Planetary Society Weblog

Amid the lengthy discussion of cost overruns and schedule delays on Mars Science Laboratory came a surprise announcement that is as important as it is welcome: NASA and ESA administrators have agre...

NASA just announced (in their third press release today) that the Hubble Servicing Mission is now rescheduled for May 12, 2009. (See this post for the history of the delay of this mission.) The rel...

It was a lengthy press briefing today, with the four bigwigs on the press panel being exceptionally long-winded. Here's the short version, which I'll follow up with more detail.Unanticipated proble...

Mars Science Laboratory will not be ready for launch in October 2009 as planned. And since Mars launches are limited by the vagaries of celestial mechanics to launch periods spaced about two years ...

This sounds really good right about now... Click to enlarge Space BeerOn December 2, the Sapporo brewing company unveiled "Space Barley," a beer brewed from barley descended from barley grains tha...

After Phoenix fell silent on November 2, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that they'd carry on listening for faint transmissions from the spacecraft, using the two NASA orbiters, until the p...

Shortly after Chandrayaan-1 launched I received an email from a skeptical Indian saying "how can we really be sure that the spacecraft is as successful as the government is telling us it is?" I don...

Varuna is one of the few formally named Kuiper belt objects because it's relatively large -- in fact, for a time, it was the second largest known object in the Kuiper belt, after Pluto. It's always...

Here's our monthly checkup with the Dawn mission, contributed by Marc Rayman, the mission's Project System Engineer. Thanks Marc! --ESL by Dr. Marc D. Rayman Dear Indawnviduals, The Dawn spacecraft...

In my most recent post on Chandrayaan-1 I mentioned the first results from the RADOM experiment, provided to the Indian mission by the nation of Bulgaria. I also mentioned that "I don't know anythi...