Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Curiosity is inching her way through her first use of the drill on a Martian rock. She paused in the proceedings to capture a second Martian

Bill Dunford

Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars is an amazing place for an imagined day hike, courtesy of images from Mars Express.

Leigh Fletcher

For the first time, amateur astronomers are capturing spectacular images of Saturn's bizarre north polar hexagon.

Emily Lakdawalla

On a lonely evening, what is one to do but to dip into archival space image data and surface with a gorgeous photo of a crescent Neptune and Triton?

Emily Lakdawalla

Remembering Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon on the tenth anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia.

Emily Lakdawalla

A conversation on Twitter today reminded me of this photo, which is one of my all-time favorite space images: the view from Rosetta during its Mars flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Time for my quarterly foray into the Cassini archival science data! The very first image I downloaded from the January 1, 2013 data release presented an interesting challenge to my image processing skill. I'll show you the pretty picture of Enceladus and then explain how I processed it.

Emily Lakdawalla

They're getting closer and closer to drilling. Curiosity now seems to be positioned in the spot where they plan to be when they execute that long-awaited first drill.

Bill Dunford

Just like on Earth, clouds and storms often ripple through the Martian atmosphere. You can even check the daily weather report.

Ganna (Anya) Portyankina

The Mars I study is really active; the surface constantly changes. We have collected a lot of image data about changing seasonal features near the south pole. There is so much that we can't analyze all of it on our own. We need your help, through a new Zooniverse project named PlanetFour.

Björn Jónsson

What is the highest resolution global Jupiter mosaic that includes a satellite transit that can be assembled from Voyager images? Satellite transits are especially beautiful when the resolution is high enough for some details to be visible on the satellites so I decided to check this. And I was remarkably lucky.

Emily Lakdawalla

My solar system chauvinism is well-established, but I am as much a sucker for beautiful astrophotos as the rest of you. Once in a while I get a media advisory from the European Southern Observatory about a new pretty picture posted on their website, and then I inevitably lose an hour following links to one stunner after another.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week at a meeting of NASA's Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), Han Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences gave a lengthy presentation on Chang'E 2. Her presentation included a new sequence of photos from the December 13 Toutatis flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a new view of Curiosity on Mars on January 2 (sol 145). Curiosity was in the same location as the one from which it shot the sol 137 panorama I posted earlier. You can see the rover's tracks leading all the way back to the landing site!

Emily Lakdawalla

Video views shot by two doomed spacecraft take us flying across the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

A recently launched Earth-observing satellite is using the stars to practice its pointing, and caught a neat animation of Jupiter.

Mark Lemmon

A Mars imaging scientist answers the question: who is the

Emily Lakdawalla

ESA brought Mars Express' VMC back online in May, but hasn't been posting the images. This week, they launched a new process to release VMC images automatically to a Flickr page.

Emily Lakdawalla

My collage of all the asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft is probably the single most popular image I have ever posted on this blog. I've now updated it to be in color and to include Toutatis.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Chang'E 2 mission flyby of Toutatis succeeded in acquiring images. Oh my goodness, did they succeed. These, in combination with the incredible radar images still being acquired from Goldstone and innumerable optical observations, make Toutatis one of the best-studied asteroids in the solar system.