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Asteroid 62412. Credit: Scott Sheppard Comets are often called “dirty snowballs” by astronomers. However, various investigative missions, such as Giotto and Deep Impact, revealed them to be blackened, cratered, and fractured. No ice fields, reflective crust, or watery clouds were observed. Indeed, the latest pictures from the Rosetta mission of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko indicate that it is a mountain of rock in space. According to a recent press release, the Gemini Observatory’s image of asteroid 62412, located between Mars and Jupiter, is the first time that one of the Hygiea family of asteroids has exhibited a tail, and is only the...

It's a match made in heaven: Jessica Sunshine and comet Tempel 1. The geologist, a Tenafly native with an asteroid named after her, never expected to meet this kind of celestial body. But talent and dumb luck landed her on NASA's Deep Impact mission that might reveal the building blocks of the universe. The $333 million project involves an impactor, fired from a mother ship, hurtling at 23,000 mph and crashing smack dab into the comet a little before 2 a.m. on Monday, creating a massive crater up to 14 stories deep. Through a telescope, the cosmic union won't look...

THUNDERBOLTS PICTURE OF THE DAYExploring the electric universe From ancient mythology to cosmic plasma discharge Credit: NASA/JPL. Image manipulation: Carl SmithThis is a sequence of images from the hi-res Deep Impact flyby camera. They show jets emanating from two centers. The color substitution images on the right show more clearly the relative brilliance distribution in the grey-scale images. They show the presence of two bright centers. The presence of more than one crater was predicted by the electrical model of comets. homethe book quotes picture of the day picture archive subject index the film(video clips) products Contact usElectric Universe:...