(From west to east)

• Pallus is at stationary on the 24th in the constellation of Hydra.
• Vesta is stationary on the 5th in the constellation of Virgo.

• Information about the Minor Planets can be found at the Minor Planet Observer website.

Raw images are available at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/index.cfm.

Cassini Imaging Team

New Horizons Reaches the Final 4 (AU)

"New Horizons sailed past another milepost today when the NASA spacecraft moved to within four astronomical units (AU) of Pluto - which is less than four times the distance between the Earth and the sun, or about 371 million miles (598 million kilometers).

"We're as close to the Pluto system now as Earth ever gets to Jupiter, a first for any spacecraft," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. "And hold on to your hat, it just gets more and more exciting from here."

Since launch on January 19, 2006, New Horizons has covered nearly 2.89 billion miles (4.62 billion kilometers). It makes a temporal connection with one NASA's legendary deep-space explorers this summer when it crosses the orbit of Neptune on Aug. 25 -- exactly 25 years after Voyager 2 made its historic flight past that giant planet. When New Horizons arrives at Pluto on July 14, 2015, it will have traveled farther than any spacecraft ever has to reconnoiter its prime target."

On Video: How Do We Get to Pluto? Practice, Practice, Practice

Part I: The Encounter Begins
    - Small mp4 (38 MB, 640x360)
    - Large mp4 (116 MB, 1280x720)

Part II: Passing Pluto
    - Small mp4 (34 MB, 640x360)
    - Large mp4 (102 MB, 1280x720)"

LORRI Looks Back

New Horizons gallery

Find New Horizons in the iTunes App Store here.

"Scientists using the Herschel space observatory have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres.

Plumes of water vapor are thought to shoot up periodically from Ceres when portions of its icy surface warm slightly. Ceres is classified as a dwarf planet, a solar system body bigger than an asteroid and smaller than a planet.

Herschel is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission with important NASA contributions. "This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere," said Michael Küppers of ESA in Spain, lead author of a paper in the journal Nature.

The results come at the right time for NASA's Dawn mission, which is on its way to Ceres now after spending more than a year orbiting the large asteroid Vesta. Dawn is scheduled to arrive at Ceres in the spring of 2015, where it will take the closest look ever at its surface."

Dawn's Virtual Flight over Vesta

A gallery of images can be found online.

"MESSENGER has now returned more than 200,000 images acquired from orbit about Mercury. The 1996 proposal for the mission promised a return of at least 1,000 images says Robert Gold, MESSENGER's Science Payload Manager. "We expected then that we would have some data compression that would probably raise the image total to somewhere near 2,000 images," says Gold, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), but scientists did not imagine then the degree to which MESSENGER would surpass that goal.

"Returning over 200,000 images from orbit about Mercury is an impressive accomplishment for the mission, and one I've been personally counting down for the last few months," says APL's Nancy Chabot, the Instrument Scientist for the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS). "However, I'm really more excited about the many thousands of images that are still in MESSENGER's future, especially those that we plan to acquire at low altitudes and will provide the highest resolution views yet of Mercury's surface."

During MESSENGER's second extended mission, the spacecraft is making a progressively closer approach to Mercury's surface with each successive orbit. In about two months, each closest approach will be at a lower altitude than at any previous point in the mission, enabling the acquisition of unprecedentedly high-spatial-resolution data. For spacecraft altitudes below 350 kilometers, Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) images will be acquired with pixel scales ranging from 20 meters to as little as 2 meters.

To commemorate the milestone, image scientists released this four-image mosaic -- one of the first from the MDIS low-altitude imaging campaign -- that reveals, among other features, hollows that appear to have formed in one layer in the wall of this 15-kilometer-diameter crater."

The MESSENGER app is available for download from iTunes.

Curiosity Adds Reverse Driving for Wheel Protection

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"Terrain that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is now crossing is as smooth as team members had anticipated based on earlier images from orbit. On Tuesday, Feb. 18, the rover covered 329 feet (100.3 meters), the mission's first long trek that used reverse driving and its farthest one-day advance of any kind in more than three months.

The reverse drive validated feasibility of a technique developed with testing on Earth to lessen damage to Curiosity's wheels when driving over terrain studded with sharp rocks. However, Tuesday's drive took the rover over more benign ground.

"We wanted to have backwards driving in our validated toolkit because there will be parts of our route that will be more challenging," said Curiosity Project Manager Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The rover team used images taken from orbit to reassess possible routes, after detecting in late 2013 that holes in the vehicle's aluminum wheels were accumulating faster than anticipated. Getting to the chosen route, which appeared to be less hazardous for the wheels, required crossing a 3-foot-tall (1-meter-tall) dune. Curiosity crossed the dune on Feb. 9.

Erickson said, "After we got over the dune, we began driving in terrain that looks like what we expected based on the orbital data. There are fewer sharp rocks, many of them are loose, and in most places there's a little bit of sand cushioning the vehicle."

The mission's destinations remain the same: a science waypoint first and then the long-term goal of investigating the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, where water-related minerals have been detected from orbit."

