Articles

Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.

The Borup Fiord Field Site

The Sulfur Springs of Borup Fiord Pass, Ellesmere Island, offer an excellent Europa analog.

Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Discovers More Meteorites as Opportunity Closes in

The Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are wheel deep in winter, and still faring well, working hard, and sending home interesting new finds despite the below freezing Martian temperatures. The next month or so will bring the season's coldest temperatures to the rover's present habitats, but so far, no one on the team is losing any sleep over whether or not they'll make it through, because these rovers just keep going and going . . .

MESSENGER has flipped for the last time

I just received a MESSENGER mission news update stating that the MESSENGER spacecraft, en route to Mercury via two Venus flybys, has passed another milestone on its long journey: it has, for the last time, passed from Earth's environs toward the inner solar system.

New Horizons tracks an asteroid

New Horizons is spending the summer traversing the asteroid belt. I haven't written a lot about New Horizons lately because the mission has been going so uneventfully well. But now I've got something to write about: data!!

Blink comparison between ISS and RADAR views of Sinlap

The official publication on the second Titan RADAR swath is out

Today Nature published an article titled

Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Works Winter Campaign as Opportunity Roves Adrift on way to Victoria

The Mars Exploration Rovers are now well into their second Martian winter and, all things considered, both Spirit and Opportunity are faring pretty well for being, essentially, aging Baby Boomers on bitter cold, dusty alien planet some 50 million miles away from home.

A couple of neat artist's conceptions of ExoMars

With the Aurora program under way, the next European mission to Mars will be a rover named ExoMars, to be launched in 2011.

The layered interior of Gale crater, Mars

An Odyssey THEMIS image of Gale Crater, Mars

This week's releases from the Mars Odyssey THEMIS team included a gorgeous one of the layered interior of Gale crater.

Europe goes ahead with Aurora

This item is a little bit old -- I missed it when it was announced last Monday. ESA issued a press release stating that

Xanadu: Rivers flowed onto a sunless sea

Cassini RADAR: Another Flyby, Another Completely Different View of Titan

OK, I finally got a story written about the latest and greatest of the Cassini RADAR data based upon a conversation I had with with Ralph Lorenz late last week.

Global color view of Titan with a polar hood (7 December 2011)

Cassini RADAR images of the surface of Titan

Since the last Titan flyby on April 30, the Cassini RADAR team has been releasing quite a large number of pieces of the swath to the Web.

A play-by-play of the Cassini scare on Mayday

Last week's Cassini Significant Events Report included a detailed play-by-play of the frightening morning of Mayday. I thought it was a very interesting read on how a mission deals with an

OPAG, Day 2: Update from the NASA Advisory Committee meetings this week

During the first day of OPAG, the chair of the group, Fran Bagenal, was not present because she was participating in some rather important discussions taking place in Maryland.

OPAG, Day 2: Ground-based study of the small bodies in the outer solar system

After the political discussions of the morning, Mike Brown stood up to give the

OPAG, Day 1: Hot-air ballooning on Titan

The next presentation at OPAG was given by Ralph Lorenz and Tom Spilker on a Titan Montgolfiere Mission Study. What's a Montgolfiere, you ask?

OPAG, Day 1: Uranus equinox is coming up

Heidi Hammel gave a brief but spirited presentation designed to wake up the audience to the fact that Uranus is fast approaching its equinox, an event that will happen on December 7, 2007.