Well, NASA’s Valentine’s date seems to have gone off without a hitch. Last night the Stardust-NExT probe passed within 110 miles of the comet Tempel 1, and snapped plenty of pictures during its rendezvous. The mission’s main objective was to record the results of an experiment conducted by another spacecraft, Deep Impact, which hurled an impactor at Tempel 1 back in 2005. Researchers hoped Stardust would catch a glimpse of the man-made crater.

As Phil Plait writes:

The whole point here was to see the impact crater from 2005, and Stardust was able to do that. It’s difficult to see in these images here, but Pete Schultz, an impact specialist with the mission, said the crater is about 150 meters across and has a central peak, indicating material fell back to the comet. The crater wasn’t as obvious as expected, but is about the right size given the impactor speed, mass, and angle of impact.

Head over to Bad Astronomy for more details, and for a nice animation of the flyby.

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Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell

Six years ago, NASA visited the comet Tempel 1 with a fury: Its Deep Impact mission launched a projectile into the comet that kicked up dust and ice for the spacecraft to capture as a sample. Tonight, NASA is taking another pass by the comet—but a little more gently this time.

The hardy Stardust explorer, which has passed by other comets and brought samples back to Earth, will pass by Tempel 1 tonight to try to get a good look at what NASA’s blast did to the comet. Last time around, Deep Impact’s projectile was actually too effective. It blasted so much debris off the comet that it blinded itself.

Now, Stardust will be able to obtain images of that crater up close for the first time. Moreover, in the nearly six years since that initial encounter, the comet has completed an orbit around the solar system, passing close to the sun. “For the first time, we’ll go back to see what happens to a comet” after it passes close to the sun, said Pete Schultz of Brown University, a scientist for the new mission, which has been dubbed Stardust-NExT. [Los Angeles Times]

Stardust’s pass presents an opportunity not just to see what’s changed in the last five to six years of the comet’s life, but also to peel back more of Tempel 1‘s ancient history.

“Here’s a chance where we can see what has changed, how much has changed,” said Joseph Veverka, a professor of astronomy at Cornell and the mission’s principal investigator, “so we’ll start unraveling the history of a comet’s surface.” For example, photographs taken by Deep Impact in 2005 showed areas that looked old and others that seemed much younger. But the snapshots did not tell the ages of any of them. “We have no idea whether we’re talking about things that have been there for a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years,” Dr. Veverka said. [The New York Times]

The flyby is scheduled to begin at about 11:30 p.m. Eastern tonight (Monday). Stardust should pass within about 125 miles of the comet, taking snapshots of the cosmic traveler and also catching some of the particles flying off it. The approach will mark the first time two spacecraft have studied the same comet up close, and probably mark the last hurrah for Stardust: After returning with samples from the comet Wild 2 in 2004, the craft was still running fine and got the OK from NASA to go on this second comet chase. But after a dozen years in space logging billions of millions, Stardust will soon be, simply, out of fuel.

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Image: NASA

The Ares I rocket, scrapped during President Obama‘s overhaul of NASA, may be making a comeback. Two rocket-makers say that they have reached a plan to salvage the design of Ares I and use it to compete in the private competition to provide post-shuttle space taxi service to NASA.

The partners are Alliant Techsystems of Minneapolis (ATK) and the European company Astrium, which builds Ariane 5 rockets to carry satellites into space. Today they are announcing their collaboration on the new 300-foot rocket.

The new rocket, named Liberty, would be much cheaper than the Ares I, because the unfinished NASA-designed upper stage of the Ares I would be replaced with the first stage of the Ariane 5, which has been launched successfully 41 consecutive times. The lower stage of the Liberty, a longer version of the shuttle booster built by ATK, would be almost unchanged from the Ares I. [The New York Times]

To truly go ahead with the project, the two companies will need to snag at least some of the $200 million in funding NASA is set to give next month to private companies developing space taxi technology. Giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as newer private space companies like SpaceX, are all competing for these dollars and contracts.

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The twin satellites have taken their positions, and now we get to see something we’ve never seen before: the whole sun, all at once.

The pair of observers that make up NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) have been traveling since 2006 to reach opposite sides of our star, and they just beamed back the first 360-degree solar images.

The satellites are in the same orbital path as Earth, more or less, and have just taken up their final positions — one is where we’ll be in three months, and the other where we were three months ago. (The first has NASA’s least imaginative name to date: STEREO A, for “ahead.” The second is called STEREO B, for…you can probably guess.) [TIME]

Seeing the far side of the sun isn’t just a scientific curiosity. It could also helps researchers figure out the sun’s violent outbursts, like the coronal mass ejections that could endanger astronauts and foul up satellites if one headed for Earth.