To follow the Mars Curiosity rover and NASA on Foursquare, visit: http://www.foursquare.com/MarsCuriosity and http://www.foursquare.com/NASA

For information about NASA's partnership with Foursquare, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/connect/foursquare.html.

  Mars Rover Landing - Free for the Xbox (requires Kinect)

SPIRIT UPDATE: Spirit Remains Silent at Troy - sols 2621-2627, May 18-24, 2011:

More than 1,300 commands were radiated to Spirit as part of the recovery effort in an attempt to elicit a response from the rover. No communication has been received from Spirit since Sol 2210 (March 22, 2010). The project concluded the Spirit recovery efforts on May 25, 2011. The remaining, pre-sequenced ultra-high frequency (UHF) relay passes scheduled for Spirit on board the Odyssey orbiter will complete on June 8, 2011.

Total odometry is unchanged at 7,730.50 meters (4.80 miles)."

OPPORTUNITY UPDATE: Busy Week of Imaging and Robotic Arm Studies - sols 3568-3575, Feb. 05, 2014-Feb. 12, 2014 :

"Opportunity is climbing 'Murray Ridge' up on Solander Point, part of the rim of Endeavour Crater.

The rover continues to explore the region called 'Cook Haven.' The rover has turned its attention to other rocks within this area. On Sol 3568 (Feb. 5, 2014), Opportunity lifted her robotic arm so 13-filter Panoramic Camera (Pancam) images of the surface target, called 'Green Island' could be collected, along with some Navigation (Navcam) images. On the next sol, the rover used the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) to brush a spot on Green Island and followed that with a Microscopic Imager (MI) mosaic and a placement of the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS).

On Sol 3571 (Feb. 8, 2014), the rover collected a 13-filter Pancam image of the brushed spot on Green Island before bumping about 9.8 feet (3 meters) to a new rock target, called 'Stuart Island.' Opportunity began the in-situ (contact) investigation of Stuart Island on Sol 3573 (Feb. 10, 2014), with a MI mosaic and APXS placement for an overnight integration. The rover repeated this again on the next sol with more MI mosaics, but with an offset placement of the APXS. Continuing the campaign on Sol 3575 (Feb. 12, 2014), Opportunity collected more MI mosaics and performed a third offset of the APXS.

As of Sol 3575 (Feb. 12, 2014), the solar array energy production was 387 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.548 and a solar array dust factor of 0.610.

Total odometry is 24.07 miles (38.74 kilometers)."

Landing sites

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"A new image from a telescopic camera orbiting Mars shows NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity at work on "Murray Ridge," without any new impact craters nearby.

The Feb. 14 view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is available online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17941. Rover tracks from Opportunity, as well as the rover itself, are visible.

A rock, dubbed "Pinnacle Island," appeared in January 2014 next to Opportunity where it had been absent a few days earlier. After that, researchers using HiRISE planned this observation to check the remote possibility that a fresh impact by an object from space might have excavated a crater near Opportunity and thrown this rock to its new location. No fresh impact site is seen in the image. Meanwhile, observations by the rover solved the Pinnacle Island mystery by finding where the rock had been struck, broken and moved by a rover wheel.

Murray Ridge is part of the western rim of Endeavour Crater, an impact scar that is billions of years old and about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter."

MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER HIRISE IMAGES
All of the HiRISE images are archived here.

"NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has tweaked its orbit to help scientists make the first systematic observations of how morning fogs, clouds and surface frost develop in different seasons on the Red Planet.

The maneuver took place Tuesday, Feb. 11. Odyssey team engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver, designed the gentle move to accelerate Odyssey's drift toward a morning-daylight orbit. The desired change will occur gradually until the intended orbit geometry is reached in November 2015 and another maneuver halts the drift.

The change will enable observation of changing ground temperatures after sunrise and after sunset in thousands of places on Mars. Those observations could yield insight about the composition of the ground and about temperature-driven processes, such as warm-season flows observed on some slopes, and geysers fed by spring thawing of carbon-dioxide ice near Mars' poles.

"We're teaching an old spacecraft new tricks," said Odyssey Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of JPL. "Odyssey will be in position to see Mars in a different light than ever before."

Neither Odyssey, nor any other NASA Mars orbiter since the 1970s, has flown an orbital pattern with a view of the ground in morning daylight. Earlier NASA orbiters and the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter have provided some tantalizing views of morning mists on Mars, but have concentrated on afternoon observation times when views of the surface are less hazy.

Odyssey was launched in 2001 and began its science mission 12 years ago this month. It is the longest-working spacecraft ever sent to Mars."

See the Mars As Art Gallery

Dulles Airport Full News Release

Global Martian Map

"A simulated fly-through using the newly assembled imagery is available online.

The fly-through plus tools for wandering across and zooming into the large image are at THEMIS."

Daily Mars Odyssey THEMIS Images
Can be found at the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) website.

The Odyssey data are available through a new online access system established by the Planetary Data System.