Interplanetary Spacecraft
Vehicles that travel between planets, including Mars spacecraft- Explore more »
Our Favorite Martians
For the scientists and engineers who drive the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Mars exploration is personal.
March 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
Creation of a Cover Shot
Photographer Eric Curry shows how he made our March 2010 cover.
March 01, 2010 |
By The Editors
No More A-Roving
NASA’s Spirit rover goes into survival mode on Mars.
January 28, 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
The Search for a Real "Pandora"
In the three years since film director James Cameron wrote the script for his new blockbuster Avatar, a lot has changed in the field of exoplanet research (the study of planets around other stars). Nobody knows this better than one of its leading practitioners, Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smith...
December 30, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Inside Track
The Cassini probe to Saturn and Titan is just one of those spacecraft that keeps returning very cool stuff, such as the beautiful view of Saturn during its equinox a few months ago.Now, the mission has just released tantalizing footage of Saturn's moon Janus, which is about 111 miles across, overta...
December 24, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
Wet World
Announcements of newly discovered planets come so frequently these days that it's hard to tell which ones are significant. But GJ 1214b deserves its moment of fame.Discovered by a team led by David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the planet is only 5.4 times the diam...
December 17, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Fear and Dread
In 45 years of photographing Mars up close, no spacecraft had ever gotten a picture of both its moons, Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Dread), together—until last month.The High Resolution Stereo Camera on Europe's Mars Express orbiter took advantage of a rare alignment to snap this image of the two moon...
December 11, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Saturn, Selenokhod, and Scott Speicher
Today's offering is a post-Thanksgiving smorgasbord of stories (okay, I'll stop with the alliteration).
First, a lovely NASA video of an aurora shimmering above Saturn, with commentary by Caltech planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, who's been exploring the outer solar system since the Pioneer 10 ...
November 30, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
As the World Turns
Europe's Rosetta spacecraft took these spectacular views of a crescent Earth last week during its final close fly-by. The first frame starts at a distance of 683,000 miles. The last was taken from 198,000 miles.
November 14, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Here Comes Rosetta...Again
You must need patience to work on Europe's Rosetta comet mission. Launched in 2004, the spacecraft won't arrive at its main destination, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, until 2014. That's longer than New Horizons is taking to get to Pluto. The reason is that it requires a lot of energy to meet up ...
November 12, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Freeing Spirit
NASA's Mars rover prepares to escape the worst trouble of its life.
November 09, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Fireball Over Indonesia
The Near-Earth Object office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports on an October 8 fireball over Indonesia, with a link (below) to a local TV news story.Fireballs are dramatic, but not as rare as you'd think. An object this size (about 10 meters in diameter) comes along every few years, on av...
October 26, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Big Foot Was Here
There's no shortage of meteorites that have slammed into our planet since its creation. The vast majority of the craters they've left have eroded away or slowly sunk into the Earth through the process of subduction. Still, the Earth Impact Database, the list of confirmed impact craters, maintained ...
October 20, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
Phobos grunts
It's the biggest open secret in the space community: the Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt will not be leaving for the Red Planet this year, as scheduled, and will have to wait for 2011 when the orbits of Earth and Mars synch up again.The Russian space agency Roscosmos, which is responsible for the e...
September 24, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
The rivers of Titan
If I were running the space program—which is unlikely, I admit—Saturn's moon Titan would be very high on the list of destinations for the next major planetary mission. Sure, Mars is appealing, largely because of its similarity to Earth.But take a look at this radar image of Titan's northern polar r...
September 16, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Where the Wild Things Are
We’re about to get a peek at the solar system’s
final frontier.
July 2009 |
By Guy Gugliotta
Goodbye, Kaguya
At 2:25 this afternoon, Eastern time, Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter will smash into the moon, its maneuvering fuel nearly spent and its two-year mission ended. I'll miss it. Kaguya has been the most media-friendly of the new lunar missions launched to date, returning beautiful, elegant photos and mo...
June 10, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Spiders on (not from) Mars
Not being able to think up my own April Fool’s joke, I’ll pass on somebody else’s: the HiRISE camera team at the University of Arizona. Be sure to click on the Grey at bottom right.For my money (and I guess it partly is my money), HiRISE has returned some of the most beautiful images in the history...
April 01, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Kepler's unusual orbit
A couple more interesting things about the just-launched Kepler telescope—then we'll let it get on with the business of searching for distant planets. The spacecraft will be controlled, at times, by college kids working alongside professional operators. Kepler continues a NASA trend to turn over da...
March 09, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
