Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

High in the Arctic, just below Earth's north polar ice cap, biologists, geologists, and engineers come together in Svalbard every August to practice and prepare for an expedition to Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

Now that it's high summer in the Arctic, it's time for research expeditions to swarm northward to explore icy landscapes as analogues to Mars and other far-off places.

Jani Radebaugh

Jani talks about the importance of understanding analogs we can easily visit on Earth to processes happening across the solar system.

Ryan Anderson

Friday was the last day of the field trip, and we spent it at the Petrified Forest National Park.

Ryan Anderson

Today we visited Grand Falls and the nearby dune field. Grand Falls is especially interesting because it combines many of the processes that are active in shaping planetary surfaces.

Ryan Anderson

Today was a long and awesome day. We started out at Meteor Crater, the youngest and best preserved impact crater on Earth!

Ryan Anderson

Today we visited the Grand Canyon. If you haven’t been there before, there is no way to convey what it is like.

Ryan Anderson

Today we made our way from Phoenix north to Flagstaff, and on the way stopped to check out some interesting geology in Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon.

Ryan Anderson

Today was all about volcanoes.

Jim Bell

One of the ways that planetary scientists try to understand the origin and evolution of landforms on other planets is by studying similar kinds of landforms or

Emily Lakdawalla

According to a press release issued this morning by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the enormous solar flare that erupted on December 5 and 6 last year was accompanied by an intense radio burst that caused large numbers of Global Positioning System recivers to stop tracking the signal from the orbiting GPS satellites.

Stephen Grasby

From June 21 to July 6, 2006, a four-person team traveled to Borup Fiord Pass to perform geological field studies to compare with satellite images.

Emily Lakdawalla

Read that title aloud. Yes, the last minute of 2005 is actually 61 seconds long.

Emily Lakdawalla

A fun NASA explainer just crossed my email inbox and I thought I'd share it.

Emily Lakdawalla

...but this one is much closer to home than Katrina and Rita were.

Emily Lakdawalla

I received a press release in my inbox this morning that made me think. It came from the Royal Astronomical Society, and was titled

Emily Lakdawalla

On August 2, 2005, MESSENGER flew by Earth at an altitude of a mere 2,347 kilometers above Mongolia.

Emily Lakdawalla

MESSENGER is now returning images as it is bearing down on Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

As MESSENGER began its approach for its August 2 flyby of Earth, its cameras have snapped their first images. The images clearly show a cloudy Earth—and, to scientists' surprise, the Moon as well.

Charlene Anderson

Home. Family. This will be Voyager's enduring legacy: It has changed forever the feelings raised by those words. Through its robotic eyes we have learned to see the solar system as our home. Through its portraits of the planets we know that they are part of our family. Apollo astronauts showed us a tiny Earth alone in the blackness of space. Now, with these images, Voyager has shown us that Earth is not really alone. Around our parent Sun orbit sibling worlds, companions as we travel through the Galaxy.