NASA’s Deep Impact probe flew past comet Hartley 2 and revealed a odd-looking peanut-shaped nucleus. What are the first impressions from these exciting images? Only about a mile (1.6 km) from end to end, the nucleus of Comet Hartley2 is hardly the most impressive member of the Solar System. Never Read more…
Between Mars and Jupiter lies the Asteroid Belt, a swarm of millions of shards of rock, metal and ice. Somewhere out here, between 5-10 February 2009, a small asteroid, perhaps 5m across, violently slammed into another, larger (120 m), asteroid at a closing speed of about 18 000 km/h. As much Read more…
Ask anyone to draw a picture of a planet and I’ll bet they draw a ringed planet like Saturn. This giant world has always stood out from the other worlds of the Solar System thanks to its amazing rings, in astronomy books it was ‘The Ringed Planet’. Thirty years Read more…
The team at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency deserve congratulations for the amazing (and hopefully record-breaking) Hayabusa mission to asteroid 25143 Itokawa. Launched in 2003 (the spacecraft was called MUSES-C at launch, but was renamed in flight), this mission has battled against an extraordinary run of bad luck and technical Read more…
Here’s how rainbows are made. Some 13.7 billion years ago, a mere millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the first hydrogen and helium nuclei condensed out of a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. It took another 380 000 years or so for conditions in the ancient Read more…
In March 2010 that superb but underappreciated probe Mars Express made a series of very close passes by the Martian moon Phobos. On one occasion it came as close as 107 km to the tiny world’s surface. The purpose of these encounters was to determine information on Phobos’ interior Read more…
Venus was once thought to be a lush, life-bearing planet, but modern research has revealed an utterly lethal world. What perils await explorers of “Earth’s evil twin”? Is there anyone who hasn’t admired the lovely beacon of Venus hanging bright in a cerulean sky? (So bright in fact, it Read more…
At first glance Gliese 710 is not a very distinguished star. A K7 class orange dwarf a bit more than half as massive as the Sun, it currently lies about 63 light years from us in the constellation Serpens. It is moving fast though and that is why one reason Read more…
Saturn: the Blue Planet? The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals the secrets of the giant planet. This false colour image from the Hubble Space Telescope not only shows Saturn in an unfamiliar light, but displays some of the giant planet’s features. The image was created in early 2009, when Saturn Read more…