Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

One year after the New Horizons Pluto flyby, Emily reflects on its significance.

Ted Stryk

On July 6 at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, the science team convened at the place where Pluto was discovered. Ted Stryk reports from the meeting.

Justin Cowart

With Juno arriving at Jupiter, Justin Cowart gives us a lesson on the giant planet's varied cloud patterns.

Emily Lakdawalla

For a second time, NASA has placed a spacecraft into orbit at Jupiter. The spacecraft operated exactly according to plan, and Juno successfully entered orbit today, July 5, 2016, UTC

Emily Lakdawalla

We're now just about 12 hours away from Juno's Jupiter orbit insertion. As anticipation ramps up, NASA has released this sneak peek at JunoCam's approach movie, made of views of Jupiter and its largest moons shot during the final approach, up until about five days ago.

Emily Lakdawalla

The big day is almost here. Juno begins firing its main engine at 20:18 PT / 23:18 ET / 03:18 UT on July 4/5, and the maneuver should be over 35 minutes later at 20:53 / 23:53 / 03:53. Here's how you can follow the mission through its most hazardous event since launch.

Emily Lakdawalla

Highlights this month include the impending arrival of Juno at Jupiter, the approval of extended missions for all of NASA's solar system spacecraft, and public data releases from Rosetta, New Horizons, and Cassini.

Emily Lakdawalla

Jupiter is growing in Juno's forward view as the spacecraft approaches for its orbit insertion July 5 (July 4 in the Americas). The mission has released images from JunoCam and sonifications of data from the plasma waves instrument as Juno begins to sense Jupiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today NASA held a press briefing and released a press kit for the impending orbit insertion of the Juno spacecraft. The 35-minute orbit insertion burn is scheduled to begin July 5 at 03:18 UTC (July 4 20:18, PDT). Here's a timeline for events relating to orbit insertion.

Emily Lakdawalla

Juno will go in to orbit at Jupiter on July 5 (July 4 in North and South American time zones), and it's carrying a camera that's going to take really awesome photos of Jupiter. But you're going to have to be patient. Emily Lakdawalla explains why.

Emily Lakdawalla

Your monthly roundup of the adventures of the 20+ robots exploring our solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Voyager data set is a gift to Earth that keeps on giving. This week, I've seen three great new images processed from this old data set.

Jake Rosenthal

Looking back at Earth from beyond helps to give perspective on our place in the cosmos.

Emily Lakdawalla

May 2016 will be yet another month of fairly routine operations across the solar system -- if you can ever use the word

Sarah Morrison

Want to make your own globe of Pluto? Here's how!

Brittney Cooper

Huygens may have landed on Titan over a decade ago, but a group of researchers from York University were able to make a new and unexpected discovery with this older dataset.

Jessica Noviello

This year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference devoted two oral presentation sessions to questions related to icy satellites in our solar system. Jessica Noviello reports back from the conference.

Emily Lakdawalla

This month (actually, today), Cassini had a relatively close flyby of Titan, and New Horizons will observe a very distant Kuiper belt object named 1994 JR1. Akatsuki has just fine-tuned its orbit around Venus, and Hayabusa2 has begun an 800-hour ion engine thrusting phase to steer it toward near-Earth asteroid Ryugu.

Emily Lakdawalla

Image processing enthusiast Ian Regan is working on a cool new version of the Voyager 2 Neptune approach movie.

Emily Lakdawalla

Image processing enthusiast Ian Regan produced a pretty view of Titan's lake-filled north pole, now visible to Cassini's cameras in the summer sun.