Articles

Ryan Anderson

I'm a little late on this, but I thought I should share the news: MSL now has a good head and neck on its shoulders, and has officially

Emily Lakdawalla

Enjoy my extremely low-tech animation of Curiosity's first

Emily Lakdawalla

We've already seen IKAROS' view of its deployed sails from cameras attached to the spacecraft, but, in a brilliant idea, the Japanese built IKAROS with two deployable cameras that could view the thing from a distance.

Emily Lakdawalla

Speaking of spacecraft crashing...

Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa's return: round up some of the amazing photos, movies, and artworks that were posted and shared and Tweeted and re-Tweeted over the previous dozen hours or so.

Emily Lakdawalla

At 13:51 UTC, the Hayabusa spacecraft -- having traveled to an asteroid and back, surviving countless challenges-- broke up into a fiery meteor over the midnight, midwinter Australian sky.

Emily Lakdawalla

JAXA finally issued the formal announcement: they successfully expanded IKAROS' square sail!

Emily Lakdawalla

Several pictures from the sail deployment monitoring cameras showed up on the IKAROS blog overnight.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a brief update on IKAROS: According to their blog, JAXA has decided to proceed with the final stage of IKAROS' sail deployment.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday I posted a bit of a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera image showing the tracks of the Russian Lunokhod 2 rover. Today, I can post for you an image showing the rover's final resting place

Emily Lakdawalla

Holy cow, look at that right front wheel spin. I am alternately amazed and horrified by this animation.

Emily Lakdawalla

The ever-vigilant Doug Ellison just posted this animation, which really actually does show a teeny tiny bit of motion in the right front wheel. If you don't notice any motion, look closer.

Emily Lakdawalla

It really looks like the second attempt at driving Spirit out of the trap has had the hoped-for result: some forward progress (maybe about a centimeter), and no evidence for further downward sinking.

Emily Lakdawalla

Even though all of us rover fans know that Spirit is really, really stuck, I think I'm not the only one who was secretly hoping that today's images downlinked from Spirit would show that the rover had magically popped out of the ground overnight. Of course, she didn't.

Emily Lakdawalla

Rosetta appears to have operated flawlessly as it streaked past Earth for its flyby early this morning. Here are a few more gems from the flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a lovely new color HiRISE image of Spirit at Home Plate. It was captured on July 16 (sol 1,968), and Spirit is firmly entrenched at Troy, on the western side of Home Plate.

Emily Lakdawalla

For a while, Mars was beating Spirit while she was down, throwing a dust storm at the rover where it's bogged up to its hubcaps in fluffy soil When lots of dust is lofted into the sky, the hazard is that when it comes down, it may come down on the rover and its solar panels. But it appears things on Spirit are still pretty clean.

Timothy Reed

Timothy Reed explains how optical telescopes are tested for gravity sag, and the methods used to counteract or compensate for it.

Ken Kremer

Space Shuttle Atlantis and her crew of 7 astronauts glided in to a smooth and triumphant touchdown today, Sunday, May 24.

Ken Kremer

Farewell to Hubble, Obama Calls, Astronauts Testify to Congress as Shuttle is Set to Land