Articles

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.

Mat Kaplan

Apologies to baseball fans and others for the theme of this week's Planetary Radio preview, which has star player Emily Lakdawalla on deck.

Emily Lakdawalla

I attended a few talks at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting today that concerned Titan's origin and interesting surface, and then one in the afternoon about the atmosphere.

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.

Sarah Hörst

By now I hope that everyone has seen some of the spectacular images of the Saturn system (and especially Titan!) from the Cassini-Huygens mission. However, the measurements that often make my heart race are taken by instruments that reveal Titan in ways that our eyes cannot see.

Emily Lakdawalla

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

Bill Dunford

Pushing back the frontier, and filling in the blank spaces on the map.

Bill Dunford

Robotic space exploration is human exploration. Meet one of the people behind the machines.

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.

Ralph Lorenz

The fictional world Tatooine, scene of action in the Star Wars movies, is named after a town in Tunisia, where parts of the movies were filmed. The desert backdrops against which the movies were filmed are real terrestrial landscapes, which prove to be perhaps unexpectedly dynamic.

Emily Lakdawalla

Pluto's moons, formerly known as

Emily Lakdawalla

A few presentation slides with pretty pictures, sized to scale, of the large moons of the solar system.

Bill Dunford

An

Bill Dunford

Meet some worlds that were nearly shattered, literally.

Jim Bell

I'm absolutely floored when I stop to think that our beautiful blue ocean is only one of perhaps a half dozen or more oceans on other worlds in our solar system, and only one of probably millions (or more) oceans on other Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Oceans abound!

Bill Dunford

Nothing reflects the romance of deep space exploration more than the evocative names of places on the planets and moons.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've been out of town for a couple of days and am overwhelmed with work and an overflowing email box. So what do I do about that? I ignore what I'm supposed to be doing and play with Cassini raw image data, of course. Here is a

Sarah Hörst

A tale from the scientific trenches: laboratory work to simulate Titan's rich atmosphere.