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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
This week, learn about the conditions of the early solar system and get ready for next week’s meteor shower, plus more.
Six scientists share the major planetary science discoveries of the past decade, and the questions that will drive the next 10 years of solar system exploration.
Twenty-five years ago, multiple fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, changing the face of the planet and the course of planetary science.
Ted Stryk shows us a new color, near-global view of Europa made from Galileo spacecraft data captured in 1996.
Michael L. Wong asks how our understanding of the origin of life on Earth informs our search for it elsewhere.
Judy Schmidt shares the technique she used to make a beautiful new animation of Jupiter.
It’s been almost 17 years since NASA's Galileo spacecraft took meaningful data of Jupiter’s volcanic moon.
Let's check in on NASA's Juno spacecraft, which completed its 14th close flyby of Jupiter last month.
Seán Doran has made a cool visual index to the images that JunoCam took during Juno's first 12 closest approaches to Jupiter.
The Juno spacecraft that is currently orbiting Jupiter has obtained the first good images of Jupiter's polar regions. I am presenting here a combined global map of Jupiter, made from a Cassini map I made for the equatorial and temperate regions and polar maps made from the Juno JunoCam and JIRAM polar images.
With the help of some preprocessing of JunoCam images by Mattias Malmer, Don Davis shows us how Jupiter might have looked on April 1, 2018, if we'd been aboard Juno.
Take a look at how electronics of spacecraft are built to survive the harshness of space environments.
The Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument can obtain images in two infrared bands. JIRAM can see the nightside of Jupiter (including the winter pole) and takes spectacular animations.
The Jovian system is a busy place. The Groovy Galilean Satellites session at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) covered analysis of past mission data, testable hypotheses for future missions, and discussion of the use of ground-based data.
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is not just for big payloads, it can also throw light things into space very fast. And that has significant implications for the exploration of distant destinations in our outer solar system—particularly the ocean moons of the giant planets.
Results from the Juno gravity science experiment presented at last week's American Geophysical Union meeting suggest Jupiter's winds penetrate only to 3000 kilometers deep.
JunoCam may be an outreach instrument, but its superb photos of storms on Jupiter are providing plenty of data for scientists to talk about.
Björn Jónsson argues that even now, 40 years after Voyager 1 and 2 were launched, a lot of the data they returned is still of high interest.
In 1979, both Voyager missions captured thousands of photos of Jupiter as frames of movies of the giant planet spinning among its moons. In honor of the mission's 40th launch anniversary, Ian Regan has reprocessed the data to produce stunning new movies.
Using new image processing techniques, Alex Parker brings new life to an old image of Jupiter captured by the New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto over a decade ago.
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