Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

I've been delving in to the Mars Express image archive this week, checking out its images of Phobos, and found a couple of really cool time-series of images to assemble into animations.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, the much-anticipated comet ISON made its closest pass by Mars. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera is the first to achieve a positive detection of the somewhat-fainter-than-expected comet in its photos.

Emily Lakdawalla

Some brand-new images just arrived from Curiosity on Mars, and two of the most recent are Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) images of the wheels. Today's images contained two little surprises.

Mat Kaplan

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

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the basins of the Moon -- a result of a trip down a rabbit hole of book research. Here's the next step in that journey: the Geologic Time Scales of Earth and the Moon.

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

A paper in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research uses new data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to update our story for the history of the Moon's massive impacts.

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.

Van Kane

The European Space Agency will announce two major science missions this November, one of which is likely to be devoted to solar system exploration.

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

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

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?

Mat Kaplan

Listen to or watch the recording of our live celebration for LADEE as the spacecraft blasted off for the moon.