Articles

Mat Kaplan

This week's Planetary Radio features artist Jon Lomberg inviting listeners to join the New Horizons Message Initiative.

Jason Davis

Comet ISON is brightening as it approaches the Sun, and can now be seen from many ground-based telescopes.

Geraint Jones

Recently, almost a thousand researchers gathered in London for Europe’s annual meeting of planetary scientists. Here's a report from one session on cometary science.

Van Kane

The European Space Agency will announce two major science missions this November, one of which is likely to be devoted to solar system exploration.

Mat Kaplan

Pay attention! This Mars orbiter, headed for launch in November, is a terrific science mission, as Mat Kaplan learned in a recent workshop, and in this week's Planetary Radio.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week was the European Planetary Science Congress in London, and there's been a lot of science news. One thing that caught my eye Friday was the publication of a new atlas for Vesta.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few weeks ago I received an email pointing me to a really cool new map-based browser to Dawn's Vesta image data.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just four months ago I posted about a paper recently published by Leslie Young and coauthors that described three possible scenarios for Pluto's atmosphere. Yesterday, Cathy Olkin, Leslie Young, and coauthors posted a preprint on arXiv that says that only one of those scenarios can be true. And it's a surprising one. The title of their paper says it all:

Marc Rayman

Traveling confidently and alone, Dawn continues to make its way through the silent depths of the main asteroid belt. The interplanetary adventurer is on its long journey to the uncharted dwarf planet Ceres, by far the largest of all asteroids.

Alan Stern

New Horizons has just completed a summer of intensive activities and entered hibernation on Aug. 20. The routine parts of the activities included thorough checkouts of all our backup systems (result: they work fine!) and of all our scientific instruments (they work fine too!).

Björn Jónsson

Björn Jónsson produces beautiful color and 3D global mosaics of Vesta from Dawn's archival data.

Bruce Betts

Using a Shoemaker NEO Grant a new telescope is operating in Illinois to do asteroid tracking.

Emily Lakdawalla

In which the fifth graders of Kipp Heartwood Academy argue the competing sides in the is-Pluto-a-planet debate through the medium of rap.

Karl Battams

For several weeks now, ground-based observers have been blind to Comet ISON as our local star was sitting directly between us and the comet. I am delighted to share two pieces of good news: first, that ISON is still alive and well, and secondly that it has been recovered.

Daniel Fischer

Space blogger Daniel Fischer provides a preview of the exciting interplanetary observing campaign that has recently begun to study comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) from vantage points across the solar system.

Bruce Betts

Shoemaker NEO Grant winner Bob Stephens specializes in lightcurves of near Earth asteroids to determine their physical properties. Here is an update on recent progress using his 2013 Planetary Society grant. This is the first in a series of updates on Shoemaker NEO Grant winners.

Emily Lakdawalla

Does Pluto have an ocean under its ice? If it doesn't now, did it ever have one? How will we know?

Emily Lakdawalla

Last Thursday at the Pluto Science Conference there was a surprising and interesting talk by Amanda Zangari, who pointed out a serious problem with Pluto cartography.

Marc Rayman

Ion propulsion is not a source of power for Dawn. Rather, the craft needs a great deal of power to operate its ion propulsion system and all other systems. It needs so much that...we crave power!!

Mat Kaplan

This week's Planetary Radio features the new indy film that relies on the best available science to create a thrilling and inspiring human mission to Jupiter's moon.