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Cassini is currently near its periapsis. Saturn must appear absolutely gigantic to an observer on the spacecraft. It will take 90 minutes for news of this event to reach Earth. The spacecraft passed through the Cassini Division right after orbital insertion. Nope. Thought I heard that...

The Cassini data that will be discussed may be a couple years old since the spacecraft is currently perpendicular to the plane of the moons. The last Enceladus flyby was in 2015, but Saturn is surrounded by many other possible ocean worlds.

JPL: "NASA's Cassini Mission Prepares for 'Grand Finale' at Saturn" ---------- Post added at 12:38 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:28 AM ---------- This is the ideal moonlet shape. You may not like it, but this is what peak shepherd looks like. "Cassini Reveals Strange Shape of...

The White House budget supports the Europa Clipper orbiter, but provides no funding for a lander. However, this is not stopping NASA from continuing research on a landed spacecraft. SpaceNews: "Europa lander work continues despite budget uncertainty" The article later mentions a Science...

This photo looks like it's straight from 2001: source

Amazon makes most of its money net income off web services, not shopping. The company is actually running a profit.

SpaceNews: "Europe’s Jupiter explorer mission moves to prototype production"

Cutting funding for the Earth observing instruments on GoreSat DSCOVR is laughably petty. Keeping the mission operational costs relatively little, and funding a few science instruments is probably a small fraction of that cost. For some reason the Republicans historically like to underfund...

Probing Seven Worlds with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

Challenger was rushed to launch because of its delays. NASA wanted to finally get the shuttle off the ground and ignored concerns engineers had with basic materials science. Similarly, NASA chose the most expedient option during STS-107, to downplay any possible tile damage. In all three...

A nice JPL graphic showing the diminutive scale of the TRAPPIST-1 system: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA21428

The planets all come pretty close to each other, and they're all near the host star, so I don't think moons would be stable. It looks more like the Jovian system than the solar system.

Well, Musk is rumored to overwork his employees. So who knows how late they were working the previous night.

Technically, he did not specify which direction the burns were in but how the spacecraft moves with respect to Earth. Then he called the phases burns. The launch was at 6:30 AM their time, so it's understandable if the presenters were tired and made mistakes.

You've got to remember that Juno is rotating, so a narrow angle camera like on Cassini would probably return blurry images. This is not to say that Junocam couldn't have been more capable or better shielded, but it isn't relevant to the mission's scientific objectives.

Thus SLS could be used to go to the moon as easily as Mars. Plus, getting to the moon, landing, and returning requires a lot less architecture and expense than a Mars mission. Most of the big aerospace contracts come from the Department of Defense, so it may not be that hard to gut the remnants...

I like this selection; these missions are truly explorers, but I'm a bit disappointed that NASA hasn't chosen a mission to Venus since the 1980s. Venus is a possible destination for the next New Frontiers mission, but I'm partial to exploring Titan and Enceladus. The Trojan proposal for New...

MRO was able to see Beagle 2.

To elaborate on that uh oh: "Juno Spacecraft in Safe Mode for Latest Jupiter Flyby"

Regaining my basic Blender knowledge to make my first new video in nearly three years: