Articles

Alan Stern

New Horizons has just completed a summer of intensive activities and entered hibernation on Aug. 20. The routine parts of the activities included thorough checkouts of all our backup systems (result: they work fine!) and of all our scientific instruments (they work fine too!).

Ken Herkenhoff

United States Geological Survey scientist Ken Herkenhoff posts regular updates on the Curiosity science team's plans for the rover on Mars.

Van Kane

A new breed of small planetary spacecraft may allow for more frequent flights to the planets for highly focused missions.

Emily Lakdawalla

LADEE's launch window opens two weeks from today, on September 6. The brief little mission aims to study the lunar atmosphere and dust environment before future soft landings disturb its currently pristine state.

Emily Lakdawalla

Watching MAVEN go through its final launch preparations via the photo gallery at the Kennedy Media Archive.

Björn Jónsson

Björn Jónsson produces beautiful color and 3D global mosaics of Vesta from Dawn's archival data.

Emily Lakdawalla

Those sneaky scientists on Curiosity managed to catch a Phobos transit of the Sun with one set of cameras, and to watch its shadow darkening the surface with another. COOL!

Bill Dunford

Beautiful maps of a mysterious place.

Mat Kaplan

Join Emily Lakdawalla and Mat Kaplan inside JPL's High Bay 1, where two Earth-revealing missions are being readied for launch.

Larry Crumpler

Opportunity arrived at the base of the next segment of the Endeavour crater rim and is now investigating the contact.

Bruce Betts

Using a Shoemaker NEO Grant a new telescope is operating in Illinois to do asteroid tracking.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, the Curiosity mission released the video whose potential I got so excited about a couple of weeks ago: the view, from Curiosity, of Phobos transiting Deimos in the Martian sky. In this post, Mark Lemmon answers a bunch of my questions about why they photograph Phobos and Deimos from rovers.

Emily Lakdawalla

In which the fifth graders of Kipp Heartwood Academy argue the competing sides in the is-Pluto-a-planet debate through the medium of rap.

Emily Lakdawalla

The world's great telescopes capture stunning photographs of stars, nebulae, and other sky phenomena. In Europe to the Stars, authors Govert Schilling and Lars Lindberg Christensen share many such photos. But the real stars of this book are the great telescopes of the European Southern Observatory.

Casey Dreier

Planetary exploration sees strong support from both parties in the current budget process, but we have a long way to go before a budget is passed this year.

Emily Lakdawalla

A lovely view of the ringed planet and its hazy moon seen from nearly behind them just a few days ago.

Jason Davis

Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser spacecraft recently completed a series of range and taxi tow tests, which pave the way for free flights that could begin this fall.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday I enjoyed my second-ever opportunity to suit up and enter the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On display were SMAP, an Earth orbiting radar mission, and ISS-RapidScat, which will perform a different radar experiment from the Space Station.

Jason Davis

A pretty picture of the Perseid meteor shower from Mount Lemmon, Ariz.

Karl Battams

For several weeks now, ground-based observers have been blind to Comet ISON as our local star was sitting directly between us and the comet. I am delighted to share two pieces of good news: first, that ISON is still alive and well, and secondly that it has been recovered.