If all goes as planned, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will launch from Cape Canaveral either Thursday or Friday, depending on the launch of space shuttle Endeavour. Brown University professor and LRO researcher Michael Wyatt is at the launch site, and starting today, Wyatt will share his impressions of this historic mission — the opening maneuver in the United States return to the Moon — with all of you. Thanks, Michael! We'll post Michael's...

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Exploration Program web site has a fun new feature — Ask Dr. C, “your personal Mars expert.” You can type in a simple question — the simpler, the better — and get a pretty good answer. A computer program tries to match your question with an extensive database of responses. The real Dr. C is Phil Christensen , a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. Christensen is the Principal Investigator for the 2001...

Last summer, my colleague Michael Bakich, a senior editor at Astronomy , kindly gave me a special filter that fits on the front of my 4-inch Celestron NexStar, thus allowing me to observe the Sun without turning my eyeball into a poached egg. I looked at the Sun with the new setup. Nada. Nothing! Thanks to this cool graphic just released by NASA, it’s clear why the Sun is so, well, boring to look at lately. We are in a deep “solar minimum,” a period...

Megacorps are practically lining up for the privilege of disseminating fantastic volumes of astronomical images to you, John and Jane Q. Public. Recently Google added a “Live from Mars” function to its 3-D visualization of Mars within Google Earth. The feature allows you to see images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Now Microsoft says it will let you explore images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, pictured at right) within its web-based...

Richard Greenberg, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is an expert in celestial mechanics and carries out NASA-sponsored investigations of solar system evolution and planet formation. He is also author of the current book Unmasking Europa . After NASA and the European Space Agency chose Jupiter’s moons — including Europa — as the next destination for a major planetary exploration mission...

“There is an ocean beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa [pictured at right]. Strange creatures could be swimming in these alien waters, but so far no missions have been sent there to investigate this possibility.” So begins, " Hoping for Europa ," an article by Astrobiology magazine Editor Leslie Mullen. Squids from outer space — who could resist? Or will it be a balloon ride over the windblown surface of a hydrocarbon lake on...

On Christmas Day, 1758, a German amateur astronomer and farmer named Johann Georg Palitzsch did something that would have made a great Christmas gift for English astronomer Edmond Halley. Johann “recovered” Halley’s Comet, meaning he was the first to observe this previously observed “dirty snowball” as it returned to the inner solar system. Edmond Halley (1656-1742) calculated the orbit of the comet that now bears his name based on previous sightings...

Many phases of the Moon ago — more than 200 — I came under the spell of earth science and wrote a lot about it for a number of years. This week, some of that ancient knowledge came back to visit as I gazed at a fantastic 28-image mosaic of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. You may see crusty cracked ice; I see the outlines of ice continents. At the American Geophysicial Union meeting in San Francisco this week, the halls are abuzz with talk of plate tectonics...

India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe will fire a rocket Saturday, November 8, to insert itself into orbit. As I sat down to prepare a magazine news article about the mission earlier this week, I found myself lacking a decent piece of space art of the probe. A web search led me not to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which lofted the craft, but to a talented space enthusiast in England named Doug Ellison . He kindly provided the image of...

If you want to witness something historic, get on the next flight to Sudan. That’s where a unique meteorological event may take place late tonight. Astronomer Rich Kowalski of the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson discovered asteroid 2008 TC3 last night. And astronomers predict that tonight, on October 7 Africa time, the object will enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in a spectacular fireball. The asteroid is only a few meters across at most, so it...