Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

A while ago I posted all 99 issues of the Voyager Mission Status Bulletins in PDF format, and now I have another cool item to add to that collection: NASA EP-191,

Emily Lakdawalla

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to see firsthand the blackness of space above our home planet's thin atmosphere. Since there's lots of thoughtful reporting and commentary being posted on this anniversary, I thought it'd be more useful to link to some particularly interesting posts than to add in my comments.

Emily Lakdawalla

In the past week there have been 25th anniversaries of two events in 1986, one great, one terrible: the closest approach of Voyager 2 to Uranus on January 24, and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger upon liftoff on January 28.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week is the end for Kodachrome film. It's a casualty of the digital revolution.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm surprised no one's emailed me demanding the last batch of Voyager mission status bulletins! Well, here they are.

Mat Kaplan

A brief musing on the public opinion of the shuttle when it was first unveiled, and now, as it's about to be retired.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week I posted a stack of Voyager Mission Status Bulletins, which were once the main resource for space enthusiasts to follow the dramatic events and photos of an in-flight space mission.

Charlene Anderson

To see the bigger picture, it can help to step back a bit from your current position. Sometimes you need to consider the past to inform your vision for the future.

Emily Lakdawalla

When I wrote a post about Jupiter's missing South Equatorial Belt in May, I had three main questions: how long did it take for the belt to go away, has this happened before, and how can a planet as big as Jupiter change its appearance so quickly?

Pam Chadbourne

Pam Chadbourne, one of the many engineers who made the Magellan Radar Mapper mission possible, sent this note out to Magellan team members this morning, and graciously permitted me to post it here.

Emily Lakdawalla

Universe Today has recently completed a fantastic, thought-provoking series on the near-disaster of the Apollo 13 mission, which unfolded forty years ago last month.

Emily Lakdawalla

Either Spirit is the longest-lived landed Mars mission ever, or she is not. We won't know for certain unless we manage to observe a radio signal from her.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to believe it's been going strong for so many years.

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a piece of the Lunar-Reconnaissance-Orbiter-spots-the-Lunokhods story that I was intrigued by but just didn't have the time this week to investigate properly.

Emily Lakdawalla

On Sunday comes the twentieth anniversary of an iconic image from the Voyager mission: the

Emily Lakdawalla

Galileo, the scientist, discovered the Galilean satellites of Jupiter four hundred years ago next month, while Galileo, the mission, arrived at Jupiter to study those moons in situ fourteen years ago Sunday.

Susan Lendroth

Grab your bell bottoms and Tang, and travel back to 1969 when Apollo 11's journey to the Moon captivated the world, and Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's boot prints in the lunar dust transformed us into a multi-world species.

5thstar

In 1995, 572 astronaut applicants were narrowed down to 125 based on their resumes and English scores, then down to 48 based on paper exams and brief medical checks. These 48 candidates went through a week of comprehensive medical checks and job interviews.

Timothy Reed

The editors of the site, Nature, have begun their ApolloPlus40 blog.

David Seal

David Seal muses on his time as the mission planner for Cassini, and the history behind its name, and astronomy in Rome.