Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

It's already 9:00 and I've hardly begun assimilating my 16 pages of notes, so I am going to have to just post a short summary with some highlights from today's meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group, or OPAG.

Emily Lakdawalla

Before I get to my notes from OPAG I want to minimally acknowledge today's news, which I'll have to get to in more detail later.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just wanted to point out a couple of new items on the website.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since January 1, 2004—the beginning of the Saturn phase of the mission—Cassini has radioed almost 139 Gigabytes of science data to Earth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Get used to this view of Home Plate and Husband Hill, because Spirit will be seeing a lot of it over the next 8 months, whenever power levels permit the rover to eke a little bit of science activity out of the day.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today is the day that New Horizons passes Mars' orbit (not that Mars is anywhere close to New Horizons right now).

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini planner Dave Seal gave me a newly updated list of times and dates for Cassini's ongoing tour of the Saturn system, so I went through and compared my table to his and made updates to flyby distances.

Emily Lakdawalla

A news update from the MESSENGER mission last Friday included a news item that piqued my interest: they reported that the MESSENGER science team website is now live.

Emily Lakdawalla

LPSC: Thursday: Can bugs get from Earth to Europa?

Emily Lakdawalla

LPSC: The Poster Sessions, Tuesday and Thursday

Emily Lakdawalla

The audience was rapt as Project Manager Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi stood up to give an introduction to the Hayabusa spacecraft and described the saga of the mission to date.

Emily Lakdawalla

So after those two rover talks I skipped over to the other large room to listen to what the Cassini science teams had to say about Enceladus.

Emily Lakdawalla

I said earlier I was going to cover the poster sessions next, and there are some cool things that I want to write about, but I thought I'd better get to something a bit more topical a bit sooner: Europa and the other Galilean satellites, and when (if!?) we'll be exploring them again.

Emily Lakdawalla

This morning at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference began with Titan, and then later in the morning I had to choose between skipping Titan and going over to rover sessions, or staying with Titan. I elected to stay with Titan.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just posted a very brief story about all of the press releases that have been whizzing around today about the possibility of liquid water on Enceladus.

Emily Lakdawalla

They held the usual pre-arrival press conference this morning for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This press conference typically doesn't convey any information that people who have been paying attention don't already know.

Emily Lakdawalla

This one is

Emily Lakdawalla

I received quite a number of emails containing suggested names for Pluto's moons -- thanks! I just sent all the suggestions to Alan Stern; here they are for everybody's enjoyment.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just posted today's installment of Planetary Radio, in which Mat Kaplan gets an update on New Horizons from Principal Investigator Alan Stern-- check it out!

Emily Lakdawalla

Another thing I've been trying to catch up on is the daily imaging activities of Cassini, but that, too, has been tough because Cassini has been taking so dang many pictures!