Articles

Mat Kaplan

Tens of thousands of Jupiter images were taken by the Voyager spacecraft, but relatively few have been processed to reveal their true beauty and wonder. The latest Snapshots video from Emily Lakdawalla explains why.

Charlene Anderson

NASA's Mars science exploration budget is being decimated, we are not going back to the Moon, and plans for astronauts to visit Mars are delayed until the 2030s -- on funding not yet allocated, overseen by a congress and president to be named later.

Charlene Anderson

The Planetary Society is deeply troubled with the priorities reflected in NASA's FY13 budget. If implemented, it will portend grave consequences for our nation's ability to conduct deep-space science missions and could irreversibly erode unique aspects of the space industrial base needed for such missions.

Charlene Anderson

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist extraordinaire and Planetary Society Board Member, will be testifying to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation tomorrow, March 7.

Mat Kaplan

A new installment of our

Mat Kaplan

Have you heard it?

Mat Kaplan

The second episode of Emily Lakdawalla's new video series reveals the gigantic library of solar system images captured by NASA spacecraft, and explains why we've seen so few of them. Emily says they're all online, waiting for space geeks to turn them into gold.

Mat Kaplan

This is the first episode of editor Emily Lakdawalla's new video series exploring the solar system.

Mat Kaplan

Emily Lakdawalla and I drove down to the 3rd annual San Diego SpaceUp Unconference on February 4. We had great fun hanging out with the other space geeks.

Bill Nye

Today, NASA announced its budget for its fiscal year 2013. As you might imagine, there are large budget cuts. But, the planetary science program has been cut disproportionately. NASA's allocations are out of balance.

Emily Lakdawalla

On Tuesday, Bill Nye was privileged to attend the second White House Science Fair. Here are some photos and video of the event.

Emily Lakdawalla

Planetary scientist Susan Niebur passed away on February 6, 2012, of inflammatory breast cancer. While I did not know Susan very well personally, I knew her professionally as a staunch supporter of and passionate organizer for young people, women, and families in planetary science.

Louis D. Friedman

It appears that Phobos-Grunt was doomed before it launched on November 9, 2011. Cheap parts, design shortcomings, and lack of pre-flight testing ensured that the spacecraft would never fulfill its goals.

Louis D. Friedman

Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, has released its official report concerning the failure of the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which fell back to Earth from orbit on January 15 after failing to ignite the engines that were to take it to the largest Martian moon.

Mat Kaplan

Bruce Betts will be returning to the virtual classroom at California State University, Dominguez Hills for an Intro To Astronomy course. The first lecture will be Wednesday, February 8, from 3:00 to 4:30pm Pacific Time.

Amir Alexander

A review of Robert H. Gray's

Mat Kaplan

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast begins this year's effort with an interview with Bruce Betts, who will be starting an online astronomy course. A transcription of the interview is included in this post, as well as a link to the podcast.

Charlene Anderson

The Cosmos Award for Public Presentation of Science -- at least the blown-glass Saturn trophy given to Stephen Hawking by The Planetary Society -- continues to appear around the Internet.

Charlene Anderson

Catching up on my blog reading today, I turned to

Emily Lakdawalla

This week's lineup is a largely astronomical crowd so most of the conversation concerned dark matter and boiling exoplanets and imaging the black hole at the center of our galaxy.