January 24, 2011 - New Rings for an Old Planet

Published in cooperation with The Planetary Society

Spend the year in space, one week at a time

Recent Weeks

May 14, 2012 - Monkey Nebula

May 7, 2012 - Getting a Grip on INTELSAT

April 30, 2012 - Dust in the Wind

April 23, 2012 - Celebrate Astronomy Day

April 16, 2012 - Rover Rides Again

April 9, 2012 - Mercury’s Marvelous Morphology

April 2, 2012 - A Matter of Truss

March 26, 2012 - Hubble Bubble

March 19, 2012 - Rocket Pioneer Centennial

March 12, 2012 - Southern Lights on Saturn

March 5, 2012 - A New Star in Town

February 27, 2012 - Hubble Upgrade

February 20, 2012 - Sideways Supernova

February 13, 2012 - Auroras Gone Wild

February 6, 2012 - Hubble Telescope Tune-Up

January 30, 2012 - Lunar Orbiter Liftoff

January 23, 2012 - Magellan Turns up the Stereo

January 16, 2012 - Southern Sibling Sees Stars

January 9, 2012 - Hitching a Ride Home

January 2, 2012 - Transforming the Space Frontier

December 26, 2011 - These Laws Can't Be Broken

December 19, 2011 - Long and Winding Road

December 12, 2011 - Blast from the Past

December 5, 2011 - It’s Just Like Folding a Map

November 28, 2011 - A Warmer, Wetter Mars

November 21, 2011 - Spy in the Sky

Customer Comment

The phenomenal amount of information and photos that I got out of last year's calendar!

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2012 Desk Calendar

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144 full-color pages
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Weekly photo essay
Daily Moon phases
Night sky events
Space trivia
Holidays
Room for notes/appts

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Customer Comment

I love this calendar! I have it on my desk and look at every entry for every day... Just beautiful. Keep up the good work.

--Robert A., Poughquag, NY

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The Week in Space

January 24-30, 2011

New Rings for an Old Planet After a nine-year journey of more than 1.8 billion miles, including a couple of swings past Jupiter and Saturn along the way, Voyager 2 became the first—and still only—spacecraft to pay a visit to Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun. Voyager 2’s historic encounter, which took place twenty-five years ago this week, turned that pale, mysterious gas giant into a more familiar world. It tripled the number of known moons orbiting Uranus (from five to fifteen), confirmed that the atmosphere is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, returned beautiful images like this of the nine known rings of the planet (which had been discovered telescopically in 1977), and spotted two new rings. Since then, the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered two more Uranian rings.

Image credit: NASA / JPL