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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
They released the entire Cassini RADAR swath across Xanadu!
Following immediately on the heels of the release of the
Cassini's T7 RADAR view of southern Titan; northern swath coming soon
Cassini's T7 flyby of Titan occurred on September 7, 2005. They've now released the full swath of RADAR image data to the Planetary Data System; here it is for your enjoyment.
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Discovers More Meteorites as Opportunity Closes in
The Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are wheel deep in winter, and still faring well, working hard, and sending home interesting new finds despite the below freezing Martian temperatures. The next month or so will bring the season's coldest temperatures to the rover's present habitats, but so far, no one on the team is losing any sleep over whether or not they'll make it through, because these rovers just keep going and going . . .
MESSENGER has flipped for the last time
I just received a MESSENGER mission news update stating that the MESSENGER spacecraft, en route to Mercury via two Venus flybys, has passed another milestone on its long journey: it has, for the last time, passed from Earth's environs toward the inner solar system.
New Horizons tracks an asteroid
New Horizons is spending the summer traversing the asteroid belt. I haven't written a lot about New Horizons lately because the mission has been going so uneventfully well. But now I've got something to write about: data!!
The official publication on the second Titan RADAR swath is out
Today Nature published an article titled
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Works Winter Campaign as Opportunity Roves Adrift on way to Victoria
The Mars Exploration Rovers are now well into their second Martian winter and, all things considered, both Spirit and Opportunity are faring pretty well for being, essentially, aging Baby Boomers on bitter cold, dusty alien planet some 50 million miles away from home.
A couple of neat artist's conceptions of ExoMars
With the Aurora program under way, the next European mission to Mars will be a rover named ExoMars, to be launched in 2011.
An Odyssey THEMIS image of Gale Crater, Mars
This week's releases from the Mars Odyssey THEMIS team included a gorgeous one of the layered interior of Gale crater.
Cassini RADAR: Another Flyby, Another Completely Different View of Titan
OK, I finally got a story written about the latest and greatest of the Cassini RADAR data based upon a conversation I had with with Ralph Lorenz late last week.
Cassini RADAR images of the surface of Titan
Since the last Titan flyby on April 30, the Cassini RADAR team has been releasing quite a large number of pieces of the swath to the Web.
A play-by-play of the Cassini scare on Mayday
Last week's Cassini Significant Events Report included a detailed play-by-play of the frightening morning of Mayday. I thought it was a very interesting read on how a mission deals with an
OPAG, Day 2: Ground-based study of the small bodies in the outer solar system
After the political discussions of the morning, Mike Brown stood up to give the
OPAG, Day 1: Cassini and Juno status
The Outer Planets Assessment Group opened with the status of two of the three actual outer planets missions, Cassini and Juno.
OPAG, Day 1: Getting to Europa
Next up at the Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting was an overview of the plans for future Europa missions.
Too much outer planets news for me to read (much less report on)
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.
New items on the website: Rover update and Stardust@home
I just wanted to point out a couple of new items on the website.
How much data has Cassini returned to Earth?
Since January 1, 2004—the beginning of the Saturn phase of the mission—Cassini has radioed almost 139 Gigabytes of science data to Earth.
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Pulls up to Winter Home as Opportunity Races to Victoria
Two years and 3 months after they bounced to landings at Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum, the Mars Exploration Rovers are heading into their second, long cold Martian winter.
Get used to this view
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.