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Emily Lakdawalla

After the political discussions of the morning, Mike Brown stood up to give the

Emily Lakdawalla

During the first day of OPAG, the chair of the group, Fran Bagenal, was not present because she was participating in some rather important discussions taking place in Maryland.

Emily Lakdawalla

The next presentation at OPAG was given by Ralph Lorenz and Tom Spilker on a Titan Montgolfiere Mission Study. What's a Montgolfiere, you ask?

Emily Lakdawalla

Heidi Hammel gave a brief but spirited presentation designed to wake up the audience to the fact that Uranus is fast approaching its equinox, an event that will happen on December 7, 2007.

Emily Lakdawalla

Following the mission- and science-focused presentations of the morning, there came two rather alarming presentations.

Emily Lakdawalla

The two-day meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group is over and I have 30-odd pages of notes to wrestle with.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Outer Planets Assessment Group opened with the status of two of the three actual outer planets missions, Cassini and Juno.

Emily Lakdawalla

Next up at the Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting was an overview of the plans for future Europa missions.

Emily Lakdawalla

Before I get to my notes from OPAG I want to minimally acknowledge today's news, which I'll have to get to in more detail later.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's already 9:00 and I've hardly begun assimilating my 16 pages of notes, so I am going to have to just post a short summary with some highlights from today's meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group, or OPAG.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just wanted to point out a couple of new items on the website.

Bruce Betts

On April 11, 2006, a new era dawned in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) with the dedication and beginning of operations of The Planetary Society Optical SETI Telescope in Harvard, Massachusetts. It is the first devoted optical SETI telescope in the world. The telescope was constructed by Paul Horowitz and his group at Harvard University using funding from Planetary Society members.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since January 1, 2004—the beginning of the Saturn phase of the mission—Cassini has radioed almost 139 Gigabytes of science data to Earth.

A.J.S. Rayl

Two years and 3 months after they bounced to landings at Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum, the Mars Exploration Rovers are heading into their second, long cold Martian winter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Get used to this view of Home Plate and Husband Hill, because Spirit will be seeing a lot of it over the next 8 months, whenever power levels permit the rover to eke a little bit of science activity out of the day.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today is the day that New Horizons passes Mars' orbit (not that Mars is anywhere close to New Horizons right now).

A.J.S. Rayl

As autumn falls toward winter on the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet, the Mars Exploration Rovers are on the move again. Although the twin robot field geologists are roving as quickly as possible to their next major destinations, the pace is slowing down.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini planner Dave Seal gave me a newly updated list of times and dates for Cassini's ongoing tour of the Saturn system, so I went through and compared my table to his and made updates to flyby distances.

Emily Lakdawalla

A news update from the MESSENGER mission last Friday included a news item that piqued my interest: they reported that the MESSENGER science team website is now live.

Emily Lakdawalla

The audience was rapt as Project Manager Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi stood up to give an introduction to the Hayabusa spacecraft and described the saga of the mission to date.