Articles

Mark Marley

Mark Marley explains what planetary scientists mean when they say the word

Amy Simon

Imagine 2 icy worlds far from the Sun. Their serene, blue atmospheres. Huge, ominous-looking storms. Tantalizing glimpses of moons with exotic, icy terrains. Delicate sets of encircling rings.

Björn Jónsson

The color of Uranus and Neptune is similar, but not identical. Uranus appears greener and Neptune bluer.

Björn Jónsson

Björn Jónsson argues that even now, 40 years after Voyager 1 and 2 were launched, a lot of the data they returned is still of high interest.

Van Kane

One fact dominates the planning for any mission to Uranus or Neptune: They lie far from the sun. A newly released NASA report looks at how we can explore these icy giants.

Jason Davis

Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus and Neptune: Voyager 2, in the late 1980s. A new NASA report explores the reasons to go back, and what type of mission might take us there.

Emily Lakdawalla

Beautiful new amateur work with 27-year-old Voyager data.

Emily Lakdawalla

When are the solstices and equinoxes on the giant planets, and when are they best positioned for view from Earth? I ask these questions a lot as I write about Earth photos of giant planets, and I finally decided to gather the answers to those questions in a single post.

Emily Lakdawalla

Image processing enthusiast Ian Regan is working on a cool new version of the Voyager 2 Neptune approach movie.

Emily Lakdawalla

There are no spacecraft at Uranus or Neptune, and there haven't been for 30 and 25 years, respectively. So we depend on Earth-based astronomers to monitor them, including Damian Peach.

Bill Dunford

More examples of imperfect--but tantalizing--images from deep space.

Emily Lakdawalla

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune, image magician Björn Jónsson has produced two new global mosaics of the distant ice giant, the highest-resolution ever made.

Casey Dreier

The Voyager mission may be the ultimate expression of our desire to explore, but why does that will exist in the first place? Why is it unique to humans?

Christophe Pellier

Can features on Neptune be observed by amateur astronomers? For years, the Hubble Space Telescope and some professional terrestrial observatories have been revealing incomplete belts and spots on the surface of Neptune. Now, spots have been imaged by amateurs.

David Shortt

With the recent announcement by NASA that the 36 year-old spacecraft Voyager 1 has officially entered interstellar space at a distance from the sun about four times further than Neptune's orbit, and with Voyager 2 not far behind, it seems worthwhile to explore how humans managed to fling objects so far into space.

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

Despite the fact that Voyager 2 returned relatively few high-resolution images from either Uranus or Neptune, there are many more photos in the archives than regularly make it to public view.

Emily Lakdawalla

My guest this was Planetary Society Board vice president Heidi Hammel. We discussed two planets near and dear to our hearts, Neptune and Uranus. What's new on these icy worlds since Voyager 2 passed by, and what are the prospects for their future exploration?

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?

Alex Parker

2011 HM102 is an L5 Neptune Trojan, trailing Neptune by approximately 60 degrees. This object was discovered in the search for a New Horizons post-Pluto encounter object in the Kuiper Belt.