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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.

All asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft as of August 2014, in color, albedo linearly scaled

Asteroids and comets to scale, including Hartley 2

Just in time for today's Deep Impact press briefing, which you can watch on NASA TV in a few minutes: I've updated my montage of all the asteroids and comets that have been visited and photographed to include Hartley 2.

Comet Hartley 2

Deep Impact at Hartley 2: Two weeks after the flyby

Today the Deep Impact/EPOXI science team held a press briefing that followed up on their very successful flyby of two weeks ago, a status report on what they can say so far about the science that's coming out of the encounter.

Hayabusa at Itokawa

JAXA announcement: Itokawa sample return successful!

It's official: in a press release today, JAXA announced that some 1,500 dust grains scraped from the interior of Hayabusa's clean-looking sample return capsule are not of terrestrial origin so must be from Itokawa.

Laplace A from Chang'E 2

First pictures from Chang'E 2 released

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced the success of Chang'E-2 lunar mission on Monday. Yong-Chun Zheng, an associate professor at the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, presents the mission's first released pictures.

Simulation of transit of Haumea by its moon Namaka

DPS 2010: Centaurs and Trans-Neptunian objects

I attended all day Tuesday of the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting on October 5. The afternoon session on Tuesday was a grab bag about different small objects in the outermost solar system.

Intrepid crater

Opportunity bags a few craters

In the last few days, Opportunity's passed by several craters, and the rover drivers took advantage of the chance encounters for what they call

High-resolution global view of Jupiter from Cassini

An awesome animation of Jupiter's clouds

Ready to see something beautiful? Here's a team effort by Björn Jónsson and Ian Regan to create a really mesmerizing view of the motions of Jupiter's clouds.

Interiors of icy bodies in the solar system (as of 2010)

Eris might be smaller than Pluto after all (but it's still more massive)

Several astronomers pointed their telescope at Eris to watch it pass in front of a background star. Occultations permit precise measurement of the diameters of distant, faint objects, and it turned out that Eris was much smaller than previously thought, so much so that its diameter may turn out to be the same as, or even smaller than, Pluto's.

Mars during the 2003 opposition

Fly over Mars

Adrian Lark has posted several new flights over gorgeous Martian landscapes to his Youtube channel. My favorite of his recent ones is this dive into Zumba crater.

3D animation of comet Hartley 2's nucleus

Hartley 2 compared to other comets, and in motion 3D

I had to catch up with tasks left undone at home today and didn't have time to write up my notes from the Hartley 2 press briefing, for which I apologize. I'll leave you for the weekend with three cool Hartley 2 pictures.

Nightside jets on Hartley 2

Hartley 2's jets

It was a very happy set of scientists, engineers, managers, and administrators who filled the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Von Karman auditorium this afternoon to do the postgame show on Deep Impact's flyby of Hartley 2.

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