Articles

Ted Stryk

The New Horizons science team is meeting this week. Ted Stryk was invited to attend the meeting, and he sent the following notes from the first day.

Emily Lakdawalla

An amateur named Bernhard Braun (

Emily Lakdawalla

The January 1, 2010 Cassini imaging data release includes everything acquired by Cassini from January 1 to March 30, 2009 in all its high-quality glory.

Emily Lakdawalla

It was 400 years ago today that Galileo discovered smaller planets attending the planet Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Did you think I was going to skip Uranus? How could I?

Emily Lakdawalla

Rhea? You might be asking. Rhea? When Saturn has so many more interesting moons? Hear me out.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's yet another of the moons of Uranus for you: Ariel, a near-twin in diameter to Umbriel, but apparently with more interesting geology.

Emily Lakdawalla

This one is fresh from the spacecraft! The data were captured yesterday, December 26, by Cassini during its best yet imaging encounter with the small ringmoon Prometheus, and showed up on the Cassini raw images website today.

Emily Lakdawalla

Titan is a weird alternate-universe Earth, surprisingly similar to our own planet in some ways, but not at all like our planet in others.

Emily Lakdawalla

I think if you polled most space fans about their favorite moons of Jupiter, Ganymede would come in a consistent third behind Europa and Io. It's just not fair.

Emily Lakdawalla

To those of you who celebrate the holiday, merry Christmas! I hope Santa was good to you.

Emily Lakdawalla

I love posting animations of Cassini images that I compose from frames grabbed from the mission's raw images website, but they are shoddy compared to the versions that eventually come out from the mission's imaging team.

Emily Lakdawalla

Miranda is the one moon of Uranus for which we have very good images from Voyager 2, and that was a stroke of luck, because low-resolution shots of all of Uranus' moons would have told us that it was, geologically speaking, the most dramatic of the five biggest ones.

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

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

Mimas is the anti-Enceladus.

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.