Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

You know, I could fill this blog almost entirely with the amazing images that Gordan Ugarkovic locates, processes into prettiness, and uploads to his Flickr account.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've posted animations from Cassini before in which there are multiple moons moving around, but this is one of the coolest such sequences I've seen yet.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've spent a pleasurable hour or so browsing over the latest release of images from Cassini to the Planetary Data System.

Emily Lakdawalla

Three years after New Horizons flew past Jupiter on its way to Pluto, the spacecraft has imaged the giant planet again.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here are two newly processed portraits of Saturn, showing the planet just after its equinox.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Saturn system is always in motion, always changing. Saturn itself is a gas giant, with swirling storms, and like the other gas giants it has a host of moons flying around, perturbing each other's motions. And then there's the rings.

Emily Lakdawalla

Three months ago, grandiosely, I announced that I was going to survey volcanism across the solar system, and I began the journey on Earth. Then I failed to follow up.

Emily Lakdawalla

Four times a year, the Cassini mission releases three months' worth of data gathered from Saturn and its moons to NASA's Planetary Data System.

Emily Lakdawalla

As promised last week, Cassini has delivered its best photos yet of the tiny moon Daphnis, the ringmoon that is responsible for carving out the skinny Keeler gap at the outer edge of Saturn's A ring.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a pretty picture post, a dramatic Cassini shot on the outer edge of the A ring captured earlier this month.

Emily Lakdawalla

A happy ending to this story: JPL reported yesterday evening that the flipped bit in Voyager 2's flight data system software has been successfully toggled back to its correct value.

Emily Lakdawalla

Every time I think Cassini has captured the coolest image of Enceladus ever, it does better.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini flew within 436 kilometers of Enceladus' surface today. Although it's Cassini's 11th targeted flyby of Enceladus, these close buzzes are never routine.

Emily Lakdawalla

Voyager 2's engineers have confirmed that the problem with the spacecraft was indeed the result of a single flipped bit in its software, as they predicted.

Emily Lakdawalla

Good old Voyager 2; she takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Emily Lakdawalla

Every time Cassini gets reasonably close to one of the moons of Saturn, whether the close approach is a targeted one or just an opportunistic encounter, its planners usually take advantage of the proximity to take a bunch of photos.

Emily Lakdawalla

A good start to my day today: The New York Times' Lens Blog featured the

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, this is a cool paper. Here's the gist: the Cassini RADAR team has spotted some river channels on Titan that shine so brightly in radar images, there must be something special going on to explain that brightness.

Emily Lakdawalla

Engineers have shifted NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft into a mode that transmits only spacecraft health and status data while they diagnose an unexpected change in the pattern of returning data.

Emily Lakdawalla

A lot of readers have expressed interest in the origin of Saturn's north polar hexagon. The hexagon is a long-lived pattern in the clouds surrounding Saturn's north pole, which has been observed since the Voyagers passed by in 1980 and 1981.