It's been a while since I bored you all with my astronomy and astrophotography fetish so here goes:
First, if you don't have the NASA JPL Planetary Photojournal bookmarked, then I highly recommend you do it right now. It's a great resource for finding images of our solar system's various inhabitants.
Second, if you haven't seen the beautiful Cassini narrow-angle camera image of Jupiter (which became my new desktop image the minute it was released), then you should check it out.
Cassini, on it's way to Saturn, snapped this amazing portrait of our biggest giant. The Cassini spacecraft and Saturn will catch up to each other in 9 months where Cassini will move into Saturn orbit and begin science to determine the temperature field, cloud properties and composition of Saturn's atmosphere, measure the planet's global wind field, including its waves; make long-term observations of cloud features to see how they grow, evolve and dissipate, determine the internal structure and rotation of the deep atmosphere, record daily variations and relationship between the ionosphere and the planet's magnetic field, gather data to help determine the composition, heat flux and radiation environment present during Saturn's formation and evolution and investigate sources and nature of Saturn's lightning.
About six months after Cassini goes into Saturnian orbit, its piggy-back Huygens probe will bail off and head for Saturn's largest and the solar system's only atmosphered moon, Titan. Huygens will descend through Titan's thick, muddy, atmosphere measuring elemental composition, wind and temperature, and hopefully tell us what Titan's surface is like.
Cassini is a joint NASA, European Space Agency, and Italian Space Agency project.
A little closer to home, the UK's Mars Express and Beagle 2 lander are just over 1 month away from their arrival at Mars. We're in for an exciting season of Mars exploration starting Christmas day with their arrival, and quickly followed up by Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Explorer Rovers, which arrive January 3rd and 24th.
In other Mars news, Japan's Nozomi Mars Mission has one last shot at correcting a short that is preventing them from making necessary course corrections. If they can get things fixed, then Nozomi will arrive at Mars in three weeks. The various reports I've read are painting a gloomy picture but even if the correction cannot be made, a lot has been learned in the repeated attempts to rescue this mission that went off track in 1999 and had to circle back and make a couple of Earth fly-bys to get on the current trajectory that will bring it to, or past Mars.
And in space policy news, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, spoke in front of the ASA about "a rare moment in our history", fueling continued speculation that manned Moon and Mars missions may be in the cards.
I'll wrap things up with a couple of items from the "pretty pictures" department:
November Lunar eclipse by Markus Strassfeld (scroll down to see the 2:21:25 image, via APOD)
November Lunar eclipse by David Cortner.
