Articles

Matthew Knight

Lowell Observatory's Matthew Knight addresses several points of confusion that have repeatedly come up in the coverage of Comet Lovejoy.

Deepak Dhingra

Deepak Dhingra shares some of the latest research on Enceladus' geysers presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco last month.

Larry Crumpler

Larry Crumpler gives an update on the status of Opportunity's traverse toward Marathon Valley.

Emily Lakdawalla

Curiosity has spent the last two months completing a second circuit of the Pahrump Hills field site, gathering APXS and MAHLI data. The work has been hampered by the loss of the ChemCam focusing laser, but the team is developing a workaround. Over the holidays, the rover downlinked many Gigabits of image data. The rover is now preparing for a drilling campaign.

Emily Lakdawalla

Dawn has captured a series of photos of a rotating Ceres whose resolution is very close to Hubble's, and they show tantalizing surface details.

Adam Block

Astrophotgrapher Adam Block shares an image of Comet Lovejoy, which is currently visible with binoculars.

Bill Dunford

Explore a new collection of 3D lunar landscapes.

Bruce Betts

Quan-Zhi Ye was an 18 year-old college student and the principal investigator of the Lulin Sky Survey when he won a 2007 Shoemaker NEO grant. He's now a Ph.D. candidate and provides an update on his work in meteor studies.

Emily Lakdawalla

What happened to Beagle 2? It's been a mystery for 11 years. That mystery appears to have been solved.

Paul Schenk

This year we achieve the first exploration of these curious but fascinating objects. Paul Schenk explains what we may learn about them.

Emily Lakdawalla

The landing of Huygens on Titan was a significant moment for planetary science and a great accomplishment for Europe. But the Huygens landing also stimulated the development of the international community of amateur image processors that does such great work with space images today. I was in the midst of it all at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt.

Adam Block

Astrophotographer Adam Block showcases some stunning images of lesser-known galaxies and nebulae.

Van Kane

Europe's JUICE spacecraft will provide us with a detailed regional study of this icy moon of Jupiter.

Daniel Scuka

Daniel Scuka describes the impending demise of the Venus Express spacecraft.

A.J.S. Rayl

With a wonder year of discoveries, historic feats, and bummers in the rear view mirror – and plenty of mettle to continue exploring – Opportunity ended 2014 quietly working in a temporary back-up mode, as her colleagues on Earth ramped up for the mission's marathon adventure to come in 2015.

Bruce Betts

Telescope purchased in 2007 with the support of a Shoemaker grant is still in service and has worked on over 100 near-Earth asteroids over its 8 years of operation.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few recent newspaper articles provide some updates on the status of Japan's Venus mission, Akatsuki, and the service module of China's Chang'e 5 test vehicle, Xiaofei. In brief: Akatsuki still plans to attempt to enter orbit in December of this year, while Chang'e 5 T1 is headed to lunar orbit. Meanwhile, the Chang'e 3 mission has released an interesting image of M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy.

Bill Dunford

Video: see some of the sights Cassini saw this year.

Emily Lakdawalla

There have been tons and tons of HiRISE images of the Curiosity landing region, and it has taken quite a lot of work for me to find, locate, and catalogue them. This post is a summary of what I've found; after four revisions and updates, it's now version 2.0 of the list.

Emily Lakdawalla

At the American Geophysical Union meeting, the Curiosity mission announced that an instrument had finally definitively detected methane in Mars' atmosphere. It exists at a low background level, but there was a spike to about ten times that, which lasted for a couple of months before disappearing. What that means is unclear.