Rendezvous with a Comet (8/16/2014)

You may have missed it given all the other headlines of late, but one of the most ambitious space missions of all time recently passed a critical milestone. First launched into space by the European Space Agency more than ten years ago, the Rosetta spacecraft became the first object from Earth to rendezvous with a comet when it passed by 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on August 6. Rosetta will orbit the dirty snowball for the next year as the comet starts to melt, sprouts a tail, and whips around the sun. You can receive daily updates by visiting the mission’s official homepage, which includes a time-lapse video of the cometary rendezvous from Rosetta‘s perspective. You may also find it interesting that people have already found a “face” on the comet, harkening memories of the famous “face” on Mars. In other news, NASA has also released new images from its own incredibly ambitious deep-space mission, New Horizons, which is currently en route to Pluto, one of our solar system’s most enigmatic members. Viewed in sequence, the new images show Pluto and its moon, Charon, linked in orbit with one another. The New Horizons mission began way back in 2006, when Pluto was still technically considered a planet. Despite Pluto’s technical demotion to “dwarf planet” status, there will be plenty of excitement when the voyaging spacecraft finally arrives at its destination next summer.