Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

A crescent view of MU69 reveals its bizarre shape. Let's look at lots of other fun-shaped space crescents.

Andrew Jones

Chang’e-4 is sending home brilliant footage from its various spacecraft, while also being snapped by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Curiosity completed work at Vera Rubin Ridge with an easy drilling activity at Rock Hall. Now it has finally driven on to mineral-rick rocks that were seen from orbit, long before Curiosity arrived. The team plans a lengthy traverse of the clay-bearing unit.

Adam Block

Award-winning astrophotographer Adam Block shares some of his latest galactic treasures.

Jason Davis

NASA says it does not expect to receive any more transmissions from the MarCO CubeSats that accompanied Insight to Mars last year.

Emily Lakdawalla

InSight mission has successfully placed the wind and thermal shield over the seismometer. The seismometer will now be shielded from winds and kept warm over the cold Martian nights, so the quality of its data should dramatically increase.

A.J.S. Rayl

As a string of dust storms moved through Meridiani Planum and over Endeavour Crater in January, Opportunity silently wrapped her fifteenth year on the surface of Mars.

Jason Davis

The team has yet to find a Bennu sample site that matches their pre-arrival expectations, meaning their plans will probably have to change.

Emily Lakdawalla

Look up at space at night from a dark location and you can see innumerable stars. Why, then, do photos of so many things in space show black space, devoid of stars?

Casey Dreier

If ever there was an example of how quickly political winds can shift, look no further than the sudden end to a seemingly endless government shutdown on January 25th.

Andrew Jones

China has big plans for the future, including lunar sample return, a robotic research base, and potentially human missions.

Jason Davis

Launch is currently set for 19 February, and Beresheet will spend two months traveling to the Moon ahead of touchdown in April.

Casey Dreier

The partial government shutdown that shuttered NASA continues with no end in sight. The U.S. space program sits idle, the vast majority of its workforce sent home. Space science and exploration projects are disrupted. Paychecks are absent. And an unsettling realization has dawned on hundreds of thousands of public employees and contractors affected by the shutdown: this time is different.

Jason Davis

The work builds on a Planetary Society-sponsored test and paves the way for an ambitious expedition in Greenland this year.

Louis D. Friedman

Slava Linkin, one of the leading planetary scientists in the Soviet Union and later Russia, passed away on 16 January 2019. Viachelslav Mikhailovich Linkin was an enormously important participant in Planetary Society history.

Jason Davis

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft will try to collect a sample from asteroid Ryugu during the week of 18 February, mission officials said during a press briefing last week.

Emily Lakdawalla

New Horizons is back in action after going quiet for a period of solar conjunction following the 1 January flyby of 2014 MU69 (informally nicknamed

Jason Davis

Everything is going well 9 days after China's Chang'e-4 mission made a historic landing on the far side of the Moon, the country's space program said today.

Emily Lakdawalla

Engineers have leveled the seismometer and made progress on adjusting the position of the tether so that it doesn't interfere for the experiment. Most significantly for the mission, they have balanced the Very Broad Band sensors -- 3 of SEIS’ 6 seismic sensors -- and confirmed that they are generating good data.

David Rothery

In Apollo images — and to our own eyes, from Earth — the Moon is grey. What's going on?