It's startling to think that the Dawn spacecraft, now orbiting Ceres at its lowest altitude ever, may have fired its ion engine for the last time. The event occurred by way of positioning the spacecraft for the best possible track near Cerealia Facula, which is a prominent deposit of sodium carbonate in the center of the crater called Occator. Data from the spacecraft's visible and infrared imaging spectrometer had been used to identify the bright areas called faculae as calcium carbonate deposits earlier in the mission. Vinalia Faculae is in the same area. "Acquiring these spectacular pictures has been one of the greatest challenges in Dawn's extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition, and the results are better than we had ever hoped," said Dawn's chief engineer and project manager, Marc Rayman, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Dawn is like a master artist, adding rich details to the otherworldly beauty in its intimate portrait of Ceres." Image: A...

Yesterday’s post about exoplanet obliquity inevitably brought our own system to mind, with the stark variations between planets like Earth (23 degrees), Uranus (98 degrees) and Mercury (0.03 degrees) serving as stark examples of how wide the variation can be. Thus seasonality has to be seen in context, and interesting questions arise about the effect of high degrees of obliquity on habitability. While thinking about that I received a new paper on Uranus that has bearing on the matter, with its attempt to quantify the ‘hit’ Uranus must once have taken. After all, something accounts for the fact that the 7th planet spins on its side, its axis at right angles to those of the other planets, its major moons all orbiting in the same plane. Lead author Jacob Kegerreis (Durham University), working with Luis Teodoro (BAERI/NASA Ames) and colleagues modeled 50 different impact simulations in an attempt to recreate the axial tilt of this world. In play were the planet’s internal structure,...

The quality of the image below isn't very high, but consider what we're looking at. This is the 'night side' of Pluto's moon Charon as viewed against a star field by the New Horizons spacecraft. We're looking at reflected light from Pluto --'Plutoshine' -- as the sole illumination of most of the surface. Who would have thought, in the 88 years since Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto, that we would see a Plutonian moon's dark side by Pluto's light? I wonder if there would have been a mission to Pluto at all if it hadn't been for James Christy. Working with astronomer Robert Harrington at the U.S. Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station (Arizona), Christy was situated just miles away from Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was discovered, when he noticed a strange elongation in images of the world. That was forty years ago, on June 22, 1978, during an effort to tighten up estimates of Pluto's orbit around the Sun. I suppose an astronomical analogue to this odd 'blob' on Christy's plates...

I set off an interesting conversation with a neighbor when organic material was detected on Ceres, as announced last year by scientists using data from the ongoing Dawn mission. To many people, 'organics' is a word synonymous with 'life,' which isn't the case, and straightening that matter out involved explaining that organics are carbon-based compounds that life can build on. But organic molecules can also emerge from completely non-biological processes. So with that caveat in mind about this word, it's still interesting that organics appear on Ceres, especially since water ice is common there, and we know of water's key role in living systems. A new paper looks again at data from Dawn, whose detections were made with infrared spectroscopy using its Visible and Infrared (VIR) Spectrometer. The instrument, examining which wavelengths are reflected off Ceres' surface and which are absorbed, detected organic molecules in the region dominated by Ernutet Crater on Ceres' northern...

I've always had a great interest in Iceland, stemming from my studies of Old Norse in graduate school, when we homed in on the sagas and immersed ourselves in a language that has changed surprisingly little for a thousand years. There's much modern vocabulary, of course, but the Icelandic of 1000 AD is much closer to the modern variant than Shakespeare's English is to our own. Syntactically and morphologically, Icelandic is a survivor, and a fascinating one. New Horizons' journey to Kuiper Belt Object MU69 occasions this reverie because the mission team has named the object Ultima Thule, following an online campaign seeking input from the public that produced 34,000 suggestions. The word 'thule' seems to derive from Greek, makes it into Latin, and appears in classical documents in association with the most distant northern areas then known. In the medieval era, Ultima Thule is occasionally mentioned in reference to Iceland, and sometimes to Greenland, and may have been applied even...

The longer we can keep a mission going in an exotic place, the better. Sometimes longevity is its own reward, as Curiosity has just reminded us on Mars. After all, it was only because the rover has been in place for six years that it was able to observe what scientists now think are seasonal variations in the methane in Mars' atmosphere. Thus the news that Juno will remain active in Jupiter space is heartening, and in this case necessary. The mission is now to operate until July of 2021, an additional 41 months in orbit having been approved. More time on station allows Juno to complete a primary science mission that had appeared in jeopardy. The reason: Problems with helium valves in the spacecraft's fuel system resulted in the decision to remain in the present 53-day orbit instead of the 14-day 'science orbit' originally planned, and that has extended the time needed for data collection. Thus the lengthening of operations there not only allows further time for discovery but...