Articles

Jason Davis

A total solar eclipse and the launch of Europa Clipper are on our list of cosmic events to get excited about this year.

The Downlink

The realities of space go beyond what we can see, and perhaps even beyond what we can imagine.

The Downlink

Everything you need to know about NASA’s Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids.

Casey Dreier

Lucy kicks off a beefier era of Discovery.

Darin Ragozzine

The LSST is expected to increase the number of known small bodies by more than a factor of 10.

Van Kane

Last week, NASA selected its thirteenth and fourteenth missions in its low cost Discovery program.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is the first in a series of posts in which scientists share favorite planetary science plots. For my #FaveAstroPlot, I explain what you can see when you look at how asteroid orbit eccentricity and inclination vary with distance from the Sun.

Van Kane

Van Kane rounds up some of the latest NASA Discovery mission proposals aiming to explore our solar system's smallest bodies.

Emily Lakdawalla

Chiron, which is both a centaur and a comet, may also have rings.

Emily Lakdawalla

On Wednesday, March 26, two important discoveries in the outer solar system were announced: the discovery of the second confirmed member of the Inner Oort Cloud (2012 VP113) and the discovery of rings around the planetesimal Chariklo. In a Hangout on Air, a rag-tag group of planetary scientists and astronomers active on Twitter talked about the discoveries.

Alex Parker

Yesterday, a team of astronomers announced that they discovered a set of planet-like rings around Chariklo, an asteroid-like body that currently resides in the unstable region between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus.

Alex Parker

This month my latest paper made it to print in the Astronomical Journal. It's a short piece that describes a serendipitous discovery that my collaborators and I made while searching for a distant Kuiper Belt Object for the New Horizons spacecraft to visit after its 2015 Pluto flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week I'll be talking with NEOWISE principal investigator Amy Mainzer about moving objects that the WISE mission has spotted both inside and outside our solar system.

Alex Parker

Recently, several of the Kuiper Belt Objects our team has discovered while searching for New Horizons post-Pluto flyby candidates have been submitted to the Minor Planet Center and their orbital information is now in the public domain.

Alex Parker

2011 HM102 is an L5 Neptune Trojan, trailing Neptune by approximately 60 degrees. This object was discovered in the search for a New Horizons post-Pluto encounter object in the Kuiper Belt.

Emily Lakdawalla

Earlier today I wrote a post about how to calculate the position of a body in space from its orbital elements. I'm trying to get a big-picture view of what's going on in trans-Neptunian space.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA funds regular meetings of scientists who work on different parts of the solar system to provide scientific input into NASA's future plans. These

Emily Lakdawalla

Congratulations to Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo for identifying the first known L5 Trojan asteroid of Neptune!