Articles

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

What planet is THIS?

Check out this watery world! It's clearly a computer simulation of something, but of what? Can you guess?

A new view of Callisto

Here's a lovely amateur-produced color image of Jupiter's moon Callisto, or, as its artist Daniel Macháček calls it,

It's been a little while since I posted any Cassini pictures just because they were pretty, so here's a few recent ones, produced by amateurs from the images available on the Cassini raw images website.

And now for Luna 17 and Lunokhod 1

I am delighted to report that within a day of the first view of Luna 21 and Lunokhod 2 since the end of that mission in 1973, the sister mission, Luna 17 and Lunokhod 1, has also been found.

Lunokhod found on the Moon -- and on Earth, too

Yesterday I posted a bit of a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera image showing the tracks of the Russian Lunokhod 2 rover. Today, I can post for you an image showing the rover's final resting place

The far side of Phobos

Now here is an unusual image of Phobos, Mars' moon.

Soviet landers Luna 20, 23, and 24, plus the tracks of Lunokhod 2

Today is the bonanza day for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: the first formal release of orbiter data happened this morning, including 10 Terabytes (that is 10 million Megabytes!) of camera data.

Phobos from Mars Express

ESA has released the first image from Mars Express' recent close flybys of Phobos!

Pretty pictures: Europa from Galileo and Voyager

For some reason both Jason Perry and Ted Stryk took it upon themselves to produce new, pretty versions of Jupiter's moon Europa this week, so I'm hereby featuring them!

Helene has two faces

Yes, it's yet another post on Helene! I keep on finding new stuff to post. This time it is a really cool montage assembled by Ian Regan.

Pointing at Helene

I posted already some neat images from Cassini's flyby of Helene last week, and commented on how most of the images from that encounter missed Helene entirely or only caught the moon at one edge of the camera field of view. Here's an example of one of those images.

Flight path for Mars3d Candor Chasma animation

Unbelievably spectacular flight through Candor Chasma

This is one of the things that came out during LPSC last week and all I could do at the time was Tweet it—so here it is in blog form: the most unbelievably spectacular 3D animation of a bit of Mars I've seen yet, produced by Adrian Lark.