A SOLAR SYSTEM FAMILY PORTRAIT, FROM THE INSIDE OUT

What would our solar system look like if visitors from other worlds took a series of pictures  NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft did just that by piecing together the first portrait of our solar system from the inside looking out. Comprised of 34 images, the mosaic provides a complement to the solar system portrait from the outside looking in taken by Voyager 1 in 1990.

"Obtaining this portrait was a terrific feat by the MESSENGER team," says MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "This snapshot of our neighborhood also reminds us that Earth is a member of a planetary family that was formed by common processes four and a half billion years ago. Our spacecraft is soon to orbit the innermost member of the family, one that holds many new answers to how Earth-like planets are assembled and evolve."

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NASA'S NEOWISE COMPLETES SCAN FOR ASTEROIDS AND COMETS

NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of Earth's path around the sun.

NEOWISE is an enhancement of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission that launched in December 2009. WISE scanned the entire celestial sky in infrared light about 1.5 times. It captured more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets close to Earth.

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