It sounds like Venus Express is doing well, with the Near Earth Commissioning activities all done successfully and now they’ve also commissioned VIRTIS (the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) and it has returned images of the Earth-Moon system back to ESA. The Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) has also had first light and returned images.

Found another blog where people are commenting/translating on the Hayabusa mission, there’s a comment there about problems with a stuck thruster, though it may have been solved. It also looks like the Japanese reporters have gone home, or at least for a well deserved lie down after living on energy drinks.. 🙂

The Planetary Society’s Emily, the BBC and most of the rest of the known universe is reporting that Hayabusa successfully landed on the asteroid Itokawa using the target marker (containing 880,000 names) that was dropped during the previous unsuccessful attempt on the 20th November. The spacecraft fired the projectile into the asteroid and is believed to have collected material, but that will only be confirmed when it returns to earth in the Australian outback in 2007.

JAXA has a couple of really interesting pictures (in Japanese) up here and here. JAXA also have an explanation in English of what happened on the 20th when they thought they hadn’t touched down – turned out they had, but not quite as expected.

Anyway, congratulations to the JAXA Hayabusa team!

Photo from Matsuura san’s blog.

So it looks like the picture of what happened with Hayabusa is starting to make sense, a very good summary of what happened is in Emily’s blog and Mr 5thStar (sic) has updated his translations of the latest news from Matsuura San at the JAXA press center.

The Planetary Societies Emily Lakdawalla is blogging that Hayabusa tried to land but JAXA ran into communication problems and that the current situation is unclear. There is more information over at website of a blogger (I’m unable to work out his or her name, sorry!) who has been translating the blog of a space journalist (Matsuura San) who is at the press center for the mission.

It appears that JAXA are in two way contact with the probe again after a period of only having a signal (probably just a carrier). The spacecraft was in safe mode, but as JAXA sent an unacknowledged command to go safe it is unclear as to whether it heard them or whether it did it itself as the result of some other problem. They still don’t know if it landed yet, but they do know that it isn’t attached to the asteroid. At first they only had communication via the low gain antenna, but then they were able to reactivate the medium gain antenna from which they are receiving housekeeping data and other telemetry which they believe will tell them if they landed and if the impactor was fired.

The Planetary Societies blog is reporting that Hayabusa dropped its robotic probe that was intended to explore Itokawa, but missed. To be fair to JAXA it sounds like it was a fairly chancy operation anyway, and they are still hopeful about attempting to dock Hayabusa itself with the asteroid to do its sample collection prior to attempting to return it safely to Earth.

The Planetary Society has a couple of pieces of interesting news at the moment, the first is that the Japanese probe Hayabusa that is investigating an asteroid is going to try again to land, drop the robot and grab a sample, though JAXA are still not certain what caused the craft to abort last time. They are currently speculating that it could be to do with the optical navigation system and the spacecrafts orientation to the asteroid.

There’s also great news about Venus Express – the Planetary Society blog says that Venus Express has phoned home bang on time and the ESA is reporting in their online journal that:

9 Nov 06:10 UTC, MET +02h 40m
Sun acquisiton and successfull deployment of solar arrays confirmed.

Well needed good news after the loss of the CryoSat ice monitoring satellite!

The Australasian Science magazine has published a great little article on the Top Ten Equations of All Time (PDF) (also read on The Science Show by its author Nic Svenson from CSIRO).

And no, e=mc2 isn’t number 1 – for a very good reason!

OK – here’s a bunch of space related stuff from around the net.

The Planetary Society have revamped their website which looks a lot nicer than the old one. Their blog is always useful to keep an eye on to track news, and Planetary Radio has got to be one of the best podcasts I’ve found so far! If you listen to it, be warned, the location of the RSS feed has changed – it’s now here.

JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, has some good and bad news. The good news are some amazing hi-res pictures of the asteroid Itokawa, the bad news is that they’ve had to abort the drop of the marker and rover onto its surface due to an “anomalous signal“.

The UK built satellite Inmarsat-4 is due for a launch from a sea platform near Christmas Island.

The ESA’s Venus Express is now due for launch on the 9th November, and good news for Mars Express, it’s Planetary Fourier Spectrometer is now working again after reporting a fault a few months ago.

Oh, and as Jason says, now is the time for the Taurids meteor shower.

So observers using the Hubble ST are reporting the possible discovery of two new moons of Pluto, for now called P1 and P2. As the ABC news report says:

“It’s … strictly coincidental that Pluto of course was named for the god of the underworld and we’re describing these Halloween moons,” Alan Stern of the South-West Research Institute said.

You can read the full NASA press release, and the comparison composite photos showing the movement within the Pluto system is below.