All
All
Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Predicting Pluto's moons and moondust
Why didn't we discover Pluto's moons until more than a decade after Hubble launched? Mark Showalter helps me answer this question.
Mission to a Metallic World: A Discovery Proposal to Fly to the Asteroid Psyche
Imagine flying deep within the asteroid belt to study the most unreachable location in the solar system: the deep core of a terrestrial world.
A new comet observing campaign for C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring)
You thought you were rid of us...but we're back! Following the spectacular and, quite frankly unprecedented, success of the Comet ISON Observing Campaign, we are launching a similar venture for another unique cometary encounter that's happening this year. In October 2014, comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) will pass extremely close to Mars.
New Horizons: Updates From the Science Team Meeting, Part 1
Ted Stryk reports on the status of the New Horizons mission from the mission's latest Science Team Meeting.
Planetary Radio: NEOWISE PI Amy Mainzer
NEOWISE has reawakened to discover many more asteroids and comets. The mission leader thanks the amateur astronomers who follow up on these discoveries.
2013: An OSIRIS-REx Retrospective
2013 is drawing to a close, providing a nice opportunity to reflect on the outgoing year and look back at some of the highlights that we have experienced. Here are my top-20 OSIRIS-REx moments of this past year.
Snow balls in space
I don’t get much snow in southern California, but I do spend a lot of my time thinking about college snowball experiences and about the snowball fights that have made the objects of the outer solar system.
Asteroid Minerva finds its magical weapons in the sky
The International Astronomical Union has chosen the names Aegis and Gorgoneion for the two moons of the asteroid (93) Minerva. We decided to crowd-source the names, catching the attention of the public. Over the following year, I received a lot of emails with suggestions
Watch this with your kids: Asteroid Fact versus Fiction
A cute video from the OSIRIS-REx mission in the style of
Planetary Radio: Comet ISON, Rest in Pieces
Karl Battams of NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign is our guest on this week's show. He explains how ISON really did become the comet of the century for scientists.
Comet ISON Wrap Up
Comet ISON captivated our world, and many of our world’s robotic emissaries for many months. But, alas, poor ISON is dead -- again. Here I wrap up our enthusiastic coverage of this multi-morphing zombie comet that tried to survive and re-survive as it came within one solar diameter of the Sun.
Comet ISON live blog
Comet ISON reached perihelion at 18:25 UT (10:25 PT) on November 28. It's an event that's was watched around the world, accompanied by tons of commentary and streams of photos. We will update this blog entry periodically with links to all the resources that we hear of for following the comet's progress.
Comet ISON Hangouts November 25 and December 2
Two Hangouts bookended comet ISON's perihelion, hosted by Chuck Beuter of Comet Festival South Bend. On November 25, it was I and Ron Kaitchuck. On December 2, Alex Filippenko and I discussed what happened to the comet over Thanksgiving.
Multiple views of comet ISON from solar-observing spacecraft
When comet ISON passed through perihelion last week, solar observing spacecraft had a ringside view. Here are several animations of ISON's perilous passage from the SOHO and two STEREO spacecraft.
Schrödinger's Comet
After impressing us yesterday, comet ISON faded dramatically overnight, and left us with a comet with no apparent nucleus in the SOHO/LASCO C2 images. As the comet plunged through the solar atmosphere, and failed to put on a show in the SDO images, we understandably concluded that ISON had succumbed to its passage and died a fiery death. Except it didn't. Well, maybe...
Comet ISON: Your Half-time Report
I am heading out to Kitt Peak to join my fellow CIOC-ers Matthew and Casey for perihelion observations of Comet ISON, and I find myself having an early moment of reflection.
ISON, Encke, Mercury, and Home
Comet ISON has entered the field of view of the STEREO HI-1A camera, and, in an awesome animation, it joins a large cast of characters already present there.
Imaging results from the Chang'e 2 Toutatis flyby
There is a paper in press at Icarus by Xiaoduan Zou and five coauthors that provides the first peer-reviewed publication I've seen on the results of the imaging experiment performed during the Chang'e 2 flyby of near-Earth asteroid (4179) Toutatis.
Comet ISON Enters the Final Countdown
We're now less than two weeks away from comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) reaching perihelion and, if we’re honest, we are still none the wiser as to how the situation might play out!
Cosmos with Cosmos Episode 4: Heaven & Hell
Humans face the consequences of our own knowledge about the cosmos in this latest episode recap and analysis of Carl Sagan's classic series.