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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Summer 2015 edition of The Planetary Report is here
The summer edition of The Planetary Report has printed and will soon be at your door.
Name Hayabusa2's asteroid target!
Have you ever wanted to name an asteroid? JAXA is offering the opportunity to name Hayabusa2's target asteroid, 1999 JU3 to the public through a contest that runs through August 31.
What in the world(s) are tholins?
The question “why is Pluto red” has been answered with a word that most people have never heard of and perhaps even fewer people can actually define—“tholins”.
Expedition 44 Trio Flies through Solar Panel Glitch, Arrives at Station
A three-person crew is safely aboard the International Space Station following an early morning launch of a Soyuz rocket and spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
New Horizons encounter plus one week: Weird and wonderful images from the Pluto system
So many new image goodies from the Pluto system!
Dawn at Ceres: A haze in Occator crater?
While Pluto deservedly stole the headlines last week, Chris Russell’s Dawn update at the Exploration Science Forum at NASA Ames reminded us that the other dwarf planets are also sharing their secrets with eager scientists.
DSCOVR mission releases first EPIC global view of Earth, more to come in September
Five months after its launch, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission has successfully journeyed to the region of space where Sun and Earth gravitational attraction offset each other. From the vantage point of L1, DSCOVR's EPIC camera has captured its first full-globe view of Earth, and it's well, epic.
Broken Bottle Strut Likely Doomed Falcon 9 Rocket, Says Elon Musk
The demise of an ISS-bound Falcon 9 rocket last month was likely caused by a broken liquid helium bottle strut, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
New Horizons: Awaiting the data
New Horizons' encounter and data downlinks have been going exactly as planned, but the raw image website has not been updated for many days. What's going on? I found out.
Report Finds SLS Cost and Schedule Estimates Tight, but on Track
The GAO says NASA is generally doing a good job with cost and schedule estimates for SLS, its new heavy lift rocket. But NASA is also running short on schedule margin as it works to have SLS ready for flight by November 2018.
OSIRIS-REx – Testing In Progress
While the OLA, OCAMS, and REXIS instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft continue working towards their deliveries, other hardware onsite at Lockheed is undergoing testing prior to installation. The hardware is put through tests here on Earth prior to launching into space.
Latest New Horizons picture of Charon: oddly familiar
The New Horizons team released one more picture from Tuesday's encounter, one of three high-resolution images from a mosaic that crossed the center of Charon's disk, and it took me a while to figure out what it reminded me of.
LightSail Workshop Recaps Lessons Learned from Test Mission
The LightSail team held a workshop in Pasadena to discuss lessons learned from the test mission and plan for the second flight in 2016.
First look at New Horizons' Pluto and Charon images: "baffling in a very interesting and wonderful way"
Today's press briefing at the Applied Physics Laboratory in California was preceded by hours of New Horizons team members cryptically dropping hints on Twitter at astonishing details in the seven images downlinked since the flyby. The images are, in fact, astonishing, as well as beautiful, surprising, and puzzling.
New Horizons' best look at Pluto before close approach
Feast your eyes upon it!
The not-planets
Now that I have a reasonable-resolution global color view of Pluto, I can drop it into one of my trademark scale image montages, to show you how it fits in with the rest of the similar-sized worlds in the solar system: the major moons and the biggest asteroids.
New Horizons "phones home" after Pluto flyby
After a wait of more than 22 hours with no communication, New Horizons
Pluto minus one day: Very first New Horizons Pluto encounter science results
At a press briefing this morning, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern divulged some extremely preliminary first science results from the New Horizons Pluto encounter. Science results include Pluto's diameter and information on its surface composition and atmospheric escape.
Zooming in to Pluto and Charon
In the span of a few days, Pluto and Charon have turned from spots into worlds. The latest images from New Horizons are showing Pluto and Charon to have unique faces, distinct from any other icy worlds in the solar system.
Two more brief mission updates: Philae makes contact; Akatsuki to perform course correction
As a followup to yesterday's post about Dawn, Juno, and OSIRIS-REx, I have updates on two more missions. With this post, I hope to have cleared the decks so that I can focus on Pluto for the next week!