Articles

Charlene Anderson

Hollywood and Science are not congenial colleagues. When their paths cross, as they so often do in science-fiction films, each feels the other must give way to the cultural absolutes of their different tribes.

Emily Lakdawalla

According to the Akatsuki Twitter feed, the next try for launch of Akatsuki and IKAROS will be Thursday, May 20, at 21:58:22 UTC.

Emily Lakdawalla

Voyager 2's engineers have confirmed that the problem with the spacecraft was indeed the result of a single flipped bit in its software, as they predicted.

Emily Lakdawalla

The countdown for the planned launch of Akatsuki and IKAROS got to about four minutes before they decided to cancel the attempt due to weather, and I can't blame them.

Emily Lakdawalla

Coming closer every day, Mr. Hayabusa has sighted his final destination: his homeworld, Earth, and its attendant Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

IKAROS, Japan's solar sail, is nearly ready for launch, piggybacked behind the Venus orbiter Akatsuki.

Emily Lakdawalla

Thumbing her nose at this whole winter thing, Opportunity drove 20 meters yesterday, sol 2,240, on the winter solstice.

Pam Chadbourne

Pam Chadbourne, one of the many engineers who made the Magellan Radar Mapper mission possible, sent this note out to Magellan team members this morning, and graciously permitted me to post it here.

Emily Lakdawalla

Every time Cassini gets reasonably close to one of the moons of Saturn, whether the close approach is a targeted one or just an opportunistic encounter, its planners usually take advantage of the proximity to take a bunch of photos.

Ryan Anderson

Through a crazy random happenstance, I was just interviewed by a friend of a friend of a friend at Australian radio station 'triple j' for a feature on lasers!

Emily Lakdawalla

Stuart Atkinson has prepared a

Emily Lakdawalla

It's the solstice on Mars today: summer in the north, winter in the south.

Emily Lakdawalla

Good old Voyager 2; she takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm delighted to point you to a citizen science project for wannabe space geologists like me: Moon Zoo.

Emily Lakdawalla

A good start to my day today: The New York Times' Lens Blog featured the

Louis D. Friedman

Two weeks ago, The Planetary Society submitted a statement to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee considering the fiscal year 2011 budget request for NASA.

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, this is a cool paper. Here's the gist: the Cassini RADAR team has spotted some river channels on Titan that shine so brightly in radar images, there must be something special going on to explain that brightness.

Emily Lakdawalla

Via Daniel Fischer's Tweet about a blog entry by Astro BobI learned of something which should be obvious to anyone who has trained even a rather small telescope on Jupiter over the past few weeks: one of its iconic stripes is just plain gone.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've been so focused on the dramatic return of

Emily Lakdawalla

Engineers have shifted NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft into a mode that transmits only spacecraft health and status data while they diagnose an unexpected change in the pattern of returning data.