Articles

Mat Kaplan

You can be part of a planetwide group photo as Cassini and MESSENGER turn their cameras Earthward on July 19.

Emily Lakdawalla

The HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has snapped a lovely color photo of the rim of Endeavour crater, catching Opportunity midway between Nobby's Head and Solander Point.

Ralph Lorenz

The fictional world Tatooine, scene of action in the Star Wars movies, is named after a town in Tunisia, where parts of the movies were filmed. The desert backdrops against which the movies were filmed are real terrestrial landscapes, which prove to be perhaps unexpectedly dynamic.

Mat Kaplan

This week's Planetary Radio goes on tour at the Mount Wilson Observatory with descendants of its founder.

Emily Lakdawalla

Pluto's moons, formerly known as

Bill Dunford

There's a cool new way to explore the first planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA recently shared a gloriously detailed image of an unusual clear day in Alaska as seen from the Terra satellite.

Ara Kourchians

Time is kept differently on Mars. This is because Mars itself rotates a little slower than Earth. This proves to be a pain when it comes to timekeeping.

Larry Crumpler

By Sol 3325 Opportunity has driven up onto the next

Bill Dunford

The south polar cap of Mars is riddled with strange landscapes.

Jason Davis

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of images showing Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) plunging toward the sun.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission celebrated its 10th anniversary of leaving Earth in June, as Opportunity continued the sprint to its next winter haven at Endeavour Crater.

Marc Rayman

The indefatigable Dawn spacecraft is continuing its extraordinary interplanetary flight on behalf of inquisitive creatures on distant Earth. Progressing ever farther from Vesta, the rocky and rugged world it so recently explored, the ship is making good progress toward its second port of call, dwarf planet Ceres.

Mat Kaplan

The Planetary Science Institute's Amanda Hendrix is the guest for our July 1 episode. She finds water in the least likely places, including Luna.

Bill Dunford

An

Jason Davis

IRIS, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph spacecraft, was launched from Orbital Science Corporation's Stargazer carrier aircraft over the Pacific Ocean at 7:27 p.m PDT.

Emily Lakdawalla

It had never occurred to me to think about geostationary satellites in Mars orbit before reading a new paper by Juan Silva and Pilar Romero. The paper shows that it takes a lot more work to maintain a stationary orbit at an arbitrary longitude at Mars than it does at Earth.

Bill Dunford

Meet some worlds that were nearly shattered, literally.

Alessondra Springmann

Arecibo Observatory is known for its 1000-foot diameter telescope and its appearances in Goldeneye and Contact. Aside from battling Bond villains and driving red diesel Jeeps around the telescope (grousing at the site director about the funding status of projects is optional), several hundred hours a year of telescope time at Arecibo go toward radar studies of asteroids.

Jason Davis

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a striking image set of Chinese spacecraft Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 10 transiting the Sun.