Articles

Marc Rayman

As Dawn continues its long solar system journey to match orbits with Vesta and later with Ceres, some readers may note a surprising trend in the statistics for the mission.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers hunkered down in place in August and delivered more mission

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily Lakdawalla

While Spirit has been stuck at Troy, it's been taking numerous opportunities to capture photos with dramatic twilight lighting. On sol 2,002 (three sols ago, or August 21), it gazed toward the setting Sun, snapping the shutter roughly once a minute.

Emily Lakdawalla

I really can't explain why it didn't occur to me to search for the rover in the image of Victoria crater released by the HiRISE team on Wednesday.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today the HiRISE team released a lovely new view of Victoria crater, taken nearly a year after the Opportunity rover departed it.

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

From the

Marc Rayman

Today Dawn is 220 million kilometers (137 million miles) from the star at the solar system's center.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers maintained a busy schedule in July: Spirit worked day and night doing whatever it could to make use of its abundant energy; Opportunity effectively treated its “hot” right front wheel and got back to making some consecutive long drives toward the still distant Endeavour Crater.

Jani Radebaugh

The Cassini spacecraft made its 59th flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, on Friday, July 24, and in the last few hours we have received images from the RADAR instrument in SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) mode.

Samuel Lawrence

For over four decades, the lunar science community has absorbed the information from the Apollo missions. Although many important questions were answered, many important new questions are waiting to be tackled -- which is the very essence of science and exploration.

Samuel Lawrence

One primary goal of the LRO mission is to acquire the amazing bounty of scientific data necessary to enable future human lunar exploration and utilization. But why should we even bother going back?

A.J.S. Rayl

It's been a relatively quiet but scientifically significant month on the Red Planet for the Mars Exploration Rovers. While Opportunity continued its long journey to Endeavour Crater, forced to take it slower and make longer stops to rest its 'hot' front wheel, Spirit, seemingly just biding its time embedded in a sand pit it slipped into in April, turned up one of the most intriguing discoveries on the mission to date.

Timothy Reed

Timothy Reed explains how optical telescopes are tested for gravity sag, and the methods used to counteract or compensate for it.

John Spencer

Taking a look at Jupiter's moon, Io, from Hawaii.

John Smith

Each Titan flyby is not a fork in the road, but rather a Los Angeles style cloverleaf in terms of the dizzying number of possible destinations. So how did our current and future plans for the path of the Cassini spacecraft come to be? That's the question Dave Seal put to me since that's my job -- I am a tour designer.

David Seal

Saturn is rapidly approaching equinox, where the Sun passes through the ring plane (south-to-north, i.e. the northern vernal equinox), and its ring system (i.e. its great now-gloomy poorly-lit circles of large blocks of water ice) is starting to show some really interesting behavior.

David Seal

David Seal explains the complications for Cassini coming from Titan's atmosphere and Solar Cycle.

David Seal

David Seal muses on his time as the mission planner for Cassini, and the history behind its name, and astronomy in Rome.