Articles

Jason Davis

Illustrator and author Ron Miller visualizes what we would see in our skies if Saturn’s majestic rings circled the Earth.

Bill Dunford

Meet some worlds that were nearly shattered, literally.

Jason Davis

Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin performed a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Monday.

Alessondra Springmann

Arecibo Observatory is known for its 1000-foot diameter telescope and its appearances in Goldeneye and Contact. Aside from battling Bond villains and driving red diesel Jeeps around the telescope (grousing at the site director about the funding status of projects is optional), several hundred hours a year of telescope time at Arecibo go toward radar studies of asteroids.

Jason Davis

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a striking image set of Chinese spacecraft Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 10 transiting the Sun.

Emily Lakdawalla

Hi folks, just a note to let you all know I am off for a 3-week vacation.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few weeks ago, a press release from the Opportunity mission celebrated Opportunity's surpassing of the previous NASA off-world driving record. That record was set in December 1972 by the Apollo 17 astronauts aboard their Lunar Roving Vehicle. They seem very close to Lunokhod 2's stated 37-kilometer driving record, but hold your horses -- we now know Lunokhod went longer than we thought.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a quick post to announce that The Planetary Society's staff is expanding! I am so excited to be able to say that.

Bill Dunford

From far away, or from so near you could almost touch it, the moon is beautiful.

Emily Lakdawalla

ESA celebrated the tenth anniversary of Mars Express' launch with a several-day science meeting during which they issued lots of press releases and numerous spectacular photos. My favorite of them all is this enormous image of Kasei Valles on Mars.

Casey Dreier

The House of Representatives held a hearing today to discuss their proposed NASA authorization bill, which would fund Planetary Science, cut Earth Science, forbid asteroid retrieval, and command NASA to pursue a path to Mars via the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

The awesome LEGO Curiosity rover designed by Stephen Pakbaz is going to go into production!

Jason Davis

The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory received its final commands yesterday, having depleted the liquid helium required to make its infrared observations.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is extremely good news: after more than a year of analysis, the New Horizons mission and NASA have concluded and agreed that New Horizons' originally-planned trajectory past Pluto is likely safe from dust.

Emily Lakdawalla

For this evening's Planetary Radio Live event, Mat Kaplan asked me to do a presentation of some favorite space images. I told him that picking favorite space images is like picking favorite children; it's not possible because they're all my favorite. To narrow things down, I decided to explore a theme:

Mat Kaplan

We've got a full house for this evening's Planetary Radio Live, but you can watch the live webcast with singer/songwriter Peter Mayer and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Bill Dunford

Mars Express has been in flight for a decade, more than enough time to send home some amazing finds.

Jason Davis

China's Shenzhou 10 spacecraft is bound for space station Tiangong 1 following a successful liftoff from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia.

Casey Dreier

Despite congressional rejection of massive cuts to Planetary Science this year, NASA has found a way to implement the cuts internally and use the money for other purposes.

Emily Lakdawalla

Ten years ago, Spirit launched on a Delta II rocket toward Mars, and I was there to see it.