Articles

Jason Davis

Spare bandwidth during ground station passes has allowed flight controllers to downlink 2 new high-resolution images.

Heidi Hammel

Twenty-five years ago, multiple fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, changing the face of the planet and the course of planetary science.

Jason Davis

PlanetVac, a technology that simplifies the process of collecting samples from other worlds, may fly to the Moon.

Andrew Jones

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft has touched down on Ryugu for a second time, bagging samples which hopefully contain material from the subsurface of the asteroid.

Jason Davis

Sail deployment is now scheduled for no earlier than 21 July 2019.

Sridhar Narayanan

A preview guide for India's upcoming Moon mission.

Jason Davis

Pictures taken by the spacecraft's cameras Friday evening show a crescent Earth, as LightSail 2 heads into orbital sunset.

Jason Davis

Would you like to see the latest data from The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft—possibly before flight controllers have even seen it? Now you can!

Jason Davis

The mission team is working through a 73-step checklist to check out the spacecraft’s systems and perform various tests.

Emily Lakdawalla

So many Apollo-related books have come out in the first half of 2019 that I decided to cover them in a special summer book-recommendation blog. I have 5 brand-new Apollo-related books to recommend for kids, and include others I've recommended in past years.

Jason Davis

The test showed Orion can blast itself away from the Space Launch System if the big rocket fails while attempting to fly to orbit.

Emily Lakdawalla

InSight has detected a couple more small Marsquakes, and the team has lifted the housing of the heat probe off the ground, exposing the top of the mole in a surprisingly wide hole.

Jason Davis

The mission team received LightSail 2's first signals on 2 July at 01:34 PDT (08:34 UTC), as the spacecraft passed over Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California.

Jason Davis

Sporting 8 rotors and a nuclear power source like the Mars Curiosity rover, Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034.

Jason Davis

The Planetary Society's solar sail CubeSat lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on 25 June at 02:30 EDT (06:30 UTC).

Jason Davis

The Planetary Society's solar sailing spacecraft is ready to take flight. We got an up-close look at its ride to orbit.

Emily Lakdawalla

With Comet Interceptor, ESA plans to meet a comet on its first trip into the inner solar system. The mission was selected yesterday after a fast-track proposal process and will be developed on a rapid (for ESA) timeline, with a launch planned for 2028.

Jason Davis

LightSail 2 is one of 24 spacecraft hitching a ride to orbit as part of the U.S. Air Force's STP-2 mission.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission announced that they had achieved an orbit above asteroid Bennu with an altitude of only 680 meters. Now they are surveying for landing sites and have invited the public's help.

Jason Davis

Our preview guide outlines the LightSail 2 mission from start to finish.