Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

This week the Carnival of Space is over at one of my favorite new blogs, Lights in the Dark. Actually it's not so new -- evidently this week marks its first anniversary!

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA has just announced that once Cassini's Equinox Mission runs out in June of this year, they will extend it a further seven more years, long enough for the spacecraft to see Saturn through its solstice!!

Emily Lakdawalla

There were many, many treats waiting on the Cassini raw images website this morning. Yesterday, Cassini traversed the G ring, taking photos all the way.

Emily Lakdawalla

An amateur named Bernhard Braun (

Emily Lakdawalla

The January 1, 2010 Cassini imaging data release includes everything acquired by Cassini from January 1 to March 30, 2009 in all its high-quality glory.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rhea? You might be asking. Rhea? When Saturn has so many more interesting moons? Hear me out.

Emily Lakdawalla

This one is fresh from the spacecraft! The data were captured yesterday, December 26, by Cassini during its best yet imaging encounter with the small ringmoon Prometheus, and showed up on the Cassini raw images website today.

Emily Lakdawalla

Titan is a weird alternate-universe Earth, surprisingly similar to our own planet in some ways, but not at all like our planet in others.

Emily Lakdawalla

I love posting animations of Cassini images that I compose from frames grabbed from the mission's raw images website, but they are shoddy compared to the versions that eventually come out from the mission's imaging team.

Emily Lakdawalla

Iapetus! I'm always interested in Cassini images, but five years ago this month I was refreshing the Cassini raw images website several times a day, eagerly anticipating the mission's first good encounter with Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini mission announced today the first observation of a specular reflection off of a lake on Titan. A specular reflection is a mirror-like flash, and you only get one when you have a mirror-like surface -- very, very smooth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Mimas is the anti-Enceladus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini's amazing cameras have set a new standard for the quality, sharpness, resolution, beautiful color, and all-around spectacularness of images returned from the outer solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's another weird-looking one, though it's less weird from this particular, polar point of view than it is when viewed from the side.

Emily Lakdawalla

Epimetheus is one of the many small moons of Saturn that are referred to by the Cassini mission team as

Emily Lakdawalla

I've always loved advent calendars and the way they both managed and heightened my anticipation of the gift-opening frenzy of Christmas morning.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini imaging team have posted their own processed and captioned version of the Saturn's aurora movie that I posted a preview of about six weeks ago, and it was worth the wait.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, just wow. I didn't know what to expect from the second flyby of Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus in November, which happened yesterday.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a 4-frame mosaic of Enceladus images -- just another everyday spectacularly alien landscape.