After it's successful encounter with Mercury a couple of weeks ago, Messenger has increased it's velocity relative to the sun to 63 km/s. This is the second fastest NASA spacecraft in history, the fastest being Helios 2 back in the 70s.
The IBEX spacecraft was launched on a Pegasus rocket last week. Pegasus is an aircraft launched rocket. IBEX's mission is to observe the boundary of our sun's magnetosphere. IBEX will use it's own solid rocket boosters to achieve a 100,000 mile earth orbit before beginning the science phase of it's mission.
Also, 9 teams (including Armadillo Aerospace, see RRL article last week) will compete in Northrup Grumman $2 million Lunar Lander Challenge this week. Here is a video from last year:
New observations by ESA's Mars Express spacecraft have been used to more accurately measure the mass and density of Phobos. With a revised density of 1.85 g/cc, which is significantly lower than the density or Martian rock at 2.7-3.3 g/cc, the conclusion is Phobos is most likely a rubble pile. It is also likely that the mass of Phobos contains significant quantities of water ice, which of course has a density of 1 g/cc. Of course, it would be nice to obtain a sample of Phobos, and a Russian mission planned to launch next year may do exactly that. However, with Russia's less than spectacular success record with missions to Mars, I would not bet on seeing those samples return to earth any time soon.
Opportunity is continuing on it's journey to Endeavour Crater, taking one last lap around Victoria first. Also, a couple of weeks ago, on sol 1671, Oppy acquired this panorama (assembled by Hortonheardawho)
After the spectacular encounter with Enceladus last week, Cassini has still not posted any details or results from the encounter. They did post some raw images from 5000km+, but I was hoping for some extreme closeups. So far the hihgest res images are these images from August, at 545 km:
Now that is darn good, you can practically see the polar bears and leopard seals lounging on the ice, but if they got better images in the most recent encounter I'd love to see them.
A new comet was discovered last week, w00t!
Deep Space Report 1.3
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