Astro Blog

Source:   By Eric Hand, Science Excerpt:  In August 2014, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Once in orbit, it swooped as low as 10 kilometers to get unprecedented data from the comet (and to drop off its short-lived Philae lander). Today, Science is publishing a suite of new papers detailing some of the mission’s first findings, .... Active pits... Erosion from cliff faces... boulders on unstable slopes... jetting...fissure...comet vomit...windlike features....  http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/01/ten-new-rosetta-images-reveal-comet-67p-all-its-glory *. http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/01/ten-new-rosetta-images-reveal-comet-67p-all-its-glory

Source:   NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Excerpt:  An asteroid, designated 2004 BL86, will safely pass about three times the distance of Earth to the moon on January 26. ...astronomers estimate that the asteroid is about a third of a mile (0.5 kilometers) in size. The flyby of 2004 BL86 will be the closest by any known space rock this large until asteroid 1999 AN10 flies past Earth in 2027. At the time of its closest approach on January 26, the asteroid will be approximately 745,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Earth. "Monday, January 26 will be the closest asteroid 2004 BL86 will get to Earth for at least the next 200 years," said Don Yeomans, who is retiring as manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, after 16 years in the position. "And while it poses no threat to Earth for the foreseeable future, it's a relatively close approach by a relatively large ast

Source:   By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times. Front page story. Excerpts: Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two, depending on how the habitable zone of a star is defined. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, now in its fifth year of seeking out the shadows of planets circling other stars, has spotted hundreds, and more and more of these other worlds look a lot like Earth — rocky balls only slightly larger than our own home, that with the right doses of starlight and water could turn out to be veritable gardens of microbial Eden. ...Reviewing the history of exoplanets, Debra Fischer, a Yale astronomer, recalled that the first discovery of a planet orbiting another normal star, a Jupiter-like giant, was 20 years ago. Before that, she said, astronomers worried that “maybe the ‘Star Trek