Articles

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.

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'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.

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.

Tanya Harrison

Emily Lakdawalla

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) just took its lens cap off on December 29, and posted its

Emily Lakdawalla

Moonbows represent the same phenomenon as rainbows, it's just that the light from the Sun has reflected off of the Moon first before it's separated into its colors by the myriad tiny water droplets in the cloud.

Emily Lakdawalla

The HiRISE public suggestion tool, called HiWish, is a Web site that allows you to log in and select a spot on Mars as a suggestion for where the HiRISE instrument should take an image.

Ted Stryk

The second report by Ted Stryk from the New Horizons science team meeting, focusing on the search for Kuiper belt object (KBO) targets.

Emily Lakdawalla

An amateur named Bernhard Braun (

Ted Stryk

The New Horizons science team is meeting this week. Ted Stryk was invited to attend the meeting, and he sent the following notes from the first day.

Emily Lakdawalla

Data from all science instruments on all of NASA's and ESA's space missions, not just cameras, is archived in the Planetary Data System and Planetary Science Archive, and almost all of that data is available online.

Emily Lakdawalla

The science team for Mars Orbiter Camera, or