Articles

Mat Kaplan

Join Emily Lakdawalla and Mat Kaplan inside JPL's High Bay 1, where two Earth-revealing missions are being readied for launch.

Vitaliy Egorov

Six months ago, I wrote about the Russian weather satellite Elektro-L, which has more than two years of successful experience in the geostationary orbit. Then I promised that I would be here to share the materials that we collected. I think it's time to deliver on the promise.

Bill Dunford

Seasons, sunlight, and shadow at the Moon's north pole

Bill Dunford

Pushing back the frontier, and filling in the blank spaces on the map.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here it is: the view from Saturn of our Earthly home, one and a half billion kilometers away. We see Earth and the Moon through a thin veil of faintly blue ice crystals, the outskirts of Saturn's E ring. Earth is just a bright dot -- a bit brighter than the other stars in the image, but no brighter than any planet (like Saturn!) in our own sky.

Emily Lakdawalla

A new picture of the Earth-Moon system from MESSENGER, taken the same day we were told to

Mat Kaplan

You can be part of a planetwide group photo as Cassini and MESSENGER turn their cameras Earthward on July 19.

Ralph Lorenz

The fictional world Tatooine, scene of action in the Star Wars movies, is named after a town in Tunisia, where parts of the movies were filmed. The desert backdrops against which the movies were filmed are real terrestrial landscapes, which prove to be perhaps unexpectedly dynamic.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA recently shared a gloriously detailed image of an unusual clear day in Alaska as seen from the Terra satellite.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few presentation slides with pretty pictures, sized to scale, of the large moons of the solar system.

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.

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.

Bill Dunford

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

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!

Bill Dunford

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

Bill Dunford

They look so similar they can be hard to tell apart, but each hides its own mysteries.

Bill Dunford

The first human beings to see the mysterious

Bill Dunford

Mars and Earth share a truly striking family resemblance, but there's no mistaking which one is home.

Bill Dunford

Dispatches from five different worlds--all sent by robotic spacecraft on the same day.

Emily Lakdawalla

Really cool movies from Jim Richardson propose to explain how the same physics of impact cratering can produce such differently-appearing surfaces as those of the Moon, large asteroids like Eros, and teeny ones like Itokawa.