Blogs

SMAP Under Construction: Field trip to the Spacecraft Assembly Facility

Emily Lakdawalla • August 14, 2013 •

Yesterday I enjoyed my second-ever opportunity to suit up and enter the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On display were SMAP, an Earth orbiting radar mission, and ISS-RapidScat, which will perform a different radar experiment from the Space Station.

Beautiful science by Elektro-L

Vitaliy Egorov • August 08, 2013 •

Six months ago, I wrote about the Russian weather satellite Elektro-L, which has more than two years of successful experience in the geostationary orbit. Then I promised that I would be here to share the materials that we collected. I think it's time to deliver on the promise.

Rare cloud-free view of Alaska from Terra MODIS

A rare clear day in Alaska

Emily Lakdawalla • July 12, 2013 •

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

Stationkeeping in Mars orbit

Emily Lakdawalla • June 27, 2013 •

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.

Mount Taranaki, a stratovolcano in New Zealand, from Landsat

Browsing Landsat data is a lot easier than I thought it was

Emily Lakdawalla • February 08, 2013 •

With the Landsat Data Continuity Mission scheduled to launch on Monday, there's been a lot of Tweeting about Landsat, and through one such Tweet I learned about a resource that I hadn't known existed before: the LandsatLook Viewer. This is a graphical interface to more than a decade worth of Landsat data, a tremendous resource for anyone interested in Earth's changing surface, natural or manmade.