Articles

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

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

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

On Mars, at 15:00 local true solar time on May 2, a solitary rover gazed southward across her own dusty deck and snapped three photos, actually three sets of three photos, which were combined to make this view.

Emily Lakdawalla

Universe Today has recently completed a fantastic, thought-provoking series on the near-disaster of the Apollo 13 mission, which unfolded forty years ago last month.

Emily Lakdawalla

A recent entry by Bethany Ehlmann from the blog of the Planetary Geomorphology Working Group of the International Association of Geomorphologists demonstrates how you can combine the power of different types of data to tease out a rich story of the past history of one spot on Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

A lot of readers have expressed interest in the origin of Saturn's north polar hexagon. The hexagon is a long-lived pattern in the clouds surrounding Saturn's north pole, which has been observed since the Voyagers passed by in 1980 and 1981.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a linky post today, as I am nanny-less.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here are a few photos taken on Friday, April 30, 2010, The Planetary Society's very last day in our old headquarters at 65 North Catalina Avenue in Pasadena.

Marc Rayman

Dawn remains on course and on schedule for its appointments with Vesta and Ceres, colossal protoplanets in the main asteroid belt.

Emily Lakdawalla

After 25 years in our big brown house at 65 North Catalina Avenue in Pasadena, The Planetary Society is moving on Monday to new headquarters at 85 South Grand Avenue, still in Pasadena.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's one new mission and two promoted ones in this month's roundup: I've added JAXA's Akatsuki Venus Climate Orbiter for the first time, and both Hayabusa and Rosetta have been promoted from the

Ryan Anderson

We started off Day 2 of the field trip by driving up onto the eroded rocks of what used to be the tidal flats of the ancient reef, between the shore and the continental shelf.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers' fourth Martian winter is proving to be the harshest one yet and Spirit and Opportunity are getting colder than ever before. With temperatures on the Red Planet dropping in April and the Martian winter solstice still two weeks away, the season has turned into a shivering nail-biter.

Emily Lakdawalla

A contest has just been announced that appears to create a pathway for schoolchildren to suggest names to the International Astronomical Union for minor planets -- all those small things in the solar system that don't orbit the eight big ones.

Emily Lakdawalla

That's a bit of an overdramatic title, but it's true that the most efficient way for us to reduce the risk we face from asteroids that have a very small chance of hitting Earth in the future is to determine their orbits more precisely.