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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Beyond Earth T-shirt features 23 space missions
Let other geeks have their T-shirts with fictional space explorers -- now you can emblazon your chest with 23 space missions that have really explored space!
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter press briefing: silicic volcanoes on the Moon
I'm listening to a press briefing from several members of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter science team, regarding three papers published today in Science.
Opportunity's rocky road ahead, good news for an aging rover
What a difference a couple of months of driving make. Here's the sort of view of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity's road ahead that I'm accustomed to, taken two months ago.
Mars As Art
Attention Mars data trawlers! NASA Headquarters is looking for community input on an exhibition and book of
The Voyager Mission Updates
We take for granted now the ability to get detailed mission updates in a timely fashion via the Web. But How did people get their mission status before the Web?
Carnival of Space #169
The 169th Carnival of Space is live over at Next Big Future. Check it out!
Book review: Older Than the Stars
Older Than the Stars is a book about Big Bang cosmology, solar system formation, and human evolution for young children.
Browse the Cassini RPWS data set
Periodically, usually after I've posted some images pulled out of an image archive, a reader asks me:
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast: The Flight of Hayabusa
Today the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast aired my contribution, The Flight of Hayabusa, a recap of that dramatic mission.
Pretty picture: Crescent Dione
I was busy with other projects today, so today's post just asks you to look at this gorgeous three-image mosaic of a crescent Dione, taken during Cassini's most recent flyby a week ago.
NASA: NOT Grounded
So I just received my
China's Yinghuo-1 Mars Orbiter
A helpful reader has sent me copies of three recently published papers on China's first planetary probe, the Yinghuo-1 orbiter.
Early warning for close approaches of two house-sized asteroids
Most of you have probably heard by now of two small asteroids, both in the neighborhood of 10 meters in diameter, recently discovered on trajectories that pass unusually close to Earth.
Deep Impact snaps first image of flyby target comet Hartley 2
Deep Impact is rapidly approaching its next -- and final -- target, comet Hartley 2, which it will fly by on November 4.
Two natural bridges on the Moon (now with 3D!)
Imagine this landscape: you're walking across an unusually smooth lunar surface, an impact melt sheet on the floor of a relatively recently formed crater.
Neptune from two slightly different perspectives
Coincidentally, two new images of Neptune were posted today, from two very different sources.
Fly over Saturn's icy moons
A couple of weeks ago Paul Schenk posted a few really cool videos to his personal blog. Paul's subspecialty is the topography of icy moons, and he's been doing a lot of work on the moons of Saturn lately.
Getting to the real science image data: It's not that hard!
If I have to, I will drag reluctant people one at a time to plunge into NASA's Planetary Data System.
What's up in the solar system in September 2010
This month there will be approximately a hundred different planetary science meetings (a list of which is at the end of this post).
Successor to Mars Climate Orbiter will fly aboard ExoMars
Congratulations to the Mars Climate Sounder team on winning a spot for a successor instrument aboard the next Mars orbiter, the joint NASA-ESA ExoMars, set to launch in 2016.