Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Mars' moon Deimos never gets as much love as Phobos.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Planetary Society is hosting a luncheon on January 23, 2010 that will celebrate the achievements of two renowned heroes of space exploration, physicist Stephen Hawking and Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Emily Lakdawalla

I love posting animations of Cassini images that I compose from frames grabbed from the mission's raw images website, but they are shoddy compared to the versions that eventually come out from the mission's imaging team.

Emily Lakdawalla

Venus is such a beautiful, brilliant light in the sky. (When it's up; just now Venus is actually near solar conjunction, so we'll have to wait a bit for it to grace the heavens.)

Susan Lendroth

What do you think will be the top trend in space in 2010? In his Cosmic Log on MSNBC, Alan Boyle suggests that The Planetary Society's solar sailing project may be a contender.

Emily Lakdawalla

Miranda is the one moon of Uranus for which we have very good images from Voyager 2, and that was a stroke of luck, because low-resolution shots of all of Uranus' moons would have told us that it was, geologically speaking, the most dramatic of the five biggest ones.

Emily Lakdawalla

Iapetus! I'm always interested in Cassini images, but five years ago this month I was refreshing the Cassini raw images website several times a day, eagerly anticipating the mission's first good encounter with Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Not quite ten years ago, the Near Earth Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft arrived at the near-Earth asteroid Eros. NEAR accomplished many firsts.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's Neptune, but not quite like you've ever seen it before.

Emily Lakdawalla

Proteus is a weird name for this world. It's the second-largest moon of Neptune, and so it's named (as are all of Neptune's moons) for deities associated with the sea.

Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa is still 100 million kilometers from the Earth, less than an astronomical unit away but still with months to travel. But according to an update posted to their websitethis morning by project manager Junichiro Kawaguchi, Hayabusa is on the home stretch.

Emily Lakdawalla

Holy cow, look at that right front wheel spin. I am alternately amazed and horrified by this animation.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini mission announced today the first observation of a specular reflection off of a lake on Titan. A specular reflection is a mirror-like flash, and you only get one when you have a mirror-like surface -- very, very smooth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Mimas is the anti-Enceladus.

Emily Lakdawalla

There are two cool stories circulating today on the theme of discovering new places in the cosmos.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's the information on how to watch the class on how to work with Mars Express VMC images, which I conducted to a small audience this morning.

Emily Lakdawalla

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I've been fiddling with images from the Mars Webcam, more officially known as the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), for the last couple of weeks.

Emily Lakdawalla

We have three orbiters and two rovers currently exploring Mars, each of which returns breathtaking photos on a daily basis.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've gotten this question about once a week since Spirit got stuck, but yesterday, two different readers asked the same question within an hour of each other, so I figured it was time for a blog entry.

Emily Lakdawalla

The ever-vigilant Doug Ellison just posted this animation, which really actually does show a teeny tiny bit of motion in the right front wheel. If you don't notice any motion, look closer.