Articles

Mat Kaplan

The Benford brothers provide inspiration and hard fact in their excellent new anthology about interstellar travel.

Casey Dreier

We interview Dr. Franck Marchis from the SETI Institute about nanosats that can unfold in space to create sensitive telescopes that are orders of magnitudes cheaper than current hardware.

Casey Dreier

NASA confirmed that a government shutdown could affect pre-launch processing of the MAVEN spacecraft, currently scheduled to launch to Mars on November 18th.

Marc Rayman

On the sixth anniversary of leaving Earth to embark on a daring deep-space expedition, Dawn is very, very far from its erstwhile planetary residence. Now humankind's only permanent resident of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the seasoned explorer is making good progress toward the largest object in that part of the solar system, the mysterious dwarf planet Ceres.

David Shortt

With the recent announcement by NASA that the 36 year-old spacecraft Voyager 1 has officially entered interstellar space at a distance from the sun about four times further than Neptune's orbit, and with Voyager 2 not far behind, it seems worthwhile to explore how humans managed to fling objects so far into space.

Geraint Jones

Recently, almost a thousand researchers gathered in London for Europe’s annual meeting of planetary scientists. Here's a report from one session on cometary science.

Stephen J. Pyne

The Voyagers were special when they launched. They have become more so thanks to their longevity, the breadth of their discoveries, the cultural payload they carried, and the sheer audacity of their quest.

Bill Dunford

The final moments of a lunar orbiter, as told in a song composed by the moon itself.

Emily Lakdawalla

Curiosity looked up after dark and captured more cool photos of Mars' moons. They include Phobos and Deimos passing in the night, and Phobos entering Mars' shadow.

Dawn Sumner

Dawn Sumner describes the preparations for maximizing the science at Curiosity's short stop at

Emily Lakdawalla

Indian media reported over the weekend that the Mars Orbiter Mission has passed some senior review, and has been approved to proceed toward a launch date of October 28, a week later than previously planned.

Emily Lakdawalla

Efforts to regain contact with Deep Impact have been ended. The last contact with the spacecraft was on August 8, 2013.

Larry Crumpler

On sol 3425 Opportunity

Mat Kaplan

Pay attention! This Mars orbiter, headed for launch in November, is a terrific science mission, as Mat Kaplan learned in a recent workshop, and in this week's Planetary Radio.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week was the European Planetary Science Congress in London, and there's been a lot of science news. One thing that caught my eye Friday was the publication of a new atlas for Vesta.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few weeks ago I received an email pointing me to a really cool new map-based browser to Dawn's Vesta image data.

Bill Dunford

Take a spin around the Red Planet with the trusty orbiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Some good news to start your weekend: the newest member of our deep-space fleet, LADEE, has successfully completed its checkout phase and is now officially in its cruise phase. It is still in Earth orbit, headed for Lunar Orbit Insertion on Sunday, October 6.

Emily Lakdawalla

I noticed something funny while examining MAVEN assembly and testing videos.

Emily Lakdawalla

Was there rainfall on Mars? Recent work mapping valley networks suggests there probably was -- but only for about 200 million years. What does this mean for life, and the Curiosity mission?