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Across the far northern regions of Mars, a sea of dunes dots the red landscape, continuing on for thousands of miles. At first glance they appear like fossils of geography—reminders of a time when Mars was vivacious and windswept that now find themselves encrusted and stationary.

Looks can be deceiving. A research team confirms in Science this week that Mars’ dunes are not static. Atmospheric processes forged by the turning of Mars‘ seasons cut into the dunes and send sand flying about. Scientists just couldn’t see it before.

“I was hoping for tiny little changes to be detectable,” planetary scientist Candice Hansen-Koharcheck with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., [said]. “This was more like knock-your-socks-off kind of stuff. It’s a very active part of the Mars landscape in today’s climate.” [Discovery News]

Hansen-Koharcheck turned the HiRISE camera of the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on the dunes, and recorded for two Martian years (four Earth years or so). Earlier HiRISE pictures suggested that the dunes were not unchanging. These new images show not only that the dunes of Mars are a dynamic place, but, according to the team, that the forces pushing their evolution are not seen on our planet.

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For months we here at DISCOVER have been waiting impatiently for the Kepler mission to open up its vault of new exoplanets, hopefully filled with a bevy of Earth-like worlds and other exotic planets. Today planet lovers got a new peek at the Kepler findings, and those findings are stunning.

First, the Kepler scientists announced more than 1,200 candidate planets, which got DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait excited:

This is incredible! Even though I was expecting a number like this, actually hearing it for real is stunning. In 15 years we’ve found about 500 planets orbiting other stars, but in the almost two years since Kepler launched it may have easily tripled that number! Now, to be careful: these are candidate planets, which means they have not been confirmed. But in most cases these look pretty good, and if these numbers hold up it indicates that our galaxy is lousy with planets. They’re everywhere.

While those 1,200 are candidates, astronomers have confirmed a peculiar and fascinating set of six. From Phil Plait:

Using NASA’s orbiting Kepler observatory, astronomers have found a complete solar system of six planets orbiting a sun-like star… and it’s really weird: five of the six planets huddle closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun!

None of them is what I would call precisely earth-like — they’re all more massive and much hotter than Earth — but their properties are intriguing, and promise that more wonderful discoveries from Kepler are coming.

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ESO/L. Calçada

This NASA probe had its Valentine’s Day plans set well in advance. On February 14 at 11:37 p.m. eastern time, the Stardust-NExT spacecraft will swoop past the comet Tempel 1 to snap photos and collect data about this solar system wanderer. The probe will pass just 124 miles from Tempel 1.

Tempel 1 is of particular interest because another probe has dallied with it in the past: In 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact probe approached and fired an 800-pound impactor at the comet’s surface to study its composition. While that mission was a success, the dust kicked up from the crash prevented the Deep Impact probe from getting a good look at the crater created. By sending Stardust-NExT along now, researchers can finally get a good look at the crater.

And that’s not all they’ll be looking at.

Since the 2005 impact, the comet has passed closer to the sun and then headed out to the orbit of Jupiter, before heading back for another visit to the inner solar system. The team hopes to see not only the size of the crater plowed by the 2005 impact, but also to see how a close pass by the sun resurfaces a comet. “We’re going to find out a lot about how comets evolve,” says Stardust-NExT co-investigator Steve Chesley. [USA Today]

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The Kepler space telescope, launched nearly two years ago, has already proven its worth as an exoplanet hunter many times over. But the discoveries keep on coming. NASA just announced that Kepler has found its first rocky planet–and that the rocky world is only 1.4 times the size of Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet ever found.

Phil Plait explains that this nearly Earth-sized isn’t actually Earth-like and habitable:

[I]t orbits extremely close in to its star, circling over the star’s surface at a distance of roughly 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) — amazingly, it takes less than an Earth day to make one circuit. But being that close to a star comes at a price: the surface temperature of the planet must be several thousand degrees!

The planet, Kepler-10b, may not be habitable to life as we know it, but Plait is still plenty excited. Get the rest of the story on how the planet was found and what its discovery means over at Bad Astronomy.

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The plucky rovers Spirit and Opportunity and the ice-finding Phoenix Lander have perhaps drawn more attention, but it’s the craft that’s been in steady, silent orbiter that has them all beat for longevity. The Mars Odyssey mission just clicked off its 3,340th day in orbit of Mars yesterday, making it the longest-running human mission to the Red Planet. The Mars Global Surveyor, another orbiter, held the record previously.

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Into the great unknown, into the wild blue yonder, past the second star on the right and straight on till morning: That’s where NASA’s Voyager 1 is heading. The remarkable spacecraft was launched 33 years ago, and it’s now reaching the edge of our solar system. Within a few years, NASA says, it will enter interstellar space.

