Articles

Jason Davis

NASA's Project Morpheus lander completed a 74-second flight yesterday, marking the second tethered test of the new vehicle.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just some cool photos of Curiosity lighting up the Cumberland drill hole after sunset for a little nighttime science work.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's a big day for any space mission: the shipping of the spacecraft from its assembly facility to its launch facility. That happened for the next lunar mission, LADEE, on June 4, 2013.

Jason Davis

An Ariane 5 rocket carrying the Automated Transfer Vehicle Albert Einstein lifted off from French Guiana Wednesday.

Casey Dreier

When we visit Congress, this is what we leave them with. This one page summarizes the entire threat to continued planetary exploration at NASA in the proposed 2014 budget.

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a Curiosity telephone conference this morning to make an exciting announcement: they're (almost) done at Glenelg and are preparing for the drive south to Mount Sharp. Allow me an editorial comment: finally!

Emily Lakdawalla

The Hangout has been postponed because of technical difficulties. Stay tuned for rescheduling information.

A.J.S. Rayl

It was a merry and mighty month of May for the Mars Exploration Rover mission: Opportunity finished a blockbuster study of Matijevic Hill finding the best evidence yet for an ancient, potentially habitable environment, and then embarked on its first real road trip in two years. The robot field geologist had barely gotten underway on its journey when it surpassed the Apollo 17 lunar rover distance record to become the most traveled NASA vehicle on another planetary body.

Jim Bell

I'm absolutely floored when I stop to think that our beautiful blue ocean is only one of perhaps a half dozen or more oceans on other worlds in our solar system, and only one of probably millions (or more) oceans on other Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Oceans abound!

Marc Rayman

Traveling from one alien world to another, Dawn is reliably powering its way through the main asteroid belt with its ion propulsion system. Vesta falls farther and farther behind as the spacecraft gently and patiently reshapes its orbit around the sun, aiming for a 2015 rendezvous with dwarf planet Ceres.

Emily Lakdawalla

A fan-funded space telescope, usable by the public? It's an awesome idea, and it appears that a wide swath of the public agrees. Planetary Resources, headed by president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki, announced a Kickstarter project yesterday, with the goal of raising $1 million toward one of their ARKYD space telescopes.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week's

Emily Lakdawalla

A large asteroid is passing reasonably close to Earth in a few hours, and astronomers at the great radio telescopes at Goldstone and Arecibo are zapping it. The latest discovery: QE2, like many asteroids, is a binary.

Van Kane

Last decade, cost overruns on a number of planetary missions stretched NASA's budget. Recent missions have stayed within budget, but the cost of fiscal discipline may mean staying close to home.

Jason Davis

Fyodor Yurchikhin, Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano lifted off in their Soyuz TMA-09M at 4:31 p.m. EDT and arrived at the International Space Station six hours later.

Emily Lakdawalla

Despite the fact that Voyager 2 returned relatively few high-resolution images from either Uranus or Neptune, there are many more photos in the archives than regularly make it to public view.

Bill Dunford

Nothing reflects the romance of deep space exploration more than the evocative names of places on the planets and moons.

Mat Kaplan

A live conversation about just a few of the powerful new instruments that will revolutionize our knowledge of the cosmos once again.

A.J.S. Rayl

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity left Cape York on May 14th and embarked on a 2-kilometer journey south along the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The rover is heading now to Solander Point, where it will spend the coming Martian winter.

Emily Lakdawalla

A girl named Hope Johnson performing an homage to Tom Lehrer's