Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

One of the great things about space exploration is how it can shift your perspective. And you don't even need to leave home.

Emily Lakdawalla

Seán Doran has made a cool visual index to the images that JunoCam took during Juno's first 12 closest approaches to Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

A Mercury meeting held May 1-3 summarized the current and future science of the innermost planet. Emily Lakdawalla was there and shares her notes.

Emily Lakdawalla

Readers, colleagues, friends: it's finally happened. My first book is finally out in the world. Here's an excerpt that explains the design and operation of Curiosity's MMRTG, (it also applies to the future Mars 2020 rover power supply).

Emily Lakdawalla

With the help of some preprocessing of JunoCam images by Mattias Malmer, Don Davis shows us how Jupiter might have looked on April 1, 2018, if we'd been aboard Juno.

Emily Lakdawalla

What is the surface of a comet like? That's one of the main questions that motivated Philae's mission to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. We now know the comet has a rigid crust about 10 to 50 centimeters thick, below which the comet is much more fluffy.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA’s next Mars mission launched successfully from Vandenberg Air Force Base today!

Emily Lakdawalla

MarCO or Mars Cube One is an experimental mission that is sending two tiny spacecraft along with InSight to Mars. If successful, they will relay real-time telemetry from InSight to Earth during the landing.

Emily Lakdawalla

Happy Monday! Here's a picture of Prometheus. You may think it's a picture of Saturn. Look hard, toward the bottom, and you'll see Prometheus, doing its part to keep the F ring in line.

Emily Lakdawalla

What a cool photo of OSIRIS-REx's sample return capsule! But wait, what's that black dot near the top?

Emily Lakdawalla

The Curiosity team has completed its initial survey of the top of Vera Rubin Ridge, and is ready to make another attempt at drilling after the rock at Lake Orcadie proved to be too hard.

Emily Lakdawalla

Digging into the Viking archives to produce a new old composite of Mars' smaller moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week, I received a golden ticket that gave me rare access to a sacred space: the cleanroom facility where NASA's next Mars lander, InSight, is undergoing final preparations for launch.

Emily Lakdawalla

NASA’s next planetary launch is coming up, as soon as May 5, 2018. This post is your one-stop shop for information about InSight’s launch, cruise, and expected mission to Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

On March 29, vigilant astronomer Maciel Bassani Sparrenberger discovered that a new bright spot had broken out in Saturn's high northern latitudes.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week it seems fitting to feature a portrait of the Galilean moons by Galileo.

Emily Lakdawalla

The first astrobiology session at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference featured talks on a huge variety of interesting topics, and was one of my favorite sessions at the meeting.

Emily Lakdawalla

At last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, I tried a new experiment: collaborating with other attendees to take a shared set of notes.

Emily Lakdawalla

With the space station likely to fall on April Fool's Day, it's important to know whom to follow for reliable information.

Emily Lakdawalla

On this Moon Monday, I'm featuring an animation processed by Gordan Ugarkovic, showing Jupiter's volcanic moon Io with its prominent plumes.