Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

This image is beautiful for many reasons. It was captured by the MVIC imaging spectrometer, part of the Ralph instrument, on New Horizons, as it left the Jupiter system on March 2, 2007.

A.J.S. Rayl

It's been business as usual on the Red Planet this month as the Mars Exploration Rovers investigated new areas on their ever-moving missions to explore Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum. Both Spirit and Opportunity chalked up yet another productive month of field geology as they roved onward in their fourth year on location, checking out more of the local environs some 149,597,900 kilometers (93 million miles) away on Earthlings' favored other planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

The last one of New Horizons imaging instruments has finally checked in with a lovely image from the Jupiter flyby

Emily Lakdawalla

What should arrive in my inbox today but a press release from the Cassini RPWS and magnetometer teams saying, in part,

Anne Verbiscer

I received this report on the Tuesday afternoon special session on volcanism and tectonism on Saturn's satellites from Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer from the University of Virginia who I first met at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in 2005.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Tvashtar eruption continues to amaze. All this time between Galileo and New Horizons, Io's volcanoes have probably continually produced spectacular eruptions like these.

Jason Perry

Jason Perry, a member of the Cassini Imaging Team and an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona, reports from the Titan sessions.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since late January Cassini has been acquiring several sets of images that show all of Saturn's globe and ring system at once from perspectives well above and below the ring plane.

Bruce Betts

In 2007, The Planetary Society awarded $34,500 as part of its Gene Shoemaker Near Earth Object (NEO) Grant Program. The grants were made to a group of international researchers to find, track, and characterize potentially hazardous NEOs.

Emily Lakdawalla

OK, I had planned to confine my posts this week to Rosetta and New Horizons, but I could not let these images sit on my computer until next week.

Bruce Betts

Thanks to The Planetary Society Shoemaker Grant, the 1.06-meter KLENOT telescope optics was completed at the Klet Observatory. Regular observations of the KLENOT project started in March 2002 under the new IAU/MPC code 246, so we can now present results covering 5 years of this work.

Emily Lakdawalla

According to a press release issued minutes ago, New Horizons has successfully completed its close flyby of Jupiter.

A.J.S. Rayl

Dust storms are beginning to whirl around Mars as spring blooms in the southern hemisphere of the planet and along the equator where the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) are roving into their fourth year with a second banner month of exploration.

Emily Lakdawalla

There were two new pictures posted on the New Horizons Science Operations Center website this morning, of Io, and if you enhance the images a bit, there are two clear volcanic plumes visible on the limb -- Tvashtar and Prometheus are active!

Amir Alexander

Winter time is observing time at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts, when humidity is low and the sky is often clear. And so it has been for the Optical SETI telescope, which opened its doors in April 2006.

Amir Alexander

Located in the southern part of the continent of South America, Southern SETI has a continuous view of densest star-fields in our galaxy. And, since 1990, it has been sponsored and supported by The Planetary Society.

Emily Lakdawalla

This amazing view was captured by the CIVA camera on Rosetta's Philae lander just four minutes before its closest approach to Mars on February 25, 2007. The spacecraft was only 1,000 kilometers above the planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

Iapetus is one of the many fascinating bodies in the Saturn system.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's easy to forget that Mars is another such world with cloudy weather and seasonally varying climate. This lovely image release from the CRISM instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter brings that point home.

Emily Lakdawalla