Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

The latest on MSL landing sites, a look at comet outbursts, and links to other stuff.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've just posted a news story on a recently published paper that suggests that Pluto's moon Charon may have active ice volcanoes.

Emily Lakdawalla

According to the mission website, the New Horizons spacecraft has drifted off to sleep, entering its

Bruce Betts

Thanks to The Planetary Society Shoemaker Grant, the 1.06-meter KLENOT telescope optics was completed at the Klet Observatory. Regular observations of the KLENOT project started in March 2002 under the new IAU/MPC code 246, so we can now present results covering 5 years of this work.

Emily Lakdawalla

New Horizons' Jupiter encounter is officially underway!

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday the New Horizons team released a flicker animation showing the spacecraft's first sight of Pluto, using the LORRI long-range imaging instrument.

Emily Lakdawalla

Alan Stern just posted a detailed update on the status of New Horizons in his PI's Perspective blog on the mission website.

Bruce Betts

Using the Shoemaker NEO Grant funds, Minor Planet Research has purchased a 1.7-terabyte data server for our Asteroid Discovery Station (ADS) education outreach program Through the generosity of Dr. Philip Christensen, this server is housed at the Mars Space Flight Facility (MSFF) at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Emily Lakdawalla

New Horizons is spending the summer traversing the asteroid belt. I haven't written a lot about New Horizons lately because the mission has been going so uneventfully well. But now I've got something to write about: data!!

Emily Lakdawalla

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

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

I received quite a number of emails containing suggested names for Pluto's moons -- thanks! I just sent all the suggestions to Alan Stern; here they are for everybody's enjoyment.

Emily Lakdawalla

I just posted today's installment of Planetary Radio, in which Mat Kaplan gets an update on New Horizons from Principal Investigator Alan Stern-- check it out!

Emily Lakdawalla

Remember how Hayabusa was virtually still for 30 minutes? JAXA is now saying that Hayabusa actually touched down -- and more than that, they may even have a sample.

Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa reached an altitude of about 560 meters above Hayabusa at 17:30 UTC. And at 18:00 UTC they are at 500 meters. This is still farther above the asteroid than the asteroid is big...there is still a long way to go before Hayabusa touches down...

Emily Lakdawalla

In a further update on Hayabusa's status, we have been contacted by Kazuya Yoshida of the Space Robotics Laboratory at Tohuku University. Yoshida reports that the touchdown is now planned to take place

Emily Lakdawalla

There has been a delay of just about a day in JAXA's plans for landing Hayabusa on Itokawa.

Emily Lakdawalla

These photos pretty much speak for themselves. They are amazing. Hayabusa saw its own shadow on Itokawa, and took a photo of the released target marker.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Hayabusa mission has proven to be a bit of a tease -- they were releasing lots of images to the public as they approached asteroid Itokawa, but once they arrived, the image releases shut down entirely. There is finally a little postage stamp of an image captured by Hayabusa at

Emily Lakdawalla