The Rosetta spacecraft has returned the first images from its flyby of the asteroid 21 Lutetia. The image on the right was taken while the spacecraft was approximately 80,000 kilometers away and it shows a lumpy, cratered world. Lutetia is approximately 100 km in diameter. It is the largest asteroid yet visited by a spacecraft.…

Along with first images, anaglyphs and initial data results from Rosetta’s successful flyby of Asteroid (2867) Šteins, mission team members put together an animation of the flyby: More Information Rosetta Rosetta Blog Press Release: “Steins: A diamond in the sky“ Related Books [amazon-product]0387726721[/amazon-product] [amazon-product]1402025726[/amazon-product] [amazon-product]038777517X[/amazon-product]

Hours after its successful flyby of “the jewel of the solar system”, the robotic traveler Rosetta continues to return data from the encounter. From a point of light discovered in 1969 into a world of new vistas, here is Asteroid (2867) Šteins: At a press conference to announce preliminary results and to show the first…

Rosetta, the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft on its way to orbit and deploy a lander on a comet, is now approaching Asteroid (2867) Šteins. The flyby will bring the spacecraft within 800 km of Šteins on Friday evening, September 5, 2008. The ESA will provide a webcast about the event beginning on September 06,…

Venus is the Earth-that-could-have-been and the Earth-that-still-might-be.  Our so called sister planet orbits second from the Sun. Cloudy, hot, and unhospitable to life as we know it, Venus demonstrates as well as Mars why comparative planetary science can greatly improve understanding of our own planet. The greenhouse effect on Venus results in a poorly understood phenomena…

I will be speaking at the Sunday, September 7 meeting of the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix about “Images of Mars and Interplanetary Science.” This series of posts in preparation for the event will explore current spacecraft activities in planetary science. After the astronomy revolt that left the solar system with eight planets, four dwarf…

Cassini took this image of Enceladus’ water ice plumes on November 27, 2005.  New pictures and other data from the most recent flyby on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 are expected on Thursday, March 13, 2008.  Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute – “Jet Blue“ NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has successfully completed the closest flyby of Saturn’s mysterious…

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington – “MESSENGER’s First Look at Mercury’s Previously Unseen Side“ A heavily cratered side of the planet Mercury never before seen has been revealed by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft. A single image was released by NASA this evening after…

Image Credit: NASA – “Plentiful Planetary System” – “This artist’s concept shows four of the five planets that orbit 55 Cancri, a star much like our own.” NASA announced during a press telecon this morning the discovery of a fifth planet in the 55 Cancri system. This sets a new record for exoplanets in a…

With the moon visible overhead, Armadillo Aerospace unsuccessfully attempted to win the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Wirefly X PRIZE Cup this weekend at Holloman Air Force Base. The only competitor of nine ready to go for the event, Armadillo Aerospace, led by John Carmack of Doom and Quake fame, experienced both successes…

A race to space is shaping up in the private industry and once a year the public is invited to see the latest breakthroughs, vehicles, and competitions intended to accelerate this progress. The Wirefly X PRIZE Cup was held October 26 through 28 at the Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA. Combined…

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) team today released a slew of new false color images of the surface of Mars to the public, the culmination of many months of software and automation development.

[History] | [Commentary] Plenty of space blogs, organizations, and media outlets are marked last Thursday as the 50 year anniversary of the first artificial satellite in Earth orbit, Sputnik 1. On October 04, 1957 Russia surprised the United States by demonstrating their technological prowess with the successful launch of Sputnik 1. The “artificial moon” did…

[Launch Coverage] | [Commentary] 2:10 AM PST Too early! But despite the small hours of the morning here I am very excited for the big launch of the Dawn spacecraft planned for this morning. NASA TV playing in Windows Media Player, the oven heating for some waffles, and a groggy yet excited brain…here we go!…

Despite a 24-hour delay, preparations continue for the launch later this week of the Dawn spacecraft to explore two members of the Asteroid Belt. Dawn is now scheduled to be launched between 7:25 and 7:54 AM EDT on Thursday, September 27, 2007 after weather today interrupted the planned completion of launch vehicle fueling. The spacecraft…

In 2005 Saturn’s moon Enceladus was discovered to be an active world with water ice particle geysers at its south pole. The driver of this activity on a moon so small remains a mystery. One possible explanation has been suggested by Dr. Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist from the University of California Santa Cruz. Nimmo…

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/C. Martin (Caltech)/M. Seibert(OCIW) – “Johnny Appleseed of the Cosmos“ The first star discovered with a comet-like tail was announced today by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) team. While exploring the sky in ultraviolet light, GALEX spotted a tail of material streaming behind the binary star Mira, or Omicron Ceti, located 450 light…

NASA – Space Shuttle News I’m not sure there has ever been video quite like this. Thanks to the LifePort Staff Blog for pointing it out (via other sites). The most breathtaking of the bunch is “Right forward SRB camera” but the remaining have their moments as well, including views from underneath the waves. There…

Genesis I Mission Update 12 July 2006 | SpaceRef – Space News as it Happens From Las Vegas to outer space, Bigelow Aerospace has contacted their Genesis I spacecraft after a successful launch earlier today from Russia. Genesis I heralds the coming age of space tourism. The spacecraft was designed to test hardware, software, and…

The HiRISE team has released more of the high resolution “test” images of Mars taken on March 23 and 25, 2006. Incredible detail, color, and a perspective view. Eight images were taken and the rest should be available tomorrow. read more | digg story

