same time though she managed to rove back into the planetary exploration spotlight when a group of the mission scientists announced they had found -- in data from an outcrop the rover visited more than four years ago -- evidence for a past watery environment more suitable for life than any other either Spirit or Opportunity have found, a place where near-pure water existed. 1

Emily Lakdawalla

It's unimpressive now, but in a few weeks the pinpoint of light at the center of this photo of a starry sky will loom very large to Rosetta's cameras.

Emily Lakdawalla

When I wrote a post about Jupiter's missing South Equatorial Belt in May, I had three main questions: how long did it take for the belt to go away, has this happened before, and how can a planet as big as Jupiter change its appearance so quickly?

Emily Lakdawalla

We've already seen IKAROS' view of its deployed sails from cameras attached to the spacecraft, but, in a brilliant idea, the Japanese built IKAROS with two deployable cameras that could view the thing from a distance.

Emily Lakdawalla

Speaking of spacecraft crashing...

Emily Lakdawalla

Covering the events of Hayabusa's return involved a lot of watching and waiting. Rather than go blind staring at my computer and cause carpal tunnel syndrome by excessively clicking the refresh button, I decided to...go blind and develop carpal tunnel syndrome by doing some crocheting.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here are a few photos from a Flickr gallery from the Australian Science Media Centre documenting the Hayabusa sample capsule's first step in its journey from Australia to Sagamihara, Japan, where it will arrive on Friday.

Emily Lakdawalla

The major news on the Hayabusa mission this morning is that JAXA has retrieved the sample capsule!

Emily Lakdawalla

Oh my wonderful little flying saucer, you have been to an asteroid and back -- and you were burning like a star last night! And there you are, sitting quietly in the desert, just waiting to be retrieved...

Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa's return: round up some of the amazing photos, movies, and artworks that were posted and shared and Tweeted and re-Tweeted over the previous dozen hours or so.

Emily Lakdawalla

At 13:51 UTC, the Hayabusa spacecraft -- having traveled to an asteroid and back, surviving countless challenges-- broke up into a fiery meteor over the midnight, midwinter Australian sky.