Phil Plait reports on how researchers realized they’d reached a milestone in Voyager 1′s journey:

Over all those years, there has been one constant in the Voyager flight: the solar wind blowing past it. This stream of subatomic particles leaves the Sun at hundreds of kilometers per second, much faster than Voyager. But now, after 33 years, that has changed: at 17 billion kilometers (10.6 billion miles) from the Sun, the spacecraft has reached the point where the solar wind has slowed to a stop. Literally, the wind is no longer at Voyager’s back.

Read the rest of his post at Bad Astronomy.

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NanoSail-D, phone home.

On December 6, NASA launched its Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite (FASTSAT), which, among other cargo, carried the test craft NanoSail-D. No bigger than a breadbox, NanoSail-D was supposed to blast free from FASTSAT and spend three days floating free before spreading a 100-square-foot solar sail—what would be NASA’s first successful solar sail project. But while all signs initially indicated the 8-pound box succeeded in ejecting from the satellite, now NASA is not so sure. The agency is having trouble communicating with NanoSail-D, and its whereabouts are unknown.

“We have not been able to locate or make contact with NanoSail-D,” says Kim Newton of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The sail was scheduled to unfurl on 9 December, but NASA reports that the deployment of the sail cannot be confirmed, and it is not clear whether the sail was successfully ejected into space. [New Scientist]

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On her first true flight as an observatory, NASA’s plane-based infrared telescope (the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, aka SOFIA) took a close look at Orion and other star clusters overnight on November 30th.

“The early science flight program serves to validate SOFIA‘s capabilities and demonstrate the observatory’s ability to make observations not possible from Earth-based telescopes,” said Bob Meyer, NASA’s SOFIA program manager. “It also marks SOFIA‘s transition from flying testbed to flying observatory, and it gives the international astronomical research community a new, highly versatile platform for studying the universe.” [press release]

SOFIA is a highly modified Boeing 747SP jetliner that now includes a 100-inch German telescope (bigger than the Hubble’s!). These early observations were made with a general-use mid-infrared camera called FORCAST designed by a group at Cornell University.

Since SOFIA cruises at altitudes between 39,000 and 45,000 feet above sea level, it’s above 99 percent of the atmosphere’s water vapor (which normally blocks infrared light from reaching earth). The camera captures images using these infrared rays, producing detailed pictures that couldn’t be taken from earth.

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In a bit of good news for private citizens dreaming of trips to orbit, the Federal Aviation Administration has just declared that trips aboard private spaceships needn’t be one-way.

The private space company SpaceX received the FAA’s first-ever commercial license permitting the re-entry of a spacecraft into the Earth’s atmosphere from orbit, which will allow a December test of its “space taxi” to proceed. In June, SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket and a mock-up Dragon crew capsule. The next step is to send the rocket and capsule up to orbit, and then bring them safely back down to Earth with a splash-down landing in the Pacific Ocean. That test is currently scheduled for December 7.

The Dragon is controlled during descent using “Draco” rockets and SpaceX say it should be capable of landing within a small distance – say a few hundred metres – of a designated point. The company hopes to bring it down on land once initial flights have proved the system. [Register]

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Phil Plait has the report on NASA’s latest pictures from the flyby of Hartley 2, which reveal that the comet is surrounded by a blizzard of snow and ice:

Wow! Most of those dots are not stars: they are actual snowballs, frozen matter that has been ejected by the comet itself! They range in size from a few centimeters to a few dozen across, so they really are about the size of snowballs you’d use in a snowball fight… or to make a snowman. But I wouldn’t recommend it: a lot of that material is not frozen water, it’s actually frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice.

Find out what else we’ve learned about Hartley 2 and see more photos at Bad Astronomy.

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Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UMD

Rovers that roll are so 2004. This year’s designers are bringing the heat with fashionable Mars hopper designs, dreaming of explorers that can go the distance one half-mile hop at a time.

The British team that described its design in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A isn’t the first to suggest a hopper. But unlike previous designs, this hopper wouldn’t rely on solar power for fuel, but would instead by powered by radioactive isotopes and the plentiful carbon dioxide in Mars’s atmosphere.

The ability to hop from place to place would enable the new explorers to cover more of the Martian landscape, and visit rough terrain that earlier rovers couldn’t handle. The 2004 rover Opportunity is just hitting 15 miles of surface driving after almost seven years on Mars.

Dr Richard Ambrosi [who worked on the project], at the Leicester Space Research Centre, commented: “The improved mobility and range of a hopping vehicle will tell us more about the evolution of Mars and of the Solar System and may answer questions as to whether there was life in the past, whether Mars was wetter in the past and if so where that water went.” [Press Release]

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