IBEX, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, was never designed to visit the regions it studies. Indeed, the spacecraft, launched in October of 2008, is in Earth orbit and a highly elliptical one at that, with an apogee of 322,000 kilometers and a perigee of 16,000 kilometers. But from that vantage IBEX is able to study and map the boundary between the heliosphere and true interstellar space. It does this by detecting energetic neutral atoms of hydrogen (ENAs) produced at the heliosheath, helping us understand the effects of the solar wind as it collides with interstellar materials. The encounter between solar wind and the interstellar medium causes ENAs to be scattered in all directions from the heliosheath -- those that pass near the Earth are what IBEX detects, and the spacecraft scans overlapping strips of sky to build up a 360-degree map. It was last October, a year after launch, that we learned from the first IBEX map that the interstellar boundary was a more lively place than...

It's hard to believe it's been over six years since the launch of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, now well enroute to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a ten year journey that will be completed in 2014. Upon reaching the comet, Rosetta will begin an extended encounter that includes an orbiter that will circle Churyumov-Gerasimenko for thirteen months as it moves toward the Sun, and a small lander that will investigate surface conditions. We learned more about the mission in today's sessions of the European Planetary Science Congress, now being held in Rome. Jeremie Lasue (Los Alamos National Laboratory) presented the latest Rosetta findings at the conference, drawing on computer models that predict the behavior of the comet's nucleus over the course of the spacecraft's operations. Landing on a comet is tricky business, because dust, ice and frozen carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide will be active as the comet's tail begins to form. What Lasue and colleagues have done is...

Imagine being Jean-Pierre Lebreton. The man behind the Huygens probe, Lebreton and the ESA team behind him hold the record for the most distant landfall in history, the 2005 descent onto the surface of Titan. I have no idea what dreams this man might have had in his childhood, but one of mine was descending through Titan’s thick atmosphere to see its never before glimpsed surface. Huygens pulled off the feat with astonishing ease, descending slowly and steadily while snapping panoramic views of the enigmatic moon. Doubtless Lebreton has much to share about all this at this year’s European Planetary Science Congress, now being held in Rome. EPSC is the major meeting in Europe for planetary scientists, and it’s no surprise that Titan appears prominently in the news from the conference. Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer instrument (VIMS) has been keeping an eye on Titan’s cloud cover since the orbiter first took up its vigil around Saturn, and 2000 VIMS images have now...

I was fortunate enough to meet Joel Poncy (Thales Alenia Space, France) at last year's deep space conference in Aosta, where he gave the audience the lowdown on an extraordinary mission concept, an orbiter of the Kuiper Belt object Haumea. Haumea is a tricky target, lacking an atmosphere that would allow aerobraking and pushing all our limits on propulsion and power generation. But Poncy's team worked out a design using either electric or magneto-plasma technologies, assuming a gravity assist to shorten the journey for arrival around 2035. In a later lunch conversation, Poncy talked to me about the benefit of probing the Kuiper Belt, and the collateral advances that such a mission would bring in terms of developing the orbiters, landers and deep-drilling capabilities we'll need to explore planetary moons like Europa or Ganymede. Sometimes you choose targets, in other words, not only for their immediate payoff, but because they become part of the process of developing next generation...