The next couple of weeks provide a great opportunity to track down three of the brightest asteroids.

Image: Starry Night Software

Have you ever seen an asteroid? These space rocks, though small in size, are very numerous, but very few amateur astronomers have ever seen one. The next couple of weeks give stargazers an opportunity to view three asteroids in one night: Flora, Juno, and Iris.

The asteroids Juno, Flora and Iris were among the first eight space rocks ever to be discovered. Juno was the third asteroid discovered, in 1804, very soon after Ceres — the largest asteroid — in 1801 and Pallas in 1802. It was discovered by German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding, and named after Juno, the highest of the Roman goddesses.

At present Juno is located in the western part of the constellation Aquarius, and is about magnitude +8.6 on the scale used by astronomers to measure brightness of space objects. (The lower the number, the brighter the object, with negative numbers denoting exceptional brightness.)

via See Three Asteroids in the Night Sky This Month: Scientific American.

The descent and landing were called “seven minutes of terror.” Since that white-knuckle event, NASA’s Curiosity rover has had a little longer than half-a-Martian-year of quiet wonder. But in Earth years, it’s an anniversary: Curiosity touched down on Mars early on August 6th, Earth Eastern time, 2012, setting off a jubilant celebration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Since then, the plutonium-powered robot has logged more than one kilometer of driving on Mars. It has photographed what looks to be an ancient, gravely streambed. And it has drilled into sedimentary rocks and consumed the powdery extract to analyze its composition. Those rocks bear traces of an ancient wet environment where “conditions once were favorable for life,” according to project scientist John Grotzinger.

The rover has even gulped a bit of Martian air to measure its composition. As of yet, Curiosity has not detected any methane—its presence might point to ongoing biological activity on the Red Planet. But the evidence gathered indicates that Mars may well have been habitable at some point in its history.

text is a transcript of this podcast. Curiosity Celebrates an Earth-Year on Mars: Scientific American Podcast.

Using infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, an international team of astronomers has imaged a giant planet around the bright star GJ 504. Several times the mass of Jupiter and similar in size, the new world, dubbed GJ 504b, is the lowest-mass planet ever detected around a star like the sun using direct imaging techniques.

Glowing a dark magenta, the newly discovered exoplanet GJ 504b weighs in with about four times Jupiter’s mass, making it the lowest-mass planet ever directly imaged around a star like the sun.

“If we could travel to this giant planet, we would see a world still glowing from the heat of its formation with a color reminiscent of a dark cherry blossom, a dull magenta,” said Michael McElwain, a member of the discovery team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our near-infrared camera reveals that its color is much more blue than other imaged planets, which may indicate that its atmosphere has fewer clouds.”

GJ 504b orbits its star at nearly nine times the distance Jupiter orbits the sun, which poses a challenge to theoretical ideas of how giant planets form.

via Astronomers Image Lowest-mass Exoplanet Around a Sun-like Star | NASA.