Articles

Marc Rayman

Dawn's chief engineer Marc Rayman gives an update on the mission as it gets ever closer to its next target: The dwarf planet Ceres.

Jason Callahan

It takes a year to make, and is the starting point for all coming debate by Congress. It's the President's Budget Request, and understanding how it comes together is an important part of being an effective space advocate.

Jason Davis

Now that Boeing and SpaceX have won the high-profile privilege of carrying astronauts to the ISS, they must start making public appearances as reluctant equals.

Emily Lakdawalla

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

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week's Dawn images of Ceres were just slightly less detailed than Hubble's best. This week's are just slightly better.

Emily Lakdawalla

The first results of the Rosetta mission are out in Science magazine. The publication of these papers means that the OSIRIS camera team has finally released a large quantity of closeup images of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken in August and September of last year. I explain most of them, with help from my notes from December's American Geophysical Union meeting.

Jason Davis

This May, the first of The Planetary Society's two member-funded LightSail spacecraft is slated to hitch a ride to space for a test flight aboard an Atlas V rocket.

Matthew Knight

Lowell Observatory's Matthew Knight addresses several points of confusion that have repeatedly come up in the coverage of Comet Lovejoy.

Deepak Dhingra

Deepak Dhingra shares some of the latest research on Enceladus' geysers presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco last month.

Larry Crumpler

Larry Crumpler gives an update on the status of Opportunity's traverse toward Marathon Valley.

Casey Dreier

The 2016 budget cycle for NASA kicks off on Feb 2nd, when the White House releases the President's Budget Request. Here's what to look for.

Emily Lakdawalla

Curiosity has spent the last two months completing a second circuit of the Pahrump Hills field site, gathering APXS and MAHLI data. The work has been hampered by the loss of the ChemCam focusing laser, but the team is developing a workaround. Over the holidays, the rover downlinked many Gigabits of image data. The rover is now preparing for a drilling campaign.

Emily Lakdawalla

Dawn has captured a series of photos of a rotating Ceres whose resolution is very close to Hubble's, and they show tantalizing surface details.

Adam Block

Astrophotgrapher Adam Block shares an image of Comet Lovejoy, which is currently visible with binoculars.

Bill Dunford

Explore a new collection of 3D lunar landscapes.

Bruce Betts

Quan-Zhi Ye was an 18 year-old college student and the principal investigator of the Lulin Sky Survey when he won a 2007 Shoemaker NEO grant. He's now a Ph.D. candidate and provides an update on his work in meteor studies.

Emily Lakdawalla

What happened to Beagle 2? It's been a mystery for 11 years. That mystery appears to have been solved.

Jason Davis

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has released four images of the company's Falcon 9 rocket impacting its drone ship landing pad in the Atlantic Ocean.

Emily Lakdawalla

The landing of Huygens on Titan was a significant moment for planetary science and a great accomplishment for Europe. But the Huygens landing also stimulated the development of the international community of amateur image processors that does such great work with space images today. I was in the midst of it all at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt.

Paul Schenk

This year we achieve the first exploration of these curious but fascinating objects. Paul Schenk explains what we may learn about them.