Blogs & Articles

BepiColombo Earth flyby

Europe and Japan's BepiColombo spacecraft, which launched in 2018, will fly by Earth on 10 April and use our planet's gravity to swing towards the inner solar system. Learn more about this mission and why we study Mercury.

Your Guide to BepiColombo

Europe and Japan’s first Mercury mission will study how the planet formed.

Your Guide to Mercury

The innermost planet is a contradictory mystery.

Apollo 13 50th Anniversary

The Planetary Society is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13, which launched on 11 April 1970. Disaster struck on 13 April, prompting the crew's infamous "Houston, we've had a problem" call for help. Learn what happened, and how NASA got the astronauts home safely on 17 April.

Apollo 13

Apollo 13 was the 3rd attempt to land humans on the Moon and the 1st to fail. Fifty-six hours into the mission, an explosion forced the crew to abort their Moon landing and take shelter in the Lunar Module. The crew ultimately returned to Earth safely.

More Apollo resources

• Celebrating Apollo at 50
• The Apollo missions
• Reconstructing the Cost of One Giant Leap

Blogs & Articles

New Horizons update: Resolving features on Charon and seeing in color

Emily Lakdawalla • June 23, 2015 • 13

Only about three weeks remain until the flyby — it's getting really close! I almost don't want the anticipation to end. New Horizons is now getting color images and is seeing features on Charon. Deep searches have yielded no new moons.

Pluto and Charon spin among the stars

Emily Lakdawalla • June 16, 2015 • 7

I've spent a happy couple of days playing with raw data downloaded from the New Horizons website, making animations of the dances of Pluto and Charon.

An enigmatic line across Pluto: Plutonian canali!?

Emily Lakdawalla • June 09, 2015 • 17

Pluto and Charon are growing larger in New Horizons' forward view, beginning to develop distinct personalities. A version of recent New Horizons photos processed by Björn Jónsson reveals an enigmatic dark line. Our maps of Pluto's surface are now as good as our maps of Mars and Venus, circa 1900!

A (very) few more details on Pluto

Emily Lakdawalla • June 01, 2015 • 9

Last week the New Horizons mission released a few new processed versions of their latest and greatest images of Pluto. They're the best images of Pluto that Earth has ever seen, but they're still a long way from what New Horizons will be able to show us, six weeks from now.

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