Articles

Ryan Anderson

The voting has begun to give the Mars Science Laboratory a genuine, non-acronym name!

Emily Lakdawalla

Way to go, Spirit! The last two drives for the five-wheeled rover have taken it a total of about 40 meters west, traveling around the north edge of Home Plate. If I'm not mistaken, that's more than Spirit has driven in the last 400 sols combined.

David Kass

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

After a hectic week of tying up loose ends and running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I now have my proster done for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and am in Phoenix for the Planetary Surface Processes field trip, led by my adviser Jim Bell.

Marc Rayman

Dawn swooped close to Mars and then left it behind on a new course, having taken advantage of Mars's gravity.

Emily Lakdawalla

As usual, troubled Spirit's progress sometimes amounts to only centimeters, while golden child Opportunity has already clocked four kilometers on its trek toward Endeavour.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just received one of those chillingly-titled missives from JPL:

Ryan Anderson

There are a pair of excellent articles in this week's Space Review by Adrian Brown, looking at the Technical and Budgetary reasons that the Mars Science Lab launch was delayed until 2011.

A.J.S. Rayl

Despite some struggles with terrain and technology, the Mars Exploration Rovers moved their missions forward in February, as Spirit and Opportunity pressed on toward their next major Martian attractions.

Emily Lakdawalla

Planetary cartographer Phil Stooke has been working on a cool project to compose and compare maps of Mars that show how we saw the planet throughout the Space Age.

John Spencer

It seems like no time since we selected Cassini's extended mission tour of the Saturn system, in early 2007. Now we're flying that tour, which extends Cassini's original four years in Saturn orbit for another 27 months, until September 2010. So now we're looking into the future- far into the future.

Emily Lakdawalla

Looks like the Dawn flyby of Mars went well: here' a photo of Mars taken by Dawn near its closest approach to Mars during its February 17 flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here is every single image of the last two moons discovered prior to the Voyager 2 encounter, Titania and Umbriel.

Marc Rayman

Dawn continues to close in on Mars, ready for the gravitational slingshot that will help it on its expedition to the asteroid belt and its quest to gain insights into the evolution of the solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

After posting my brief

Emily Lakdawalla

According to JAXA (the Japanese space agency), poor little Hayabusa has successfully restarted its ion engine and has resumed powered flight today. Hooray! This is good news for Hayabusa's eventual return to Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

There have been a couple more releases from JPL in recent days updating the slightly worrisome announcement about Spirit that came out on January 28.

Ryan Anderson

Google Earth's latest edition was just released and guess what? It has a Mars setting!

Emily Lakdawalla

A set of Mars image data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a year ago was just released to Hubble's data archive. It was captured by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on January 30, 2008 when Mars was about 115 million kilometers from Earth.