by Emily Lakdawalla
Emily Lakdawalla
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Follow the thrilling adventures of planetary missions, past and present, and see the stunningly beautiful photos that they return from space!
Emily Lakdawalla • December 31, 2009
I just got a press release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that made my heart sink; the extrication effort for Spirit is not going at all well. I did not want to keep sounding a knell of bad news. But once in a while, I do have to report bad news.
Emily Lakdawalla • December 24, 2009
This was so cute I had to repost it -- and record it too.
Emily Lakdawalla • December 17, 2009
Holy cow, look at that right front wheel spin. I am alternately amazed and horrified by this animation.
Emily Lakdawalla • December 15, 2009
I've gotten this question about once a week since Spirit got stuck, but yesterday, two different readers asked the same question within an hour of each other, so I figured it was time for a blog entry.
Emily Lakdawalla • December 14, 2009
The ever-vigilant Doug Ellison just posted this animation, which really actually does show a teeny tiny bit of motion in the right front wheel. If you don't notice any motion, look closer.
Emily Lakdawalla • December 11, 2009
My inbox was exploding this morning with messages about a tremendously cool animation released this morning by ESA's Mars Express team. It shows Phobos crossing Deimos, in what's known as a "mutual event."
Emily Lakdawalla • November 19, 2009
It really looks like the second attempt at driving Spirit out of the trap has had the hoped-for result: some forward progress (maybe about a centimeter), and no evidence for further downward sinking.
Emily Lakdawalla • November 19, 2009 • 2
I probably crammed too much into today's class: an hour-and-a-half whirlwind tour through the cameras on the rovers and Cassini, how to access their raw images on the Internet, and some basic processing that you can do with each of them.
Emily Lakdawalla • November 18, 2009
Since tomorrow's class is going to be on playing with raw images from the rovers and Cassini, I've been playing with recent raw images from the rovers and Cassini! I just thought I'd share a couple of the fun items I've been working with.
Emily Lakdawalla • November 17, 2009
Even though all of us rover fans know that Spirit is really, really stuck, I think I'm not the only one who was secretly hoping that today's images downlinked from Spirit would show that the rover had magically popped out of the ground overnight. Of course, she didn't.
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