All
All
Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Farewell to Hubble, Obama Calls, Astronauts Testify to Congress as Shuttle is Set to Land
Farewell to Hubble, Obama Calls, Astronauts Testify to Congress as Shuttle is Set to Land
Fly me to the Moon...
Jim Bell describes his proposal to join the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Cameras science team.
What do we know about Uranus' moons? Part 2
Here is every single image of the last two moons discovered prior to the Voyager 2 encounter, Titania and Umbriel.
A pretty new Hubble image of Mars
A set of Mars image data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a year ago was just released to Hubble's data archive. It was captured by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on January 30, 2008 when Mars was about 115 million kilometers from Earth.
What are the rovers up to? January 2009
Spirit's been getting some nice views of the spot it spent all of 2008 in,
What do we know about Uranus' moons? Part 1
I got an urge to dive in to the Voyager image archives and see what exactly we have here on Earth to base our understanding of the Uranian moons on.
Opportunity and Spirit updates: Both are now driving
Another day, another drive: on sols 1,693 and 1,695 the Opportunity rover conducted two more lengthy drives to the south, totaling almost 200 meters. On the other side of the planet, Spirit is FINALLY in motion again.
Opportunity is really hitting the highway
Victoria crater, the site of a Mars year's worth of study, is now far over the horizon, as Opportunity has lately completed a series of very long drives. Opportunity is once again sailing the sand seas of Meridiani Planum.
Three great new pages on Don Davis' website
Don Davis is a space artist who takes the question of color in space very seriously.
Opportunity route map update
Eduardo Tesheiner was kind enough to send me an updated version of his route map for Opportunity so we can get a sense of just how close the rover is getting to Cape Verde.
Beautiful mosaic of the Voyager mountains
One of my favorite amateur image magicians, Gordan Ugarkovic continues to play around with the amazing data recently released by the Cassini mission, covering the Iapetus encounter of last September. Here's a lovely mosaic he just put together of the Voyager Mountains.
Yep, it's ice!
The Phoenix mission confirmed it this morning: the disappearing act pulled by those chunks of bright material in the Dodo trench pretty much nails the identification of the bright material as ice, which is great news for the mission. Ice is what Phoenix went all the way to Mars to study; it's what the team has been aiming for all these years.
Some beautiful video from the Spirit and Opportunity landing sites
A majority of the people who work in planetary geology are usually associated with one or maybe two missions, doing all their research on the results from one instrument on one mission. But there are a few people whose expertise cuts across many space missions, and an even smaller number of people who seem to work on almost everything. Randy Kirk is one of those people.
Shadows cast from Victoria's capes and bays
This is from the
White Rock through the ages: Mars Express (2004-present)
When we last visited White Rock on Mars, both Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey were mapping the planet.
Spirit, seen from space
The HiRISE instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter really is a spy camera in space. Check out this sequence of nine images from the HiRISE archives, which Doug Ellison pulled together into an animation covering more than a year of Spirit's mission.
White Rock through the ages: Mars Global Surveyor (1997-2006)
We first spotted the strange bright feature colloquially known as
Showing off Saturn's moons
There was a press release from the Cassini mission today about a pile of papers (14 of them!) being published in the journal Icarus about Saturn's icy moons. I haven't had time to read more than the overview article yet, but I wanted to come up with a graphic for an overview of Saturn's moons, and I couldn't resist delving into the massive database of Cassini images to produce something new
White Rock through the ages: Viking (1976-1980)
This is the second installment in my look at one enigmatic feature on Mars as seen by all its orbiters through the more than thirty years of spacecraft observations.
Opportunity watches the clouds drift by
Opportunity is now following a rather leisurely autumn schedule, according to the latest update on the mission website. Some of the work Opportunity is doing involves staring skyward, looking for patterns in the clouds that pass overhead at this time of year. One of the guys at unmannedspaceflight.com has put together some nifty animations of the wispy cloud patterns.