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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Your guide to future total solar eclipses
Bruce Betts and Sarah Al-Ahmed provided a guide to all total solar eclipses through the end of the 2020s, with dates and locations.
Carl Sagan’s wisdom and vision, and how far we’ve come since his time
Even Sagan would be amazed by multitudes we now know our cosmos may hold. Learn more, plus get your scoop on the week’s space news.
What’s up (and down) in space?
Wrap your head around orientations in space, and learn the latest in space exploration news.
Fun With a New Data Set: The OSIRIS-REx Earth Flyby
The OSIRIS-REx team recently issued their first data release to the Planetary Data System. This release doesn’t include any closeup pictures of asteroid Bennu, but it does include all the pictures they took during their September 2017 Earth flyby.
Imaging the Earth from Lunar orbit
Radio amateurs around the world worked together to take an image of the Earth and the far side of the Moon.
NASA Then & Now
A collection of before and after slider images showing how views of planets in our solar system have changed over the years since NASA was created.
Favorite Astro Plots: The Pyroxene Quadrilateral
Petrology is a field of science in which scientists study the compositions of rocks and minerals and interpret their geologic history. A common graph petrologists use is the “pyroxene quadrilateral.” These graphs, like photos of space, can reveal an understanding of the remotest parts of the solar system.
Big news from the magnetosphere
At five years and counting, the Van Allen Probes mission continues to reshape our thinking about how Earth’s radiation belts flex and reconfigure under the influence of solar storms.
The curious case of the Apollo 4 Earth images
Revisiting images of Earth taken from the uncrewed Apollo 4 command module in 1967.
#LPSC2018: What the Moon's craters tell us about Earth's past climate
You might be surprised to learn that studying craters on the Moon can tell us about ancient Earth.
#LPSC2018: Fungi in the lab, hot springs frozen cold, and exploding lakes
The first astrobiology session at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference featured talks on a huge variety of interesting topics, and was one of my favorite sessions at the meeting.
Throwback Thursday Funpost! A spacewalk in deep space
Only three humans have ever been on a spacewalk in the void between the Earth and Moon.
Go for GOLD, SES-14!
While we can measure properties of these upper layers using ground-based instruments, satellite-borne remote sensing instruments can give us a more frequent, global, and often higher spatial resolution perspective. And that is precisely what NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission will deliver.
Visualize today's solstice with images from Earth-observing satellites
What do the shortest days of the year look like from space?
An exoplanet-hunting space telescope turns and takes a photo of Earth
On December 10, Kepler—NASA’s prized exoplanet discovery telescope—will finally turn back and take a picture of the Earth.
Earth flyby tests OSIRIS-REx's cameras
As expected, OSIRIS-REx's Earth flyby on September 22 was a success. The mission is slowly releasing beautiful images of our home worlds taken by its many cameras following the flyby.
OSIRIS-REx Earth flyby: What to Expect
OSIRIS-REx launched on September 8, 2016. Now, a year later, it's returning to its home to get a second boost on to its destination, the asteroid Bennu. It'll test all its cameras on Earth and the Moon in the 10 days after the flyby.
Voyager 40th anniversary: Reflecting on the pale blue dot
Today is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1. Four decades later, both spacecraft survive, still producing science, still working on their interstellar missions. On the occasion of the anniversary, we revisit Carl Sagan's reflections on the significance of the Voyager missions.
Chasing the total solar eclipse at 38,000 feet
Where did you venture to view the Great American Eclipse? About 100 people were lucky enough to make the trip of a lifetime for it: 38,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, courtesy of Alaska Airlines.
NASA experiments will watch eclipse's effect on atmosphere
The upcoming solar eclipse isn’t just about watching the Moon block out the Sun. A suite of NASA-funded science experiments will to study the unseen effects of the eclipse on Earth's atmosphere.