Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

In less than 24 hours, a newly discovered asteroid known as 2010 AL30 will be zipping past Earth at an altitude of approximately a third the Earth-Moon distance. There's no chance it'll hit us, but it's generating a lot of excitement in the community of amateur and professional near-Earth asteroid observers.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's been the second most popular question I get from readers:

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week in Science magazine appeared the first peer-reviewed article on the results of Rosetta's September 2008 encounter with the smallish main-belt asteroid Steins. This morning I got a chance to sit down and read the article, and I wrote up a summary.

Emily Lakdawalla

This description of asteroid 2867 Steins is based upon an article published in the January 8, 2010 issue of Science by H. Uwe Keller and numerous coauthors and on a related press release.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's been two months, now, that extrication efforts have been going on. It's discouraging that the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit isn't out of the trap.

Emily Lakdawalla

It was 400 years ago today that Galileo discovered smaller planets attending the planet Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Congratulations are due to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) team on their lovely

Emily Lakdawalla

The United States Geological Survey has just released a new atlas of Mercury, the first to be based upon the three flybys worth of image data gathered by the MESSENGER mission.

Emily Lakdawalla

CoRoT-7b was the first unambiguously rocky planet to be discovered and was quite small, at under five Earth masses. But a press release issued today suggests that its history probably has little to do with Earth's.

Marc Rayman

Dawn usually interrupts ion thrusting once a week for about eight hours to point its main antenna to Earth. On November 30, however, instead of resuming thrusting, it dutifully followed different instructions that were stored onboard.

Bruce Betts

Congratulations to NASA's Kepler mission team on their announcement of the discovery of its first five exoplanets (planets around other stars).

Emily Lakdawalla

While we don't have Moon bases, we do have plenty of spacecraft. Before I get into my more detailed look at the activities of the 20-odd spacecraft wandering about the solar system, I thought I'd look ahead to 2010 more generally and see what the year has in store for us.

Emily Lakdawalla

I know I already posted Earth once before. But I could not resist winding up the calendar with this view of a new Earth, for the new year.

Emily Lakdawalla

Did you think I was going to skip Uranus? How could I?

Emily Lakdawalla

I just got a press release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that made my heart sink; the extrication effort for Spirit is not going at all well. I did not want to keep sounding a knell of bad news. But once in a while, I do have to report bad news.

Emily Lakdawalla

At last, I've posted my annual Year in Pictures feature. Go check it out!

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers quietly wrapped up 2009 this month: Spirit continued to valiantly spin its wheels in an attempt to get out of its embedded location on the west side of Home Plate in Gusev Crater; and Opportunity continued its investigation of Marquette Island, perhaps the oldest Martian rock it's found to date at Meridiani Planum.

Bruce Betts

NASA has selected three finalists for the next New Frontiers mission: a Venus lander, a near Earth asteroid sample return, and a lunar Aitken basin sample return mission.

Emily Lakdawalla

Looking over the list of planets, moons, and smaller bodies I posted so far, I realized I didn't have an image of a comet yet.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rhea? You might be asking. Rhea? When Saturn has so many more interesting moons? Hear me out.