Articles

The Downlink

Jupiter’s moons have always been exciting to explore, and a new era of Jovian moon research is about to begin.

Jason Davis

Tour the rings of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, plus asteroids, a dwarf planet, and an exoplanet.

The Downlink

Taking a look at volcanic worlds in our solar system and exoplanets that might crack under pressure.

The Planetary Society

Six scientists share the major planetary science discoveries of the past decade, and the questions that will drive the next 10 years of solar system exploration.

Ted Stryk

Ted Stryk shows us a new color, near-global view of Europa made from Galileo spacecraft data captured in 1996.

Jatan Mehta

Take a look at how electronics of spacecraft are built to survive the harshness of space environments.

Björn Jónsson

On the 20th anniversary of Galileo's orbit insertion around Jupiter, amateur image processor Björn Jónsson shares some of the mission's first images of Jupiter's iconic massive storm.

Emily Lakdawalla

People often ask me to produce one of my scale-comparison montages featuring the small moons of the outer solar system. I'd love to do that, but Galileo's best images of Jupiter's ringmoons lack detail compared to Cassini's images from Saturn.

Bill Dunford

Another round of posters to celebrate historic planetary missions.

Emily Lakdawalla

Now that I have a reasonable-resolution global color view of Pluto, I can drop it into one of my trademark scale image montages, to show you how it fits in with the rest of the similar-sized worlds in the solar system: the major moons and the biggest asteroids.

Björn Jónsson

Several global maps have been made of Europa, but amateur image processor Björn Jónsson felt they could be improved—so he decided to make a new one.

Bill Dunford

More examples of imperfect--but tantalizing--images from deep space.

Emily Lakdawalla

Simon Kattenhorn and Louise Prockter may finally have found subduction zones on Europa, which would it the only other place in the solar system besides Earth that is known to have active plate tectonics.

Bill Dunford

When sent from deep space, even imperfect images can inform and amaze.

Steve Vance

It's time to reassess Europa exploration, past, present and future. The Destination Europa! session at AGU, inspired by the eponymous website and movement, didn't take exactly that message as its theme, but it's what I got from the presentations. What an ELECTRIFYING meeting this has been for Europa exploration!

Emily Lakdawalla

A look at an older paper describing Galileo's possible sighting of individual ring particles orbiting Jupiter as companions to its inner moon Amalthea.

Emily Lakdawalla

Last week I trawled the archives to find all of Galileo's images of asteroid Ida; this week, I turned to Gaspra.

Emily Lakdawalla

While writing up the cruise-phase issues of the Galileo Messenger a couple of weeks ago, I came across a fuzzy montage of images of Ida that I had not seen before. So I decided to spend some time digging into the Planetary Data System to see if there were more images to be found. I found lots and lots pictures that I'd never seen before!

Emily Lakdawalla

It's taken me a year to face the emotionally draining task of reading and writing about Galileo's cruise phase as chronicled in the mission's newsletters.

Emily Lakdawalla

My collage of all the asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft is probably the single most popular image I have ever posted on this blog. I've now updated it to be in color and to include Toutatis.