Space Station Threshold

Via Twitter, the Phoenix lander said, "I saw this beautiful sunrise yestersol. Bittersweet, as it means an end to midnight sun in the Martian arctic." At Phoenix's location above Mars arctic circle, the sun doesn't set during the peak of summer in the northern hemisphere. If you recall, Phoenix took a montage [...]

With the Phoenix lander busily working away on Mars and grabbing the recent headlines, we haven't heard much from the other two robots on the Red Planet, the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit has been hunkered down, trying to survive the harshest weeks of southern Martian winter. She's waiting for the [...]

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft will make an historic encounter with asteroid (2867) Steins on September 5, 2008 at 20:58 CEST (Central European Summer Time), 2:58 pm EDT (US Eastern Daylight Time.) A few days ago, Rosetta conducted a successful trajectory correction maneuver using images from the spacecraft's cameras to calculate the ...

Scientists and engineers from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander continue with digging operations around the lander with the spacecraft's robotic arm. They are looking for new materials to analyze and are examining the soil and ice subsurface structure. "We expect to use the robotic arm heavily over the next several weeks, delivering ...

More early morning frost is showing up on the Phoenix spacecraft. The Surface Stereo Imager (SSI) took several pictures of the "Telltale" on the Phoenix Mars Lander, the device used to measure wind velocities at the landing site on Mars and created a movie of bright specks of frost accumulating on the mirror of [...]

It's getting a little nippy in the mornings on Mars. The Phoenix lander's Surface Stereo Imager took this image at 6 a.m. on Sol 79 (August 14, 2008 here on Earth), and a thin layer of water frost is visible on the ground around the landing area. From subsequent images, the frost begins [...]

What is Mars ubiquitous dust really like, close-up? Scientists from the Phoenix missions are finding out with the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), an instrument that is providing the highest magnification of anything seen from another world. A couple of months ago the Phoenix Mars Lander used its optical microscope to image small grains [...]

Scientists for the Cassini mission called their flyby of Saturn's small moon Enceladus on August 11 a "skeet shoot" – partially in honor of the current Olympic games underway, but mostly because the spacecraft would be trying to shoot rapidly at the moon with its array of cameras and scientific instruments. As the images [...]

Images and data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have revealed layers of clay-rich rock that suggests abundant water was once present on Mars. Scientists from the SETI Institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several universities have been studying data focused on the Mawrth Vallis area on Mars’ northern highland region. This is ...

Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus is of big interest to planetary scientists trying to understand the dynamics of the moon's geysers and fissures. On August 11, the Cassini spacecraft will swoop by Enceladus for a close flyby, just 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the surface, with the fractures, or "tiger stripes" near the ...