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Feb 15 2007, 2:31 AM EST (current) drknown
Feb 15 2007, 2:09 AM EST drknown 93 words added, 588 words deleted, 1 photo added

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Comet dust in the Helix Nebula
Provided by JPL
Helix Nebula
The Helix Nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, belongs to a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these colorful beauties were named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets like Jupiter. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Ariz.


February 13, 2007
A bunch of rowdy comets are colliding and kicking up dust around a dead star, according to new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The dead star lies at the center of the much-photographed Helix nebula, a shimmering cloud of gas with an eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

"We were surprised to see so much dust around this star," said Kate Su of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead author of a paper on the results appearing in the March 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. "The dust must be coming from comets that survived the death of their Sun."

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Pluto-bound Craft Nears Jupiter
January 24, 2007
by J. Kelly Beatty

Jupiter from New Horizons
New Horizons was still seven weeks from its flyby of Jupiter when it recorded this image of the planet and its moon Io on January 8th. Even from 50 million miles away, the craft's Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) easily captured the planet's Great Red Spot and a host of other features.
NASA, JHU-APL, and SWRI
Although it's only been in interplanetary space for a year, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is already well on its way to reaching Pluto in July 2015. The probe is heading outward at 43,000 miles per hour, and it'll get an additional 9,000-mph boost when it encounters Jupiter on February 28th.
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