Articles

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?

A.J.S. Rayl

It’s now been more than six and a half months that the longest-lived robot on another planet has been incommunicado.

Jason Davis

The rover is named Yutu-2, China's space agency announced.

Emily Lakdawalla

The latest images downlinked from New Horizons show MU69 to be a textbook example of a contact binary. How do contact binaries form? Updated with images released on 3 January.

Jason Davis

It’s a space feat no nation has accomplished until now.

Emily Lakdawalla

New Horizons has

Emily Lakdawalla

Today at 19:43 UTC, OSIRIS-REx entered orbit at asteroid Bennu. In so doing, it accomplished both the tightest orbit (at an altitude under 2 kilometers) and the orbit of the smallest object ever. UPDATE: Early science results from OSIRIS-REx discussed at New Horizons MU69 flyby event.

Emily Lakdawalla

Unaffected by the shutdown of the U.S. government, New Horizons is still on course for its New Year’s encounter with 2014 MU69 (nicknamed “Ultima Thule”). This post collects the latest images from New Horizons' approach to the tiny Kuiper belt object and will be updated regularly.

Ted Stryk

Ted Stryk shows us a new color, near-global view of Europa made from Galileo spacecraft data captured in 1996.