The wait is over! UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory announced today that the eagerly anticipated Stardust@Home project will officially get underway tomorrow.

Mike Zolensky (left), Stardust curator and co-investigator, and Donald Brownlee, principal investigator with the University of Washington, study Stardust material after its canister is opened in a laboratory at the Johnson Space Center. Image […]

Now this is truly a significant press release, one which I’ve been ogling periodically all day. In January of 2005, the Huygens probe, ferried to the Saturnian system by the Cassini spacecraft, successfully landed on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Huygens’ stately arrival marked a huge scientific milestone, delivering invaluable imagery and data […]

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 16 years of success, the two space agencies involved in the project, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), are releasing this image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). This mosaic image is the sharpest wide-angle view ever […]

Immediately on the heels of a successful orbital insertion two days ago, the European Space Agency today released the spacecraft’s first views of Venus. While I was eagerly anticipating the first Venus Express release from ESA, I was not expecting we’d receive imagery, data, and scientists’ first impressions so quickly (VE should begin its full […]

As the Mars Exploration Rovers continue their respective journeys - now beyond eleven times that of their original mission design - the findings keep accumulating. In reviewing the latest MER press release, I was totally captivated by this layered section of Erebus returned by Opportunity:

Image Credit: NASA /JPL / Cornell (click to enlarge)
The stack […]

Image Credit: ESA
After an interplanetary trip of 153 days and logging 250 million miles along the way, ESA’s Venus Express has completed its orbital insertion as planned. ESA reports that the VOI was a complete success, the orbiter is in good health, and it’s been confirmed that the spacecraft is sending telemetry back to Earth. […]

As promised, and hot off the presses — behold the new images just released from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The first color shot from the HiRISE Instrument:
Note: this is just a quick, tiny crop of the very top of the image, since there’s really no effective way of displaying it on my page. It’s HUGE. Follow the […]