Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

The images from Cassini's Dione encounter yesterday have started coming back, and there is a really cool set of 16 pictures of Dione and Rhea.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini is already on its way in to a close, 500-kilometer encounter with Dione -- it's less than four hours away now, at 17:52 UTC.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here is a gorgeous color mosaic of Hyperion assembled by amateur image processor Mattias Malmer from images from the recent flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, this quarter's release of Cassini data showed up at the Planetary Data System (PDS). The PDS is the public repository for all of NASA's data.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Hayabusa mission has proven to be a bit of a tease -- they were releasing lots of images to the public as they approached asteroid Itokawa, but once they arrived, the image releases shut down entirely. There is finally a little postage stamp of an image captured by Hayabusa at

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily Lakdawalla

I've finally worked my way through all of the Hyperion images that were returned from the last flyby. It's a wonderful data set.

Emily Lakdawalla

...but this one is much closer to home than Katrina and Rita were.

Emily Lakdawalla

I received the following question by email last week:

Emily Lakdawalla

I got an email last night from Anne Verbiscer, whom I had contacted about rounding up some amateur astronomers to help the Cassini mission with some photometric observations of Hyperion.

Emily Lakdawalla

I received a press release in my inbox this morning that made me think. It came from the Royal Astronomical Society, and was titled

Emily Lakdawalla

Since the discovery of 2003 UB313, larger than Pluto, there's been a lively debate going on in many places about what makes a planet. There's now an article in Nature talking about a proposal that would address the controversy

Emily Lakdawalla

There were a few talks at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting dealing with a rare and fortuitous event that happened on January 13, 2005.

Emily Lakdawalla

At a press briefing, the co-discoverers of the so-called

Emily Lakdawalla

According to Jason Perry, the much-anticipated Titan-7 RADAR imagery across Titan's southern hemisphere may have been lost due to an error on Cassini's solid state recorder. That will be very sad if it turns out to be true.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today is the last day of DPS, and the first that has not had a press conference session at lunchtime, so I have a few moments here to do some catching up.

Emily Lakdawalla

Emily Lakdawalla

This lovely animation of Itokawa represents 20 individual images taken between 18:10 on September 5 and 00:30 on September 6, from a distance of less than 700 kilometers away.

Emily Lakdawalla

On August 2, 2005, MESSENGER flew by Earth at an altitude of a mere 2,347 kilometers above Mongolia.

Emily Lakdawalla

First, here's a nice shot of Epimetheus, which was taken about a month ago.