Articles

A.J.S. Rayl

With fall slowly passing in the southern hemisphere of Mars and winter looming on the horizon, the Mars Exploration Rovers carried on with business as usual in February, working as much as possible before the reduced sunlight and beyond-frigid temperatures of the dreaded season set in.

Ryan Anderson

Last time, I gave some of the background information about my research. Now, armed with that knowledge, we can press forward and talk about what I do.

Ryan Anderson

The mantra of Mars exploration is

Emily Lakdawalla

We first spotted the strange bright feature colloquially known as

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a press release from the Cassini mission today about a pile of papers (14 of them!) being published in the journal Icarus about Saturn's icy moons. I haven't had time to read more than the overview article yet, but I wanted to come up with a graphic for an overview of Saturn's moons, and I couldn't resist delving into the massive database of Cassini images to produce something new

Emily Lakdawalla

Opportunity is now following a rather leisurely autumn schedule, according to the latest update on the mission website. Some of the work Opportunity is doing involves staring skyward, looking for patterns in the clouds that pass overhead at this time of year. One of the guys at unmannedspaceflight.com has put together some nifty animations of the wispy cloud patterns.

Emily Lakdawalla

There have been so many missions to Mars, which have sent back so much data, that figuring out how to find images of places on Mars can be really overwhelming.

Emily Lakdawalla

I thought this was a fun image to kick off the weekend. This isn't the first happy-looking crater to be photographed from Mars, but I really like this one; it's more goofy.

Marc Rayman

Now in interplanetary cruise, the Dawn spacecraft is following a much more leisurely pace than the one it maintained during the initial checkout phase of the mission.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers celebrated their fourth birthdays and began their fifth year of exploring this month -- and for the first time since the big dust storm hit the headlines last summer, Spirit and Opportunity made the news. It wasn't for the notable exploration or engineering milestone they had just achieved or the discoveries they've helped scientists make about a once very different Mars. It was because of an alleged

Emily Lakdawalla

Just two weeks after MESSENGER's first flyby of Mercury, the mission's science team presented their first impressions from the long-awaited second look at the innermost planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

The story of a Sasquatch-shaped rock visible in a recent panorama from Spirit is getting a lot of play in the mainstream media, but fortunately, it's not being taken very seriously. (My favorite take on this picture is the lead from the Times Online story about it:

Emily Lakdawalla

On the evening of Tuesday, January 15, the MESSENGER science team crowded around a computer screen, anxiously awaiting their first view of the previously unseen hemisphere of Mercury.

Emily Lakdawalla

One of the major results from the Cassini mission last year was the production of a mosaic of images from its RADAR instrument covering Titan's north pole. Titan's north pole has lakes upon lakes, some big, some small, but everywhere you look, there they are.

Emily Lakdawalla

Mercury scientists' very long wait for new data from a spacecraft at Mercury will finally come to an end on Monday, when MESSENGER makes its first close approach to the innermost planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

Antares dims and brightens as it passes behind the rings as seen from Cassini in this animation.

A.J.S. Rayl

The mission was only supposed to last three months, maybe six months if all went well, but the Mars Exploration Rovers surprised everyone. Demonstrating an uncanny kind of

Marc Rayman

After the remarkably successful initial checkout phase, Dawn is now in the interplanetary cruise phase.

Emily Lakdawalla

Dust from the sky has settled on both the rover deck and the surrounding landscape. The dust-covered solar cells will not be able to generate as much power as when they were clean. Unless a puff of wind dusts off the solar panels, Spirit may have difficulty surviving the approaching Martian winter.

A.J.S. Rayl

Nail-biting drama and the inevitable signs of aging marked the month of November for the Mars Exploration Rovers, with Spirit accidentally encountering Tartarus, a dust-filled crater, on its way to its winter haven and having to thrash for its life, and Opportunity spending a lot of its time conducting tests on its RAT (rock abrasion tool), which lost another encoder.