Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

The MESSENGER spacecraft is zeroing in on Venus for the most significant gravity assist maneuver of its long journey to Mercury.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's been quite a lot of Mars on this page for the last week; it's time to remind ourselves that there are other places besides Mars in the solar system.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers sent home field reports this past month -- some 1,200 days into their missions -- that drew gasps of amazement from both the science and engineering teams.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today's set of image releases from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE team included this one, of a fairly bland-looking lava plain to the northeast of Arsia Mons. Bland, that is, except for a black spot in the center.

Emily Lakdawalla

The other day I posted a global view of Titan featuring new territory near the north pole. Now the imaging team has released a much higher resolution version of this view.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here we bring you fifteen different Cassini views of the same world, a cratered ball of ice called Tethys.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Outer Planets Assessment Group or OPAG met two weeks ago, and the presentations from the meeting were recently posted online.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is a cool picture that was released a couple of weeks ago by Cassini's camera team.

Emily Lakdawalla

I practically fell out of my chair when I saw this movie.

Emily Lakdawalla

The MESSENGER team announced today that they accomplished the penultimate trajectory correction maneuver necessary to line the spacecraft up for its second gravity-assist flyby of Venus.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) traveled to new targets and made discoveries ranging from the magnificent to the mundane in April, four fast weeks that essentially led both of the twin robot field geologists to the next phase of their explorations.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini has just begun its 44th orbit of Saturn (called Rev 43), and is starting it off with lots of views of famously two-faced Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini got a nice

Emily Lakdawalla

According to a press release issued this morning by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the enormous solar flare that erupted on December 5 and 6 last year was accompanied by an intense radio burst that caused large numbers of Global Positioning System recivers to stop tracking the signal from the orbiting GPS satellites.

Bruce Betts

Two months after the start of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's primary science phase, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument has already acquired more than four million soundings, building toward a vast data set on the three-dimensional structure of Mars' atmosphere over the full Martian year of the orbiter's nominal mission.

Emily Lakdawalla

This image is beautiful for many reasons. It was captured by the MVIC imaging spectrometer, part of the Ralph instrument, on New Horizons, as it left the Jupiter system on March 2, 2007.

A.J.S. Rayl

It's been business as usual on the Red Planet this month as the Mars Exploration Rovers investigated new areas on their ever-moving missions to explore Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum. Both Spirit and Opportunity chalked up yet another productive month of field geology as they roved onward in their fourth year on location, checking out more of the local environs some 149,597,900 kilometers (93 million miles) away on Earthlings' favored other planet.

Emily Lakdawalla

The last one of New Horizons imaging instruments has finally checked in with a lovely image from the Jupiter flyby

Emily Lakdawalla

What should arrive in my inbox today but a press release from the Cassini RPWS and magnetometer teams saying, in part,

Anne Verbiscer

I received this report on the Tuesday afternoon special session on volcanism and tectonism on Saturn's satellites from Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer from the University of Virginia who I first met at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in 2005.