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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
LPSC: Thursday: Rovers, Titan, Mars, Venus Express, Neptune
I spent a large portion of the day at the Lunar and Planetary Institute's library and presented my own poster during the poster sessions, so my coverage of Thursday's sessions is limited.
"Return of the Falcon," a new animation of the Hayabusa mission
JAXA has released a 30-minute video of the Hayabusa mission,
Updates from Past Recipients of the Shoemaker NEO Grants (1 March 2007)
Thanks to The Planetary Society Shoemaker Grant, the 1.06-meter KLENOT telescope optics was completed at the Klet Observatory. Regular observations of the KLENOT project started in March 2002 under the new IAU/MPC code 246, so we can now present results covering 5 years of this work.
New Horizons is targeting Jupiter!
New Horizons' Jupiter encounter is officially underway!
Updates from Past Recipients of the Shoemaker NEO Grants (18 July 2006)
Using the Shoemaker NEO Grant funds, Minor Planet Research has purchased a 1.7-terabyte data server for our Asteroid Discovery Station (ADS) education outreach program Through the generosity of Dr. Philip Christensen, this server is housed at the Mars Space Flight Facility (MSFF) at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
New Horizons tracks an asteroid
New Horizons is spending the summer traversing the asteroid belt. I haven't written a lot about New Horizons lately because the mission has been going so uneventfully well. But now I've got something to write about: data!!
OPAG, Day 2: Ground-based study of the small bodies in the outer solar system
After the political discussions of the morning, Mike Brown stood up to give the
LPSC: Friday: Hayabusa
The audience was rapt as Project Manager Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi stood up to give an introduction to the Hayabusa spacecraft and described the saga of the mission to date.
Big News for Hayabusa: It wasn't hovering, it landed!!
Remember how Hayabusa was virtually still for 30 minutes? JAXA is now saying that Hayabusa actually touched down -- and more than that, they may even have a sample.
Closer still to Itokawa
Hayabusa reached an altitude of about 560 meters above Hayabusa at 17:30 UTC. And at 18:00 UTC they are at 500 meters. This is still farther above the asteroid than the asteroid is big...there is still a long way to go before Hayabusa touches down...
Getting ready for Hayabusa's touchdown
In a further update on Hayabusa's status, we have been contacted by Kazuya Yoshida of the Space Robotics Laboratory at Tohuku University. Yoshida reports that the touchdown is now planned to take place
Another Hayabusa update: small delay
There has been a delay of just about a day in JAXA's plans for landing Hayabusa on Itokawa.
Amazing Hayabusa images
These photos pretty much speak for themselves. They are amazing. Hayabusa saw its own shadow on Itokawa, and took a photo of the released target marker.
A piece of a new picture from Hayabusa
The Hayabusa mission has proven to be a bit of a tease -- they were releasing lots of images to the public as they approached asteroid Itokawa, but once they arrived, the image releases shut down entirely. There is finally a little postage stamp of an image captured by Hayabusa at
DPS: Back to Day 3 again: finishing up asteroids & Iapetus
Today is the last day of DPS, and the first that has not had a press conference session at lunchtime, so I have a few moments here to do some catching up.
An animation of Itokawa from Hayabusa
This lovely animation of Itokawa represents 20 individual images taken between 18:10 on September 5 and 00:30 on September 6, from a distance of less than 700 kilometers away.
Updates from Past Recipients of the Shoemaker NEO Grants (17 August 2005)
Following last year's Potentially Hazardous Asteroid and a few other non-main-belt discoveries, I looked into what improvements I could make to more efficiently image the sky. The major advance involved the design of a 3-lens corrector comprising 2 stock lenses and a custom lens I made myself.
Astronomers Revise Torino Scale Asteroid Advisory System
Astronomers have revised the Torino scale, the color-coded advisory system to assess the threat of asteroids and other near-Earth objects (NEOs) to make it easier for the public to understand.
Close Your Left Eye, Then Your Right: Simultaneous Observations of Asteroid 4179 Toutatis from Two Chilean Telescopes Demonstrate Parallax
This morning, asteroid 4179 Toutatis was so close to Earth that simultaneous observations from two telescopes in the same country could show parallax that is obvious even to the least experienced observer. The two telescopes belong to The European Southern Observatory and are located at La Silla and Paranal in Chile
Very Close Approach by Asteroid 4179 Toutatis: It's Not a Crisis, It's an Opportunity
On Wednesday, September 29, Earth will dodge a cannonball: the Near-Earth Asteroid known as 4179 Toutatis will buzz by at a distance only four times the distance from the Earth to the Moon -- about one and a half million kilometers, or about a million miles. But, as the wisdom goes,