Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

A couple of months ago, someone on Twitter sent me a link to an article about Laura Cesari's bead jewelry inspired by the solar system. I thought it was awfully cool.

Louis D. Friedman

The IKAROS spacecraft continues to perform its mission well as its team at the Japan Space Exploration Center moves closer to the first fully controlled solar sail flight.

Emily Lakdawalla

June 2010 was certainly busy with Hayabusa and IKAROS action, so I really needed a vacation.

Marc Rayman

A new version of the Dawn spacecraft is continuing the ambitious journey through the asteroid belt to uncharted distant worlds.

A.J.S. Rayl

With winter still freezing the southern hemisphere of Mars, June might have been an uneventful month for your average working robot, but not the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs). In fact, from the sounds of silence to a major discovery to an injury scare, the rovers' latest trials, tribulations and achievements, have turned the last four weeks into something of an emotional roller-coaster for some members of the MER team.

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.

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.

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

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.