Articles

Marc Rayman

For the first time in almost a year, the Dawn mission control room at JPL is aglow with blue.

Jason Davis

NASA and Orbital ATK are planning a one-minute test burn before Cygnus leaves the station.

Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa2 is approaching asteroid Ryugu! Here's how to stay on top of mission news and the mission's planned schedule for 2018.

Emily Lakdawalla

One of the great things about space exploration is how it can shift your perspective. And you don't even need to leave home.

Jason Davis

The Habitat is a new podcast about a year-long HI-SEAS mission in Hawaii.

Jason Davis

Revisiting images of Earth taken from the uncrewed Apollo 4 command module in 1967.

Tess Caswell

Returning to the Moon won’t be easy, even though we’ve been there before.

Elsa Jensen

Right after the last Mastcam-Z team meeting a year ago (link here to last two blog posts), our team finalized the design of the cameras, and then the fantastic voyage of creating Martian panoramic zoom cameras began.

Luyuan Xu

China's fourth lunar mission, Chang’e 4, is expected to begin on May 21 with the launch of a Long March 4C rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in the southwest of China. The launch will carry a spacecraft named Queqiao, which will serve as a communication relay satellite between Earth and the lunar farside.

Emily Lakdawalla

Seán Doran has made a cool visual index to the images that JunoCam took during Juno's first 12 closest approaches to Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

A Mercury meeting held May 1-3 summarized the current and future science of the innermost planet. Emily Lakdawalla was there and shares her notes.

Jason Davis

NASA astronaut Scott Tingle describes his first rocket launch.

Jason Davis

By 2025, NASA wants to create a new humans-in-LEO market, and then become the non-primary customer for that new market.

Sandhya Ramesh

Two weeks ago, Indian media reported a fire at the Space Application Centre (SAC) of ISRO in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Although it was a big fire, it was in an isolated building and no spacecraft was damaged.

Casey Dreier

We helped launch the new Planetary Science Congressional Caucus in Washington, D.C., with an exploration exhibition to highlight the range of academic, scientific, and industry partners engaging in planetary exploration. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye and its Board of Directors were there to welcome members of Congress and hundreds of staff and policy experts.

Emily Lakdawalla

Readers, colleagues, friends: it's finally happened. My first book is finally out in the world. Here's an excerpt that explains the design and operation of Curiosity's MMRTG, (it also applies to the future Mars 2020 rover power supply).

Björn Jónsson

The Juno spacecraft that is currently orbiting Jupiter has obtained the first good images of Jupiter's polar regions. I am presenting here a combined global map of Jupiter, made from a Cassini map I made for the equatorial and temperate regions and polar maps made from the Juno JunoCam and JIRAM polar images.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the help of some preprocessing of JunoCam images by Mattias Malmer, Don Davis shows us how Jupiter might have looked on April 1, 2018, if we'd been aboard Juno.

Jason Davis

The second flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket is now scheduled for no earlier than October 30, 2018.

Jason Davis

An appreciation for a scene from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.