-- Vesta Visit: The spacecraft Dawn approached the asteroid Vesta last month and will later visit the "dwarf planet" Ceres. Dawn will spend the next year studying Vesta and returning plenty of data to keep scientists busy for years to come. Both visits will help NASA to better understand how the solar system was formed.
-- Jupiter Mission: Earlier this month NASA launched Juno for its 5-year journey to the giant planet. As with the Vesta/Ceres visits, NASA is trying to glean more information about the early solar system. For instance, through mapping Jupiter’s gravitational and magnetic fields, NASA expects to discover more about the planet’s interior structure and mass of the core. Juno will arrive at Jupiter in August 2016, probe the planet and its moons for about a year, and eventually crash into its surface (or clouds).
-- New Mars Rover: NASA recently selected the landing site for the next Mars rover, which is part of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and known as Curiosity (remember, we still have Opportunity roving around the Red Planet, while Spirit is now just that). Our next martian visit will be touring the Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide depression close to the planet's equator (see below). And its not all depression since this crater has a three-mile high mountain at its center. And NASA scientists are particularly interested in some of the colored material in the crater since it could offer information on organic molecules. Talk about varied terrain. The launch of the MSL and rover are planned for November.
