Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, the European wing of the Hubble PR machine released this cool image of Saturn and its aurorae, with an associated video.

Emily Lakdawalla

I think a goodly proportion of you readers have already figured this out for yourselves since it was launched last March, but I didn't download and install it until last weekend, so this is new to me: Google Mars is awesome.

Marc Rayman

Dawn is outfitted with three ion thrusters, assigned the heartwarming names thruster #1, thruster #2, and thruster #3.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week the Carnival of Space is over at one of my favorite new blogs, Lights in the Dark. Actually it's not so new -- evidently this week marks its first anniversary!

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a neat picture from Opportunity, a panorama composed of its wide-angle, mast-mounted Navcam cameras, showing the crater Concepcion.

Ken Kremer

Planetary Society volunteer Ken Kremer is reporting for us from the Kennedy Space Center, where he is covering the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour, set to launch this weekend.

Emily Lakdawalla

Having discovered its first asteroid on January 12, Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has now officially discovered its first comet, P/2010 B2 (WISE).

Emily Lakdawalla

Although I am not suffering under the

Emily Lakdawalla

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a video to YouTube today showing what seems to be a remarkable amount of motion out of Spirit lately, especially given that she's supposed to be a

Emily Lakdawalla

Doug Ellison has been playing with Martian digital terrain models recently, to great effect.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just posted my writeup of today's press briefing on a new map of Pluto produced from Hubble images. The main conclusion was that Pluto has shown an astonishing amount of changes across its surface between 1994 and 2002 -- more, in fact, than any other solid surface in the solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA has just announced that once Cassini's Equinox Mission runs out in June of this year, they will extend it a further seven more years, long enough for the spacecraft to see Saturn through its solstice!!

Ken Kremer

The crew for the STS-130 flight of shuttle Endeavour arrived at the Kennedy Space Center late in the evening on Tuesday February 2. Blastoff is slated for February 7 at 4:39 AM and will be the final night time shuttle launch.

Emily Lakdawalla

Hubble has caught an astonishing view of something that's never before been observed, the aftermath of a collision between two asteroids in the main belt.

Emily Lakdawalla

For the first time ever, Mars Express' Visual Monitoring Camera has imaged the shadow of Mars' moon Phobos crossing the surface of Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

Probably the biggest topic of discussion this month will concern the news contained within the President's proposed fiscal year 2011 budget, about which there was a NASA press conference this morning.

Emily Lakdawalla

Every once in a while I get an email from a reader expressing irritation with the fact that this blog doesn't permit comments. The reasons have always been technical/financial, not philosophical.

Emily Lakdawalla

It looks like the rover team thinks Concepcion is pretty enough (in both aesthetic and a scientific senses) to be worthy of the full-color Pancam panorama treatment; color frames started arriving on Earth over the weekend.

Louis D. Friedman

The Planetary Society today issued a statement supporting the budget increase for NASA and the Administration's proposal to involve the commercial industry in human space flight.

A.J.S. Rayl

Five and a half years after they were supposed to be history, the Mars Exploration Rovers celebrated their sixth Earth year on the Red Planet with Opportunity pulling up to a fresh, new crater on the road to Endeavour, and Spirit working on repositioning itself to settle in for the coming Martian winter, and perhaps the rest of its mission.