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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
MESSENGER aims for Venus
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.
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Finds Past Water at Home, Opportunity Takes in Tierra del Fuego
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.
Cassini observes a new face of Iapetus
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.
Dione's south pole
Cassini got a nice
Space weather affects everyday life on Earth
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.
Millions of soundings yield clues to Mars' weather
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.
Io and Europa glimpsed by a retreating New Horizons
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.
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Homes in on Mitcheltree Ridge, Opportunity Crosses Valley Without Peril
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.
Io erupts, in color
The last one of New Horizons imaging instruments has finally checked in with a lovely image from the Jupiter flyby
Enceladus is a drag on Saturn's radio emissions
What should arrive in my inbox today but a press release from the Cassini RPWS and magnetometer teams saying, in part,
LPSC: Tuesday: Volcanism and tectonism on Saturn's satellites
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.
Another amazing Io image from New Horizons
The Tvashtar eruption continues to amaze. All this time between Galileo and New Horizons, Io's volcanoes have probably continually produced spectacular eruptions like these.
LPSC: Wow, Titan can be a Really Flat Place, and other Titan Talks
Jason Perry, a member of the Cassini Imaging Team and an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona, reports from the Titan sessions.
Cassini's global views of Saturn and its rings
Since late January Cassini has been acquiring several sets of images that show all of Saturn's globe and ring system at once from perspectives well above and below the ring plane.
The 2007 Gene Shoemaker NEO Grant Recipients
In 2007, The Planetary Society awarded $34,500 as part of its Gene Shoemaker Near Earth Object (NEO) Grant Program. The grants were made to a group of international researchers to find, track, and characterize potentially hazardous NEOs.
Updates from Past Recipients of the Shoemaker NEO Grants (1 March 2007)
Thanks to The Planetary Society Shoemaker Grant, the 1.06-meter KLENOT telescope optics was completed at the Klet Observatory. Regular observations of the KLENOT project started in March 2002 under the new IAU/MPC code 246, so we can now present results covering 5 years of this work.
Saturn from above (2007)
OK, I had planned to confine my posts this week to Rosetta and New Horizons, but I could not let these images sit on my computer until next week.
New Horizons' Jupiter flyby was successful!
According to a press release issued minutes ago, New Horizons has successfully completed its close flyby of Jupiter.
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Gets Back Home (To Where It Once Belonged), Opportunity Completes 10K at Victoria's Rim
Dust storms are beginning to whirl around Mars as spring blooms in the southern hemisphere of the planet and along the equator where the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) are roving into their fourth year with a second banner month of exploration.
New Horizons sees Io erupting!
There were two new pictures posted on the New Horizons Science Operations Center website this morning, of Io, and if you enhance the images a bit, there are two clear volcanic plumes visible on the limb -- Tvashtar and Prometheus are active!