Articles

ESA Mars Express Team

The Mars Express team showcases some of the best viewing opportunities of Mars in 2014, including how to spot Comet Siding Spring when it flies past Mars this October.

Bruce Betts

Update from Debra Fischer and her team on the intriguing results of their observations of the main Alpha Centauri stars, as well as future plans.

Casey Dreier

Cosmos returns in fine form in its penultimate episode. Sagan explores the historical and scientific precedents for the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI) and our human desires to not be alone in the universe.

Emily Lakdawalla

The astronomy world is all a-twitter this morning over the discovery of a new supernova in M82, a galaxy that's in our astronomical backyard,

Casey Dreier

Carl Sagan takes us from the birth to the death of the universe. How do we reconcile our place within a universe that will die? Join us for the latest discussion on episode 10 of Cosmos.

Casey Dreier

This episode highlights the other big idea in Cosmos: that we are profoundly connected with the universe around us. Our constituent parts are forged in the bellies of massive stars; we exist through their deaths.

Casey Dreier

Sagan makes us confront the limitations of our mortality given the immensities of space and time presented to us by the cosmos.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, the much-anticipated comet ISON made its closest pass by Mars. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera is the first to achieve a positive detection of the somewhat-fainter-than-expected comet in its photos.

Emily Lakdawalla

The world's great telescopes capture stunning photographs of stars, nebulae, and other sky phenomena. In Europe to the Stars, authors Govert Schilling and Lars Lindberg Christensen share many such photos. But the real stars of this book are the great telescopes of the European Southern Observatory.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday, the Curiosity mission released the video whose potential I got so excited about a couple of weeks ago: the view, from Curiosity, of Phobos transiting Deimos in the Martian sky. In this post, Mark Lemmon answers a bunch of my questions about why they photograph Phobos and Deimos from rovers.

Bruce Betts

Using a Shoemaker NEO Grant a new telescope is operating in Illinois to do asteroid tracking.

Mat Kaplan

You can be part of a planetwide group photo as Cassini and MESSENGER turn their cameras Earthward on July 19.

Jason Davis

The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory received its final commands yesterday, having depleted the liquid helium required to make its infrared observations.

Mat Kaplan

A live conversation about just a few of the powerful new instruments that will revolutionize our knowledge of the cosmos once again.

Mat Kaplan

The extended, mostly unedited recordings of my conversations with many of the people I spoke to at the ALMA Observatory in Chile. Also, the full English translation of Chilean President Sebastian Pinera's speech.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week I'll be talking with NEOWISE principal investigator Amy Mainzer about moving objects that the WISE mission has spotted both inside and outside our solar system.

Mat Kaplan

The second in a series of audio blogs chronicling my trip to the driest spot on Earth, Chile's Atacama desert, to see the inauguration of the ALMA Observatory. Al Wootten and Alison Peck tell the story of ALMA.

Emily Lakdawalla

A recently discovered comet, C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), is going to be passing very close to Mars on October 19, 2014. Does it pose a risk to spacecraft?

Emily Lakdawalla

How come Hubble's pictures of galaxies billions of light years away are so beautifully detailed, yet the pictures of Pluto, which is so much closer, are just little blobs? I get asked this question, or variations of it, a lot. Here's an explainer.

Emily Lakdawalla

Deep Impact has made the first space-based observations of comet ISON.