1) The new Carnival of Space is up at Lab Lemming’s tent, and it’s a BIG tent.
2) Emily has news that Phobos is a bit lighter than previously thought. What a pile.
3) Emily also has some nifty new MESSENGER images explained. I’ve been too lazy to deal with that.
4) Tom notes that HiRISE spotted Spirit on Mars. Massively embiggenated version is here.
4) This is dumb. So why did it make me smile so much? Oh right: I’m a dork.
I posted a few days ago that NASA’s MESSENGER probe is headed toward a rendezvus with Mercury on Monday. In the comments, BigBob noted that the first image has been returned!
This was taken on January 11, when the spacecraft was still 1.7 million kilometers from the planet. On Monday, it will pass about 200 km over the surface (yikes!). It will fly on, making two more passes of Mercury over time before settling into orbit, and making a detailed map of this planet. That’ll be in 2011, so the images we see from this first of three flybys will have to do you for now.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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 | Bad Astronomy was chosen as one of Time.com's Best Blogs of 2009. | |
 | Open Lab 2008 is a collection of the best blog posts of the year, all in one place. Are you a science junkie? Yeah, you want it. |
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