Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

I am the very last space blogger in the universe to post about this video, but that doesn't make it any less cool.

Emily Lakdawalla

253 Mathilde is the largest asteroid that has ever been visited by a spacecraft. It's held that distinction for more than twelve years, but next year it'll be upstaged by the considerably larger 21 Lutetia, which Rosetta will fly by on July 10.

Emily Lakdawalla

Members of The Planetary Society, you should now be receiving your November/December issue of The Planetary Report in the mail.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've always loved advent calendars and the way they both managed and heightened my anticipation of the gift-opening frenzy of Christmas morning.

Marc Rayman

Dawn entered the main asteroid belt on November 13. As it ventures ever deeper into this vast collection of material between Mars and Jupiter, it may be tempting to think of the spacecraft constantly dodging asteroids.

Emily Lakdawalla

The two big things happening this month are the launch of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), from Vandenberg Air Force Base no earlier than December 9 at 06:09 PST (15:09 UTC), and the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) from the 14th through the 18th.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers managed to make history and uncover history in November and that put both Spirit and Opportunity in the planetary exploration spotlight during the 71st month of an overland expedition that was supposed to be a three-month tour.

Emily Lakdawalla

Could a space rock hit Earth and cause widespread devastation? What could we do if we found an asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth?

Emily Lakdawalla

It's a holiday and I'm enjoying time with the family, so rather than write a lot, I will let a spectacular image do the talking for me.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini imaging team have posted their own processed and captioned version of the Saturn's aurora movie that I posted a preview of about six weeks ago, and it was worth the wait.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, just wow. I didn't know what to expect from the second flyby of Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus in November, which happened yesterday.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a 4-frame mosaic of Enceladus images -- just another everyday spectacularly alien landscape.

Emily Lakdawalla

Trouble has come time and again to JAXA's little Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission, yet the mission's engineers always come up with new and creative ways to solve problems.

Emily Lakdawalla

I probably crammed too much into today's class: an hour-and-a-half whirlwind tour through the cameras on the rovers and Cassini, how to access their raw images on the Internet, and some basic processing that you can do with each of them.

Emily Lakdawalla

It really looks like the second attempt at driving Spirit out of the trap has had the hoped-for result: some forward progress (maybe about a centimeter), and no evidence for further downward sinking.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since tomorrow's class is going to be on playing with raw images from the rovers and Cassini, I've been playing with recent raw images from the rovers and Cassini! I just thought I'd share a couple of the fun items I've been working with.

Ken Kremer

Space Shuttle Atlantis and her crew of six rocketed into orbit on Monday (November 16) precisely as planned at 2:28 PM EST from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.

Ryan Anderson

I think the new

Emily Lakdawalla

Even though all of us rover fans know that Spirit is really, really stuck, I think I'm not the only one who was secretly hoping that today's images downlinked from Spirit would show that the rover had magically popped out of the ground overnight. Of course, she didn't.