We're in that earliest phase of interstellar exploration that is all about nudging outward from our system into the local interstellar medium. That has already involved the Voyagers, but my plan is to keep checking in on both the Interstellar Probe concept at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the SGL probe study steadily maturing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These are absorbing ventures as scientists figure out ways to do propulsion, in-flight maintenance (and in the case of SGL, in-flight assembly) and data return on timescales the Voyager team wasn't imagining when those doughty craft were launched in 1977. Nudging outward. Let's check in a bit with New Horizons, because here we have a Kuiper Belt explorer that is fully operational, and with instruments specifically designed for the environment it explores, now some 54 AU from the Sun. It's striking to think that the Juno mission is ten times closer to our star than New Horizons. The Pluto/Charon flyby seems a...

The new Jupiter photos from JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) are unusual, enough so that I decided to fold one into today's post. It's a pretty good fit because I had already put together most of the material I was going to use about Europa. It would have been an additional plus if Europa showed up in the image below, but even without it, note that we can see moons as small as Adrasta here. Imke de Pater (UC-Berkeley), who led the observations, noted that both tiny satellites and distant galaxies show up in the same image. And here's Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory, who likewise worked on the observing effort: "This image illustrates the sensitivity and dynamic range of JWST's NIRCam instrument. It reveals the bright waves, swirls and vortices in Jupiter's atmosphere and simultaneously captures the dark ring system, 1 million times fainter than the planet, as well as the moons Amalthea and Adrastea, which are roughly 200 and 20 kilometers across,...