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

2010 JL33 seen by Goldstone radio telescope

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.

Sedna

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.

Vesta from Hubble

Happy 2011, and an end to the 2010 advent calendar

Welcome 2011! I can't wait for what this year has in store. The prize for all of you who have enjoyed opening each door in the Planetary Society's 2010 advent calendar is one of the best views we can get of one of the biggest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta.

Door 31

Door 31 in the 2010 advent calendar

Time to open the thirty-first (and next-to-last) door in the advent calendar. Where in the solar system are these dark-rimmed craters?

SOHO's 2000th comet

SOHO's 2000th comet

SOHO was launched more than 15 years ago to study the Sun, primarily; but a side benefit of its constant observation of the Sun has been its ability to notice

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

365 Days of Astronomy Podcast: Small Worlds

Today the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast aired my contribution, Small Worlds, about the smaller denizens of the solar system visited in the past year, and due to be visited in the next.

Asteroid 433 Eros

Boulders and Ponds on 433 Eros

There is really cool geology being explored on large, oddly shaped asteroids. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission reached 433 Eros in 2000, and one of the exciting results was the discovery of features called

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.

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.

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.

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