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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Alan Stern Returns to Planetary Radio
The New Horizons Pluto mission PI provides an update, and introduces his new public project called Uwingu.
Staring into Saturn's baleful eye
Amazing photos have just come back from Cassini, of swirling clouds surrounding Saturn's north pole.
Watching the slow shift of seasons on Titan
A sharp-eyed amateur noticed two images of Titan taken 20 months apart from nearly exactly the same perspective, and they illustrate how the shifting of Saturn's seasons has brought change to Titan's atmosphere.
A huge color global view of Dione
From the Cassini data archives comes a huge (5000 pixels square!) color image of Saturn's icy moon Dione, worth investigating from both near and far.
DPS 2012, Tuesday: Titan's surface
Tuesday morning at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting featured talks on the surface composition and landforms on Titan, including lakes and
Citizen "Ice Hunters" help find a Neptune Trojan target for New Horizons
2011 HM102 is an L5 Neptune Trojan, trailing Neptune by approximately 60 degrees. This object was discovered in the search for a New Horizons post-Pluto encounter object in the Kuiper Belt.
Happy Cassini PDS Release Day!
It's a quarterly feast day for me: the day that the Cassini mission delivers three months' worth of data to NASA's Planetary Data System. Here's a few images processed from the October 1, 2012 data release.
Sturzstroms on Saturn's Moon Iapetus
Long-runout landslides (sturzstroms) are found across the Solar System. They have been observed primarily on Earth and Mars, but also on Venus, and Jupiter’s moons Io and Callisto. I have just published a paper about sturzstroms on Iapetus.
A couple of gems from the archives
We're still working on migrating content from the old to the new website. This week, that means I am looking, one by one, through some great amateur-processed space images.
A Voyager 1 anniversary mosaic
Back in 1979 the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Some of their images were processed into color images and mosaics that have appeared countless times in books, magazines, on TV and on the Internet. Many of these images and mosaics are spectacular but they were processed more than 30 years ago using computers that are extremely primitive by today's standards. It's possible to get better results by processing the original, raw images from the Voyagers using modern computers and software.
Cure for the blues: processing images of a blue planet
I noticed today that I hadn't seen any amateur-processed versions of Voyager's departing shots of Uranus, so I decided to give it a try.
What's Up in the Solar System in September 2012
It's an active time in interplanetary exploration! Curiosity has begun roving Mars, and Opportunity's not wasting any time either. Dawn has just departed Vesta and begun the more than two-year cruise to Ceres. Juno is in the middle of a big deep-space maneuver, setting up next year's Earth flyby.
Saturn's still there
A pretty picture of Cassini's current view of Saturn.
Daphnis cruises through the Keeler Gap
A recent series of ring images by the Cassini spacecraft reveal Saturn's tiny moon Daphnis cruising through the Keeler Gap.
What's up in the Solar System in August 2012
Welcome to the monthly roundup of our solar system's envoy of electronic explorers! All eyes are on Curiosity as it approaches Mars this weekend. Who will lend support at the Red Planet?
A fifth moon for Pluto, and a possible hazard for New Horizons
Pluto is now known to have at least five moons (Charon, Nix, Hydra, P4, and the newly discovered P5), and its burgeoning population might pose a risk to New Horizons during its flyby, three years from now.
Pretty picture: Meet Tethys
Just a pretty global view of one of Saturn's flock of icy moons, newly processed from archival data by Gordan Ugarkovic.
Pretty picture: Halo on a halo?
An interesting set of images of Titan that Cassini took recently shows a peculiar cap at Titan's south pole.
More Venus transits in 2012
A transit of Venus as seen from Jupiter may be observed by Hubble on September 20 and a transit of Venus as seen from Saturn will be observed by Cassini on December 21.
Video: Saturn makes its own drama (with a little help)
The apparently simple device of running Cassini images together like a flipbook makes for a dramatic movie, especially with the help of well-timed musical cues.