Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm preparing a talk for the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show here in Pasadena on Sunday afternoon at 1:45. I have spent the morning putting together a slide that I have long wanted to have for presentations.

Emily Lakdawalla

The second day of the New Horizons Workshop on Icy Surface Processes was about geology and geophysics. This long post just covers the first talk of that day.

Emily Lakdawalla

Remember that neat picture and movie of Phobos passing by Jupiter that I posted last week? Several people asked me where Jupiter's moons were, and I just assumed that they weren't visible. I was wrong; Mars Express spotted Jupiter's moons along with the planet and Mars' moon!

James Wray

For now, Mars continues to eclipse Jupiter's moon Europa (shown here to scale) in NASA's flagship mission plans, but not in its appeal to many planetary scientists.

Emily Lakdawalla

As I wait for the MESSENGER Mercury Orbit Insertion webcast to start, I thought I'd fiddle with some images to point out that Mercury is a bridge between the scales of planets and the scales of moons.

Ted Stryk

Here are Ted Stryk's notes from the sessions he attended in the afternoon of Thursday, March 10, at the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Ted Stryk

The annual New Horizons Science Team Meeting was held last week at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week is the end for Kodachrome film. It's a casualty of the digital revolution.

Emily Lakdawalla

Until the New Year, I'll be opening a door each day onto a different landscape from somewhere in the solar system. Where in the solar system are these red freckles?

Emily Lakdawalla

Photos like this always make me think about how unimportant size is in determining whether one of the worlds of the solar system is an exciting place.

Emily Lakdawalla

Three years after New Horizons flew past Jupiter on its way to Pluto, the spacecraft has imaged the giant planet again.

Emily Lakdawalla

For some reason both Jason Perry and Ted Stryk took it upon themselves to produce new, pretty versions of Jupiter's moon Europa this week, so I'm hereby featuring them!

Emily Lakdawalla

It was 400 years ago today that Galileo discovered smaller planets attending the planet Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Galileo, the scientist, discovered the Galilean satellites of Jupiter four hundred years ago next month, while Galileo, the mission, arrived at Jupiter to study those moons in situ fourteen years ago Sunday.

Emily Lakdawalla

From a distance, Jupiter's fourth largest moon Europa is the smoothest object in the solar system; its outline traces out a perfect circle.

John Spencer

Taking a look at Jupiter's moon, Io, from Hawaii.

Emily Lakdawalla

As New Horizons continues its journey (it's now approaching the orbital distance of Saturn, though it's very far from that planet in space), the mission is taking advantage of the recent experience with the Jupiter flyby to plan out the science operations for the Pluto-Charon encounter.

Emily Lakdawalla

This image is beautiful for many reasons. It was captured by the MVIC imaging spectrometer, part of the Ralph instrument, on New Horizons, as it left the Jupiter system on March 2, 2007.

Emily Lakdawalla

A year after its launch on January 19, 2006, New Horizons is fast closing in on Jupiter, the first target on its near decade-long journey. On February 28 the spacecraft will approach to within 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) of Jupiter before speeding along on to its way to the edge of the solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

New Horizons' Jupiter encounter is officially underway!