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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Emily Lakdawalla takes us on a tour of the spacecraft currently exploring from within our solar system. All planets and spacecraft locations are shown at their location for April 1st, 2019.
This weekend, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft leaves Earth on a mission to touch the Sun.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe spacecraft will repeatedly dive through the Sun's corona, giving scientists their first-ever up-close look at our star.
Two sun-observing spacecraft in Earth orbit captured images of a partial solar eclipse Sunday morning.
On Wednesday evening, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketed into orbit with DSCOVR, the Deep Space Climate Observatory. Here's a photo and video roundup.
Within a two-day span, two rocket launches and three ocean landings are scheduled—one of which involves an autonomous spaceport drone ship.
After a bad day on the launch pad, some perspective.
Karl Battams highlights the historic discovery, by an Air Force satellite, of a sungrazing comet.
Upcoming deep space missions will venture right to the heart of the Solar System.
Planetary transits of the Sun by Mercury and Venus don't come along very often, and when they do we make a big deal of it because, well, it's really cool!
Comet ISON reached perihelion at 18:25 UT (10:25 PT) on November 28. It's an event that's was watched around the world, accompanied by tons of commentary and streams of photos. We will update this blog entry periodically with links to all the resources that we hear of for following the comet's progress.
Comet ISON captivated our world, and many of our world’s robotic emissaries for many months. But, alas, poor ISON is dead -- again. Here I wrap up our enthusiastic coverage of this multi-morphing zombie comet that tried to survive and re-survive as it came within one solar diameter of the Sun.
Two Hangouts bookended comet ISON's perihelion, hosted by Chuck Beuter of Comet Festival South Bend. On November 25, it was I and Ron Kaitchuck. On December 2, Alex Filippenko and I discussed what happened to the comet over Thanksgiving.
When comet ISON passed through perihelion last week, solar observing spacecraft had a ringside view. Here are several animations of ISON's perilous passage from the SOHO and two STEREO spacecraft.
Comet ISON has entered the field of view of the STEREO HI-1A camera, and, in an awesome animation, it joins a large cast of characters already present there.
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.
No mission to Europa, diminished funding for outer planets missions, a small bump to small spacecraft missions, and an increase for asteroid detection are part of the White House's proposal for NASA in 2014.
Comet PANSTARRS is delighting northern hemisphere viewers right now. But it's also big, bright, and beautiful to the STEREO spacecraft.
Curiosity has been shooting photos of the Sun as Phobos and Deimos cross its face, and -- as far as I can tell -- captured sunspots as well.
Here's a neat video posted by SungrazerComets (the Twitter identity of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Sungrazing Comets website) this morning.
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