Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Time to open the second door in the advent calendar. Until the New Year, I'll be opening a door onto a different landscape from somewhere in the solar system. Can you guess where this crater-scarred surface lies?

Emily Lakdawalla

Europe is apparently of the mind that science and technology will help to carry them out of tough economic times, and has made three-year commitments to continue the in-space operations of 11 missions through 2014.

Emily Lakdawalla

This news is a little old but worth mentioning: On September 9, the Japanese solar sail mission, IKAROS, won a Web award in Japan for their work to publicize the mission via Twitter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Pioneer Venus discovered a stable

Emily Lakdawalla

MESSENGER is in a unique position in the solar system, orbiting the Sun well within the orbit of Venus. From there, it can gaze outward from the Sun to search for tiny objects that may possibly be traveling in the same region, called vulcanoids.

Louis D. Friedman

While we were in New York for the International Solar Sailing Symposium last week, we held a meeting with the Japanese IKAROS team to discuss technical results and issues in our two projects.

Louis D. Friedman

This week, Bill Nye and I are attending the International Solar Sail Symposium at the New York College of Technology.

Louis D. Friedman

The Japanese space agency reported on their web site today that acceleration of the IKAROS spacecraft by solar pressure has been confirmed.

Emily Lakdawalla

Upon James Aldridge's return from Japan, he posted several albums worth of amazing photos, including several of their calligraphy instructor, well-known artist Aiko Tanaka, creating a gestural brush painting to commemorate Hayabusa's return.

Louis D. Friedman

The IKAROS spacecraft continues to perform its mission well as its team at the Japan Space Exploration Center moves closer to the first fully controlled solar sail flight.

Emily Lakdawalla

Or: Emily reads you the table of contents of Icarus.

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

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

JAXA's end-of-Sunday update on IKAROS' status gives more details about an issue they are working on the spacecraft. The spacecraft itself is in perfect health, but its dynamics are different from what was expected.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is just a brief update to yesterday's post to add a few sentences that Lou wanted to hold until JAXA had had a chance to issue an official statement.

Louis D. Friedman

Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman was at JAXA's Japanese Space Exploration Center to observe the deployment of IKAROS' solar sails.

Louis D. Friedman

Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman is at JAXA's Japanese Space Exploration Center to observe the deployment of IKAROS' solar sails.

Emily Lakdawalla

Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman is now in Japan, joining the rest of the IKAROS team to watch the eagerly anticipated deployment of its solar sails.