Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Iapetus! I'm always interested in Cassini images, but five years ago this month I was refreshing the Cassini raw images website several times a day, eagerly anticipating the mission's first good encounter with Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Not quite ten years ago, the Near Earth Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft arrived at the near-Earth asteroid Eros. NEAR accomplished many firsts.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's Neptune, but not quite like you've ever seen it before.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini mission announced today the first observation of a specular reflection off of a lake on Titan. A specular reflection is a mirror-like flash, and you only get one when you have a mirror-like surface -- very, very smooth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Proteus is a weird name for this world. It's the second-largest moon of Neptune, and so it's named (as are all of Neptune's moons) for deities associated with the sea.

Emily Lakdawalla

Holy cow, look at that right front wheel spin. I am alternately amazed and horrified by this animation.

Emily Lakdawalla

Mimas is the anti-Enceladus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I've been fiddling with images from the Mars Webcam, more officially known as the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), for the last couple of weeks.

Emily Lakdawalla

We have three orbiters and two rovers currently exploring Mars, each of which returns breathtaking photos on a daily basis.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Moon is the most familiar of the objects in the heavens.

Emily Lakdawalla

The ever-vigilant Doug Ellison just posted this animation, which really actually does show a teeny tiny bit of motion in the right front wheel. If you don't notice any motion, look closer.

Emily Lakdawalla

If you don't think Pluto gets enough respect, just imagine what it's like to be a satellite of an asteroid.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini's amazing cameras have set a new standard for the quality, sharpness, resolution, beautiful color, and all-around spectacularness of images returned from the outer solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is a special post for all of my readers who are lighting the first candle on their menorot this evening.

Emily Lakdawalla

My inbox was exploding this morning with messages about a tremendously cool animation released this morning by ESA's Mars Express team. It shows Phobos crossing Deimos, in what's known as a

Emily Lakdawalla

Welcome to the tenth post in my

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's another weird-looking one, though it's less weird from this particular, polar point of view than it is when viewed from the side.

Emily Lakdawalla

I love this asteroid. It's just so weird-looking.

Emily Lakdawalla

Jupiter has been high overhead at sunset for several months, a brilliant light that's easy to spot even when the sky is still bright at dusk; but it's now moving quickly to the west as Earth speeds ahead of Jupiter's more stately march around the Sun.

Emily Lakdawalla

Umbriel is the darkest moon in a pretty dark place in the solar system, the Uranus system.