Articles

Marc Rayman

For the first time in almost a year, the Dawn mission control room at JPL is aglow with blue.

Emily Lakdawalla

One of the great things about space exploration is how it can shift your perspective. And you don't even need to leave home.

Elsa Jensen

Right after the last Mastcam-Z team meeting a year ago (link here to last two blog posts), our team finalized the design of the cameras, and then the fantastic voyage of creating Martian panoramic zoom cameras began.

Luyuan Xu

China's fourth lunar mission, Chang’e 4, is expected to begin on May 21 with the launch of a Long March 4C rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in the southwest of China. The launch will carry a spacecraft named Queqiao, which will serve as a communication relay satellite between Earth and the lunar farside.

Emily Lakdawalla

Seán Doran has made a cool visual index to the images that JunoCam took during Juno's first 12 closest approaches to Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

A Mercury meeting held May 1-3 summarized the current and future science of the innermost planet. Emily Lakdawalla was there and shares her notes.

Emily Lakdawalla

Readers, colleagues, friends: it's finally happened. My first book is finally out in the world. Here's an excerpt that explains the design and operation of Curiosity's MMRTG, (it also applies to the future Mars 2020 rover power supply).

Björn Jónsson

The Juno spacecraft that is currently orbiting Jupiter has obtained the first good images of Jupiter's polar regions. I am presenting here a combined global map of Jupiter, made from a Cassini map I made for the equatorial and temperate regions and polar maps made from the Juno JunoCam and JIRAM polar images.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the help of some preprocessing of JunoCam images by Mattias Malmer, Don Davis shows us how Jupiter might have looked on April 1, 2018, if we'd been aboard Juno.

Emily Lakdawalla

What is the surface of a comet like? That's one of the main questions that motivated Philae's mission to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. We now know the comet has a rigid crust about 10 to 50 centimeters thick, below which the comet is much more fluffy.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA’s next Mars mission launched successfully from Vandenberg Air Force Base today!

A.J.S. Rayl

Opportunity spent April further exploring the area about halfway down Perseverance Valley, checking out unusual, vesicular or pitted rocks the likes of which she has never seen, while officials prepared the mission’s bid to keep the robot field geologist roving through 2019.

Van Kane

Both would do compelling science in the mid-2030s. Otherwise the two missions could not be more different.

Emily Lakdawalla

MarCO or Mars Cube One is an experimental mission that is sending two tiny spacecraft along with InSight to Mars. If successful, they will relay real-time telemetry from InSight to Earth during the landing.

Franck Marchis

One year ago, Franck Marchis wrote an article about the remarkable discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system. Here's an update.

Roger Wiens

Excitement is building within the SuperCam team as the instrument enters the final stages of assembly and testing toward an anticipated launch aboard NASA’s Mars 2020 rover.

A.J.S. Rayl

For the 15th year in a row, Opportunity drove into the spotlight during an afternoon session at the 49th Lunar & Planetary Science Conference.

Makoto Yoshikawa

What do we already know about Ryugu, and why is it so hard to know what it looks like? Hayabusa2 Mission Manger Makoto Yoshikawa

Emily Lakdawalla

Happy Monday! Here's a picture of Prometheus. You may think it's a picture of Saturn. Look hard, toward the bottom, and you'll see Prometheus, doing its part to keep the F ring in line.

Emily Lakdawalla

What a cool photo of OSIRIS-REx's sample return capsule! But wait, what's that black dot near the top?