NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer – WISE – has recently finished a survey of small bodies in our solar system. The survey mission, called NEOWISE (for Near Earth Objects), used WISE’s infrared-imaging capabilities to identify 20 new comets and more than 33,000 main-belt asteroids. WISE also spotted 134 near-Earth objects – asteroids or comets that…
Category: Comets and Asteroids
Radar Love
NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar, located in California’s Mojave Desert, recently made some detailed observations of asteroid 2010 JL33 on December 11 and 12, 2010 as it tumbled through space at a distance of 5.3 million miles – 22 times further away than the Moon! The radar images have also been assembled into a…
From the LITD Archives: Final Flight
Originally posted on January 6, 2010. A reminder that our solar system is a dynamic place, where gravity is the rule of the game and there’s rarely a prize for second place. On January 3, the European Space Agency’s SOHO solar observatory spacecraft captured images of a comet flying towards the Sun….and then disappearing into…
Spaceballs!
Holy interplanetary snowstorm! This image, a focused (“deconvolved”) view of comet Hartley 2 which was approached by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft on November 4, shows a swarm of specks surrounding an ice-spraying, boulder-crusted nucleus. Those specks aren’t stars, they’re golfball- to basketball-sized balls of loosely-packed ice particles… a.k.a snowballs! And comet Hartley-2 is literally surrounded by them…
Lights in the Dark 