Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

It took months of work (and no wonder) but the wait was worth it: here is Cassini's spectacular view of Saturn, captured on July 19, 2013, as Cassini passed through Saturn's shadow. If you're a little confused by the image, I'm here to help: I've posted a video explainer.

Van Kane

NASA’s shrinking budgets for planetary exploration may force it to decide between continued funding for the Saturn Cassini mission and the continued funding for its Mars missions.

Emily Lakdawalla

I try to be measured in my praise for spacecraft images. Not every photo can be the greatest space image ever. But this enormous mosaic showing the flattened globe of Saturn floating within the complete disk of its rings must surely be counted among the great images of the Cassini mission.

David Shortt

With the recent announcement by NASA that the 36 year-old spacecraft Voyager 1 has officially entered interstellar space at a distance from the sun about four times further than Neptune's orbit, and with Voyager 2 not far behind, it seems worthwhile to explore how humans managed to fling objects so far into space.

Van Kane

The European Space Agency will announce two major science missions this November, one of which is likely to be devoted to solar system exploration.

Emily Lakdawalla

A lovely view of the ringed planet and its hazy moon seen from nearly behind them just a few days ago.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here it is: the view from Saturn of our Earthly home, one and a half billion kilometers away. We see Earth and the Moon through a thin veil of faintly blue ice crystals, the outskirts of Saturn's E ring. Earth is just a bright dot -- a bit brighter than the other stars in the image, but no brighter than any planet (like Saturn!) in our own sky.

Mat Kaplan

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

Bill Dunford

An

Emily Lakdawalla

An easy image processing trick -- using lower-resolution color data to colorize a black-and-white photo -- is relied upon by many space missions to keep data volumes low. Here's how to do it.

Bill Dunford

Cassini's unique views of Jupiter and Saturn.

Bill Dunford

Dispatches from five different worlds--all sent by robotic spacecraft on the same day.

Bill Dunford

Look past the rings, and Saturn is even stranger--and more breathtaking.

Leigh Fletcher

For the first time, amateur astronomers are capturing spectacular images of Saturn's bizarre north polar hexagon.

Emily Lakdawalla

Remember the amazing photo of Saturn's north pole that I posted yesterday? Now, thanks to an amateur image processor, it moves, and the motions of the individual clouds within the belts are mesmerizing.

Emily Lakdawalla

Amazing photos have just come back from Cassini, of swirling clouds surrounding Saturn's north pole.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's a quarterly feast day for me: the day that the Cassini mission delivers three months' worth of data to NASA's Planetary Data System. Here's a few images processed from the October 1, 2012 data release.

Emily Lakdawalla

We're still working on migrating content from the old to the new website. This week, that means I am looking, one by one, through some great amateur-processed space images.

Emily Lakdawalla

A pretty picture of Cassini's current view of Saturn.

Jason Davis

A recent series of ring images by the Cassini spacecraft reveal Saturn's tiny moon Daphnis cruising through the Keeler Gap.