Articles

Louis D. Friedman

The IKAROS spacecraft continues to perform its mission well as its team at the Japan Space Exploration Center moves closer to the first fully controlled solar sail flight.

Louis D. Friedman

LightSail 1, the Planetary Society's new ultra-light Cubesat-based solar sail spacecraft, has passed its Critical Design Review.

Emily Lakdawalla

Or: Emily reads you the table of contents of Icarus.

Emily Lakdawalla

We've already seen IKAROS' view of its deployed sails from cameras attached to the spacecraft, but, in a brilliant idea, the Japanese built IKAROS with two deployable cameras that could view the thing from a distance.

Emily Lakdawalla

JAXA finally issued the formal announcement: they successfully expanded IKAROS' square sail!

Emily Lakdawalla

Several pictures from the sail deployment monitoring cameras showed up on the IKAROS blog overnight.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm hereby posting a request that was sent earlier today to members of the Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society by its chair, Candy Hansen.

Emily Lakdawalla

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is poised for its maiden flight tomorrow, Friday, June 4, between 11:00 and 15:00 Eastern time.

Emily Lakdawalla

Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman is now in Japan, joining the rest of the IKAROS team to watch the eagerly anticipated deployment of its solar sails.

Louis D. Friedman

The LightSail 1 spacecraft development is proceeding well. Our engineering team has completed crucial milestones to building the vehicle that will demonstrate the value and potential of using sunlight alone to propel exploratory craft through space.

Emily Lakdawalla

Universe Today has recently completed a fantastic, thought-provoking series on the near-disaster of the Apollo 13 mission, which unfolded forty years ago last month.

Emily Lakdawalla

That's a bit of an overdramatic title, but it's true that the most efficient way for us to reduce the risk we face from asteroids that have a very small chance of hitting Earth in the future is to determine their orbits more precisely.

Ken Kremer

Planetary Society volunteer Ken Kremer witnessed the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on its STS-131 mission to the International Space Station in person and filed this report on the successful mission.

Abigail Fraeman

Our favorite astronaut has moonwalked off the dance floor, and we want to thank him for showing us that you're never too old to try something new. This is my last post -- I hope you've enjoyed reading these little interjections of space-related pop culture.

Emily Lakdawalla

Space Station astronaut Soichi Noguchi is an awesome photographer. This image is going straight into the

Emily Lakdawalla

Are you a serious amateur astronomer who enjoys the challenge of following up on the discoveries of faint near-Earth objects?

Emily Lakdawalla

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced yesterday that the venerable 70-meter dish at the Goldstone Deep Space Network station is being taken offline so that major surgery can be performed.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've written before about a serious problem looming for planetary exploration: the aging infrastructure of NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN).

Bruce Betts

This week Bruce Betts is attending a U.N. meeting in Austria, in particular the parts focused on international considerations of the near-Earth object threat.

Ken Kremer

Planetary Society volunteer Ken Kremer reports for us from the Kennedy Space Center, where he is covering the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour, set to launch this weekend.