Articles

Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.

Shadowland

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

Terra Cognita

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

Pretty picture: Looking backward

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.

Earth and Moon from MESSENGER

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

Return of the Pale Blue Dot

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

Dunes on Tatooine

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.

Rare cloud-free view of Alaska from Terra MODIS

A rare clear day in Alaska

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

Scale comparisons of the solar system's major moons

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

Planetary Radio: Don't Step in That Puddle!

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.

Stationkeeping in Mars orbit

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.

A Little Moonlight

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

One Ocean World Among Many

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!