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) performed a flawless engine burn today in a successful bid to enter orbit around Mars. The event, known as Mars Orbital Insertion (MOI), is a risky one for robotic visitors to the Red Planet. Now that MRO is safely in orbit, the spacecraft will soon begin several months of aerobraking to…

The modern robotic investigation of comets began with a spacecraft from the European Space Agency (ESA) named Giotto. Giotto captured in 1986 the first close-up images of a cometary nucleus and a wealth of other data. ESA is marking the 20th anniversary of Giotto’s successful flyby of Comet Halley on the eve of a NASA…

Cassini-Huygens mission scientists discovered last year that plumes of ice erupt from the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, but the mechanism for the this process has not been fully explained. Now a review of competing theories and available data implicates the more unlikely source: pressurized liquid water pools or an ocean near the moon’s surface.…

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is scheduled for Mars Orbital Insertion (MOI) on Friday, March 10, 2009. Confirmation of success should arrive around 3:15 pm MST. Below is a link to a presentation I gave one of my classes today about the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board MRO, the highest resolution camera every…

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced today the discovery of an exoplanet only 5.5 times the mass of the Earth orbiting a red dwarf star located near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, some 20,000 light years away from our own solar system. The discovery could indicate that rocky planets like the…

Planetary scientists long assumed that the moons of the outer planets were cold, dead, and airless worlds, heavily cratered but otherwise little changed from their original formation. In 1979, Voyager 1, looking back just after its flyby of Jupiter, discovered volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon Io. Over a year later, Voyager 1 discovered that the…

New Horizons was successfully launched today from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA after previous delays due to high winds and power outages. A slight delay today because of high clouds preceded a picture perfect launch. At the moment New Horizons is rocketing away from the Earth and will pass the orbit of the moon…

Update: Launch postponed to Wednesday, January 18, 2006 due to high winds. New Horizons and the Atlas rocket on which it sits were rolled out to their launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA yesterday. Only hours remain before the launch window opens up and NASA attempts to launch the piano-sized spacecraft on…

(Disclosure: Richard Leis is an operations team member located at the University of Arizona for NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE.)) Although the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) are less than two months away, spacecraft already in orbit around Mars continue to send…

The first spacecraft mission to the last of the original nine planets in our solar system is schedule for launch on Tuesday, January 17, 2006. New Horizons will begin its journey as the fastest spacecraft ever launched from the Earth. The speed is necessary to reach Pluto and its three known moons in just a…

Cassini passed within 2,043 kilometers (1,270 miles) of the surface of Titan on Saturday, January 14, 2006 (Pacific Standard Time) in its eleventh targeted flyby (after a more distant flyby a day earlier.) The event heralds a new phase in NASA’s mission to the Saturnian system. For the next two and a half years, all…

The sample-return capsule from the Stardust spacecraft landed early this morning in Utah, after gliding through the darkness across the West Coast of the United States. Inside the capsule is valuable cargo: the first cometary and interstellar material to be returned to the Earth for study. NASA TV covered the landing live while helicopters at…

The first mission to return cometary material to the Earth is now in its final hours of the mission. The Stardust spacecraft, visitor to Asteroid 5535 Annefrank and Comet Wild 2, crossed the orbit of the Moon yesterday morning and successfully deployed the sample-return capsule toward the Earth later that evening. The capsule is expected…

On December 26, 2005 Cassini returned to Titan for its ninth targeted flyby and the last of the year. The latest data includes information about Titan’s magnetic field and more images of albedo features and landmarks on the surface that have been labeled Aztlan, Quivira, Bazaruto. Elba Faculae, and Omacatl Macula. The raw images show…

Humanity improves the vision it turns on the universe in two ways: seeing farther than before and resolving greater detail. 2005 was a year of much more detail, of blurry bodies resolving into dynamic worlds and undiscovered objects in our own backyard suddenly coming into view. Augmented by robotic surrogates, adaptive optics, new remote sensing…

The clearest image yet (above left, compare to image above yet) of the center of our galaxy has been captured by the 10-meter Keck II Telescope at the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii. The image show the area surrounding Sagittarius A*, the name given to the energy source believed to be a black hole at…

Cassini scientists will provide evidence in this week’s issue of Science that the previously labeled ringlets near Saturn’s F ring are instead a single spiral arm surrounding a core ring. No such object has ever before been observed in our solar system. The F ring is a thin but complex feature beyond Saturn’s more prominent…

Cassini has returned spectacular images of huge plumes of water ice particles emanating from Enceladus, confirming that this tiny moon of Saturn is an active and watery world. Several plumes of various sizes can be seen clearly along the limb of the moon backlit by the Sun. Spraying out into space, these plumes may provide…

The image above is mostly real. The setting sun and martian landscape were really taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on its 489th martian day. What is not real in this image is that little rover looking off into the distance. Spirit, for all its advanced technological capabilities, is not able to take a…

After a planetary spacecraft is successfully launched on its long journey to its target planetary object, the various teams involved in the mission must checkout the instruments and subsystems they provided. This usually involves taking images to verify that everything is working properly. The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) and the Venus Monitoring…

Cassini flew by Rhea yesterday in an effort to better understand the heavily cratered world with wispy terrain similar to the ice cliffs and fractures of Dione. The image above shows the planned image coverage as Cassini passed only 500 kilometers (310 miles) above Rhea on Saturday. When Cassini was still 76,689 kilometers (47,652 miles)…