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The Planetary Society Blog
Archive
Archived posts are listed in reverse chronological order.
Mar. 24, 2011 | 14:32 PDT | 21:32 UTC
In honor of Stardust: The Annefrank encounter
Since Stardust is being decommissioned today I thought it'd be fitting to take a look back at one of its data sets. I hadn't fiddled with the Annefrank data set before, and it was small and easy to deal with. I found as I was working with it that... More»
Mar. 23, 2011 | 20:28 PDT | Mar. 24 03:28 UTC
Tomorrow is Stardust's very last day
What's that in my eye? Must be a piece of stardust that's making my eyes water as I read that Stardust will be given its very last command tomorrow, a command that'll end its long life, but give its builders one more piece of valuable data in the... More»
Mar. 23, 2011 | 15:05 PDT | 22:05 UTC
A zoomable MastCam is not going to make it to Mars
I hate being the bearer of bad news, but here it is. Amid all the building excitement for Curiosity -- the successes in testing, the delivery of the instruments, the fun of tuning in to Curiosity Cam to peek in on engineers doing their work in... More»
Mar. 23, 2011 | 12:51 PDT | 19:51 UTC
LPSC 2011: Sponge-moon Hyperion
Almost two weeks since the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and I'm still getting notes on talks! This writeup came from Mike Malaska. By day, Mike is a Ph.D. organic chemist leading drug discovery projects for a pharmaceutical company. By... More»
Mar. 22, 2011 | 14:40 PDT | 21:40 UTC
Evidence for rain on Titan
Last week, Zibi Turtle and Jason Perry and a dozen other coauthors published a paper in Science discussing evidence for rain on Titan. I don't write about Titan much on this blog, which is a shame because Cassini has been assembling a vast trove of... More»
Mar. 22, 2011 | 09:05 PDT | 16:05 UTC
Encouragement from space for Japan
I saw this posted by @Akatsuki_JAXA (the Akatsuki Venus mission's official Twitter identity) and thought it was cute so I'm sharing it here. Thanks to translation help from Twitter I can tell you that it shows Japan's spacecraft offering... More»
Mar. 21, 2011 | 15:00 PDT | 22:00 UTC
Dawn's instruments are being roused for Vesta approach
Today the Dawn imaging team released a photo from the main camera, the Framing Camera, symbolizing that they're preparing to start Dawn approach science; the other two science instruments, a spectrometer and a neutron detector, are also being turned... More»
Mar. 21, 2011 | 11:37 PDT | 18:37 UTC
Neat video of Curiosity drive testing (plus a code-cracking challenge)
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted a short video showing some recent testing of an engineering model of the Mars Science Laboratory in their outdoor Mars Yard; they're testing the performance of the rover's driving capability over slopes of... More»
Mar. 17, 2011 | 18:16 PDT | Mar. 18 01:16 UTC
MESSENGER successfully entered orbit at Mercury!
Just a brief post to announce that at 01:00 UTC MESSENGER completed a 15-minute burn of its main engines to enter orbit at Mercury! According to mission controllers, all indications from the low-rate telemetry received through the spacecraft's... More»
Mar. 17, 2011 | 16:15 PDT | 23:15 UTC
Mercury: a moon-scale body
As I wait for the MESSENGER Mercury Orbit Insertion webcast to start, I thought I'd fiddle with some images to point out that Mercury is a bridge between the scales of planets and the scales of moons. Here's a collage of the eight bodies in the... More»
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