Articles

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rovers are now well into their second Martian winter and, all things considered, both Spirit and Opportunity are faring pretty well for being, essentially, aging Baby Boomers on bitter cold, dusty alien planet some 50 million miles away from home.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the Aurora program under way, the next European mission to Mars will be a rover named ExoMars, to be launched in 2011.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week's releases from the Mars Odyssey THEMIS team included a gorgeous one of the layered interior of Gale crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

This item is a little bit old -- I missed it when it was announced last Monday. ESA issued a press release stating that

Emily Lakdawalla

OK, I finally got a story written about the latest and greatest of the Cassini RADAR data based upon a conversation I had with with Ralph Lorenz late last week.

Emily Lakdawalla

Since the last Titan flyby on April 30, the Cassini RADAR team has been releasing quite a large number of pieces of the swath to the Web.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week's Cassini Significant Events Report included a detailed play-by-play of the frightening morning of Mayday. I thought it was a very interesting read on how a mission deals with an

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

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

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 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

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.