As I noted before, the Cassini probe has discovered ice volcanos on the southern pole of Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. On a later orbit last month they actually managed to return images of these plumes to Earth. You can view them on the Cassini Imaging site, along with a time lapse movie. Cool stuff.

This movie made up of frames taken by the MESSENGER space probe as it passed by Earth on its way to Mercury is pretty cool. Makes you think…

The more we learn about the solar system, the stranger the place gets. Cassini recently discovered ice volcanoes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. I like where they’re talking about 110 Kelvin being warm. At -261 F, that’s positively balmy.

Astronomers have discovered a tenth planet that’s larger than Pluto, and more than twice as far from the sun. No word on a name yet. Hopefully they can come up with something better than Quaoaoaoar.

Early this morning, NASA’s Deep Impact space probe blasted away a chunk of Comet Tempel to see what’s inside. Apparently the mission went off without a hitch. Congrats to the Deep Impact team, and here’s looking forward to seeing what people smarter than me can learn from all the data that’s been sent back.

I fully support using my tax dollars to blast holes in other space objects. In fact, I can’t think of a better use.

For your daily dose of internet insanity, apparently Iapetus, the moon of Saturn which is pictured in the previous post, is not a moon after all, but an ancient interstellar spaceship. And, of course, there’s a conspiracy to prevent us from finding this out. Who knew?

In case you haven’t heard, NASA’s Cassini probe is in orbit around Saturn, and the European Huygens probe is due to touch down on Titan in a few days. In the meantime, Cassini is returning some spectacular pictures from almost a billion miles away. I’m a firm believer that great pictures are improved by putting them as my desktop background. So I’ve modified some of the Cassini pictures for that purpose:

(click on the images for the full-sized versions)