Chang'E-4: The Yutu-2 rover isn’t wasting any time, & has driven away from the lander toward (but not into) a nearby crater. Reminder that all photos from the far side of the moon are being relayed to earth by the Queqiao spacecraft, which is parked in a halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point, about 61,500km behind the moon. “Halo orbit” means it’s about that far behind the moon, but always off to one side or the other from the actual L2 point so it has a line of sight to the Earth. Wouldn’t be much of a relay otherwise.
Fwiw, it took three tries to tag this post with #moon, because Tumblr autocorrect kept changing it to Sailor Moon. It’s too late to say “never change”, but don’t change any further, Tumblr.
Chang'E-4: Another photo from today’s lunar landing; this one looks like it might have been taken during descent.
Chang'E-4: First photo after landing on the far side of the Moon a few hours ago. I first saw this from a random Twitter user posting to the #ChangE4 hashtag so I had a post all put together cautioning that this may or may not be the real deal, and how I’d make the landscape a bit more exciting if I was going to photoshop the Moon. I was just about to post that, and I rechecked the hashtag & now it’s been posted by CGTN, a major news network in China, so that seems to be official confirmation. Or if it’s been shopped, it’s at least been officially shopped, I guess. Anyway, if I was going to ‘shop the Moon, I think I’d have to add a tiny 2001 obelisk off in the distance, just to see if anyone noticed. I mean, that would be one way to get your crewed lunar program funded.
New Horizons: Fresh new detailed images of 2014 MU69, showing that it’s a contact binary object. The spacecraft team says they don’t see anything that’s definitely a crater so far, although we still have higher resolution photos on the way, so it might be premature to say that yet. The thing that really struck me was looking at these, and then looking at Rosetta photos of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. C-G is thought to have originated out in the Kuiper Belt, and it’s possible it once looked like a smaller version of MU69 here, before some interaction flung it toward the sun and it eroded and outgassed into the wild rugged shape it is now.
New Horizons: 2014 MU69 from ~500,000 miles, one of the highest-resolution images sent back prior to the flyby. Released at a JHUAPL press conference that just wrapped up a few minutes ago. Some better images should be coming down in the next few days. Then we take a nice break for solar conjunction, because of course that would have to happen now, and the tasty download goodness should resume after that.
New Horizons: A first photo showing 2014 MU69 (“Ultima Thule”) as a multi-pixeled object. Closest approach is in a few hours, and then photos will trickle back to the Earth over the next 20 months or so, though hopefully they’ll send back the best ones first.
Juno: Three views of Jupiter’s moon Io from three different instruments, taken December 21st 2018. Top photo is a JunoCam image, with a volcanic plume visible along the terminator. Second is a Stellar Reference Unit image taken after Io passed into Jupiter’s shadow, & was illuminated only by light reflected off Europa. Third one is a JIRAM infrared image, so the bright spots show heat sources, presumably volcanic features. The article mentions Juno also taking images with the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph, but they neglected to include any with the press release. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen any images from it, come to think of it. Anyway, this is all coming from a probe that wasn’t designed to study Jovian moons, and doesn’t fly anywhere near them.
