Articles

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since leaving Marquette Island on sol 2,122, Opportunity has been barreling southward on her journey toward Endeavour crater. On her horizon for the last several sols has been a very small but very fresh looking crater named Concepción.

Forest Purnell

The Planetary Society regularly hosts interns and visiting scientists and engineers from world space agencies. Recently, we've had the pleasure of working with JAXA's Toshiaki Takemae.

Emily Lakdawalla

There were many, many treats waiting on the Cassini raw images website this morning. Yesterday, Cassini traversed the G ring, taking photos all the way.

Ryan Anderson

Check out these awesome flyovers of Mars, generated by Doug Ellison of UnmannedSpaceflight!

Louis D. Friedman

The world's space community -- and the public -- is awaiting the Obama Administration's new plan for human and robotic space flight. We expect the plan will be unveiled as part of the formal submission to Congress of the Administration's proposed budget for the Federal Government.

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a press briefing today that announced the official end of efforts to extricate Spirit from her sand trap at Troy. Instead, the rover drivers will now focus on improving the chances that Spirit will survive the coming winter so that she can carry on doing science once the power situation improves in the spring.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a press briefing going on right now that marks today, January 26, 2010, more than six years after she landed, the day that NASA decided that Spirit's roving days were over.