Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA funds regular meetings of scientists who work on different parts of the solar system to provide scientific input into NASA's future plans. These

Emily Lakdawalla

I haven't checked in on Cassini lately. I went to the raw images page and found the frames for this very lovely, very close view of Saturn. It was taken by Cassini two days ago, as it was approaching periapsis.

Emily Lakdawalla

365 Days of Astronomy is a daily podcast that is almost entirely user-driven. Each podcast, which can cover astronomical, cosmological, planetological, or educational topics, is written, recorded, and submitted by people like you who are excited about space.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last Friday I posted an awesome video of Martian clouds in motion. This week I'll tell you how I made it. The how-to is split up into two parts. The first, today, is how to access Mars Express HRSC image data and process it into the individual animation frames, from which you can make an animated GIF.

Emily Lakdawalla

Behold an amazing (if I do say so myself) video of Martian clouds in motion.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is a bit of a departure from space science, but was so awesome, I had to share. I've always loved Tom Lehrer's

Emily Lakdawalla

It's the first time I've ever seen anything like this -- two identical spacecraft, side by side on one launch adapter ring.

Emily Lakdawalla

Much has been made of the

Emily Lakdawalla

Dawn's images of Vesta show craters upon craters, but the longer I study the images, the wackier the craters look.

Emily Lakdawalla

While doing my daily reading today I was struck by the awesomeness of two recent blog posts. Both were composed not by professional bloggers like me but by professional space explorers, one a scientist and the other an engineer.

Emily Lakdawalla

This photo is making the rounds of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and whatever other social network you care to name today. It was shot by astronaut Ron Garan from the Space Station, and it's a meteor seen from above. Way cool.

Emily Lakdawalla

Amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins sent me this neat little animation of comet Garradd moving against background stars through an hour's worth of observing. I'm not any kind of astronomer but if I were I think I would get a kick out of looking at things that appear to move within one night of watching -- asteroids, comets, Jupiter's spots. I'm impatient that way.

Emily Lakdawalla

I was not trained as a journalist, so before I started working for the Planetary Society I had no understanding of how much news reporters depend upon press releases to generate story ideas. Did you know that most of the news that you read on the Web or in a newspaper or hear on the radio probably originated as a press release or an arranged press event from somewhere?

Emily Lakdawalla

Opportunity's wheels are on a whole new different kind of rock: she has arrived at the rim of Endeavour crater, on Cape York.

Emily Lakdawalla

Opportunity is at her goal. In this 3D anaglyph, taken on sol 2678 (yesterday, August 6, 2011), Opportunity's wheels are resting on strange lumpy bedrock.

Emily Lakdawalla

Juno is a mission that will peer deeply into Jupiter's interior, and didn't really need to take a visible-light camera along in order to accomplish its scientific goals. But I think nobody could bear sending a spacecraft to Jupiter without getting pictures from up close. So they added Junocam.

Emily Lakdawalla

It almost looked like it wasn't going to happen today, but it did! At 16:25 UTC, a huge Atlas V 551 lifted off with the Juno spacecraft and sent it on its way to Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Do you have kids at home for the summer? Treat them to a spectacular fireworks show by tuning in tomorrow morning to watch Juno blast off to Jupiter!

Emily Lakdawalla

Explaining how to combine the red, green and blue images from a recent Cassini image session containing five of Saturn's moons: Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea.

Emily Lakdawalla

When a spacecraft has visited a new body for the first time, the usual answer to any scientific question is