Articles

Mat Kaplan

Astronomer Timothy Spahr directs the Minor Planet Center, the global clearinghouse for asteroids, comets and other relatively small objects in the solar system, including moons. He also coordinates the Society's Shoemaker NEO grant program.

Larry Crumpler

By Sol 3325 Opportunity has driven up onto the next

Bill Dunford

The south polar cap of Mars is riddled with strange landscapes.

Jason Davis

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of images showing Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) plunging toward the sun.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission celebrated its 10th anniversary of leaving Earth in June, as Opportunity continued the sprint to its next winter haven at Endeavour Crater.

Bruce Betts

Meet the PlanetVac team and learn their general plan and what they are doing now. PlanetVac is a newly started Planetary Society and Honeybee Robotics project to test a pneumatic system to sample planetary surfaces.

Jason Davis

When Space Shuttle Discovery launched on its 1988 return-to-flight mission, it was a big moment for NASA and America.

Marc Rayman

The indefatigable Dawn spacecraft is continuing its extraordinary interplanetary flight on behalf of inquisitive creatures on distant Earth. Progressing ever farther from Vesta, the rocky and rugged world it so recently explored, the ship is making good progress toward its second port of call, dwarf planet Ceres.

Jason Davis

A Russian Proton-M rocket veered off course and crashed in a nearby field shortly after liftoff from Baikonur, Kazahkstan.

Jason Davis

Work continues to prepare Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39B for the Space Launch System, as a flame trench deflector originally built for the Space Shuttle is removed.

Mat Kaplan

The Planetary Science Institute's Amanda Hendrix is the guest for our July 1 episode. She finds water in the least likely places, including Luna.

Bruce Betts

The Planetary Society's PlanetVac project with Honeybee Robotics is now fully underway. Here we provide a just released statement by Honeybee, and an introduction to this lab test of a new planetary surface sampling system.

Bill Dunford

An

Jason Davis

IRIS, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph spacecraft, was launched from Orbital Science Corporation's Stargazer carrier aircraft over the Pacific Ocean at 7:27 p.m PDT.

Casey Dreier

Early detection is a crucial step in preventing or mitigating threats from space, but it's not NASA's job.

Emily Lakdawalla

It had never occurred to me to think about geostationary satellites in Mars orbit before reading a new paper by Juan Silva and Pilar Romero. The paper shows that it takes a lot more work to maintain a stationary orbit at an arbitrary longitude at Mars than it does at Earth.

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.