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All
Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Solstice? What solstice?
Thumbing her nose at this whole winter thing, Opportunity drove 20 meters yesterday, sol 2,240, on the winter solstice.
Venus, and the Moon, and Atlantis, and ISS, and Magellan
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.
Photos of your names on the IKAROS spacecraft
IKAROS, Japan's solar sail, is nearly ready for launch, piggybacked behind the Venus orbiter Akatsuki.
Update on Voyager 2 status
Good old Voyager 2; she takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Happy solstice -- on Mars
It's the solstice on Mars today: summer in the north, winter in the south.
New maps of Enceladus and other moons
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.
Carnival of space 3D special
Stuart Atkinson has prepared a
Talking Lasers on Aussie Radio
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!
Planetary Society Tells Congress "Reassert Optimism, Inspire Future Generations"
Two weeks ago, The Planetary Society submitted a statement to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee considering the fiscal year 2011 budget request for NASA.
A Martian Moment in Time, revisited
A good start to my day today: The New York Times' Lens Blog featured the
Moon Zoo is ready for you
I'm delighted to point you to a citizen science project for wannabe space geologists like me: Moon Zoo.
Radar glories in Titan rivers
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.
Jupiter has lost a belt!
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.
Akatsuki and IKAROS getting ready for launch, with your names aboard
I've been so focused on the dramatic return of
Some trouble on Voyager 2
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.
A moment in time
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.
13 things that saved Apollo 13
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.
Morphology and mineralogy on Mars
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.
Saturn's hexagon recreated in the laboratory
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.
Space carnival, rover update, Planetary Radio Live!
Just a linky post today, as I am nanny-less.



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