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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Dawn Journal: ORT ORT ORT
Dawn continues its flight through the asteroid belt, steadily heading toward its July rendezvous with Vesta, where it will take up residence for a year. On January 10, Dawn performed some of the activities that it will execute in its low altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) at Vesta.
Kepler announcement today: More than a thousand exoplanets including one 6-planet system
I wasn't able to watch the Kepler press briefing today so I will give you links to some of my favorite blogs for information on today's announcement, which follows a major data release last night as well as the publication of a paper in Nature.
Io and Jupiter from Voyager 1
Here's an image I've been meaning to post for months, a new mosaic from Voyager 1 by Ted Stryk of Io crossing Jupiter's terminator as it neared closest approach.
Uranus and Challenger
In the past week there have been 25th anniversaries of two events in 1986, one great, one terrible: the closest approach of Voyager 2 to Uranus on January 24, and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger upon liftoff on January 28.
Butterfly crater on Mars
I've spent the day noodling around in the current issue of Icarus, following up some of the more interesting stories within its table of contents, and came across a picture of this very cool crater -- actually, set of craters -- on Mars.
Stardust update: Tempel 1 Ahoy!
It is with great relief that I now report that JPL announced this evening the sighting of Tempel 1 by Stardust, a mere month before the planned flyby.
IKAROS: self-portrait with Venus; primary mission complete
JAXA posted a report today stating that IKAROS
Animation of Phobos rotating from recent Mars Express flyby images
Daniel Macháček has colorized some terrific images of Phobos and run them through some morphing software to make a seamless animation that appears to show Phobos rotating before you.
Report from the 2011 New Horizons Science Team Meeting
The annual New Horizons Science Team Meeting was held last week at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Stardust update: Tempel 1 not yet spotted by spacecraft, hopefully next week
A new update has been posted to the Stardust website: The spacecraft continues to operate as expected and all subsystems are healthy on approach to comet Tempel 1.
Mars Express' January 2011 Phobos images show how camera works
The Mars Express High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) team has just released several images from the most recent series of Phobos flybys to the Mars Express blog.
Two fine color Cassini animations: Prometheus rotating, Tethys and Dione dancing
Daniel Macháček has reached into the dark side of Prometheus and pulled out an incredible amount of detail where the potato-shaped moon is illuminated by Saturnshine. He produced an animation that morphs among the three sets of four-filter color images that Cassini snapped during the flyby.
Stardust prepares for first second look at a comet: Tempel 1 on February 14
A press briefing was held at NASA Headquarters this morning to preview the planned February 14 encounter by Stardust with Tempel 1. There aren't often lots of questions from media after these
Another scientific clarification: Vanth probably not half the mass of Orcus
Earlier this week I got all excited about the Orcus-Vanth system. It turns out there was a math error in the version of the paper that I read, which resulted in the notion that Vanth could be nearly as big as Orcus.
Scientific clarification: "inverted topography" is more general than "esker-like features"
In the past couple of months I've received several emails from scientists offering clarifications, corrections, or alternative points of view to previous posts, which is awesome and something that I enthusiastically encourage. Here's one of them.
2010 JL33: How to see an asteroid from quite a long way away
A terrific set of Goldstone radar images of a good-sized near-Earth asteroids named 2010 JL33 was posted to the JPL website yesterday. They also posted a movie version but something about these pixelated radar image series absolutely begs for them to be displayed as an old-school animated GIF, so I made one.
Goodies from the January 11 Rhea flyby
Cassini got some incredibly tricky shots during its January 11 Rhea flyby!
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast: Unmanned Space Exploration in 2011
Today the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast aired my contribution, Unmanned Space Exploration in 2011, about what to look forward to in solar system exploration this year.
"A genuinely weird experience": A video of Steve Squyres explaining a photo of Steve Squyres
In a lovely talk, in his uncommonly engaging way, Steve Squyres presents the portrait of him that now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.
Orcus and Vanth
As part of a big, ongoing project to make a comparison chart of the dimensions and physical properties of solar system objects I've spent the morning tackling the difficult problem of summarizing the physical characteristics of the biggest things that are out there beyond Neptune.