A global message will be transmitted toward Polaris, the North Star, 434 light years away, in October
A Simple Response | Rocket Science
http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2016/07/28/a-simple-response/

NASA’s Solar Probe Plus Mission Moves One Step Closer to Launch
https://www.nasa.gov/...goddard/2016/nasa-s-solar-probe-plus-mission-moves-one-step-closer-to-launch
NASA’s Solar Probe Plus – the first mission that will fly into sun's upper atmosphere and “touch” the sun – has passed a design review,
an important milestone leading to its anticipated summer 2018 launch. The successful review means the mission may now transition from
formulation and design to final assembly and implementation. The spacecraft, as it appears in the image, currently includes the primary
structure and propulsion system. Over the next phase of the mission, engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel,
Maryland – which manages the mission and is building the spacecraft – will finish assembly and install the rest of the spacecraft systems
and science instruments.

Murray Buttes on Mars - Curiosity, Sol 1414, assembled & processed by James Sorenson

A movie of the Venus' night-side produced by IR2
This movie is produced from the IR2 2.26-μm images, acquired on 29 March 2016 at a distance
of 0.36 million km. Original 4 images were acquired with 4-hour intervals from 16:03 JST (07:03 UT).

In 4 hours, the super-rotating clouds move by ~10 degrees. Such images are numerically derotated to produce
intermediate images so that the resultant motion becomes smoother. Deformation, appearance and disapperance
of clouds are obvious in this movie. As the mission enters the "nominal" observing phase, we plan to shorten
the intervals to 2 hours or even shorter so the high-definition movies will definitely help understanding of
the Venus atmosphere.

Dark afternoon, Today on Mars (Curiosity Sol 1414)

Observing the Sun with NuSTAR
http://aasnova.org/2016/07/29/observing-the-sun-with-nustar/

http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-gazes-at-long-dead-star
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the remnants of a long-dead star. These rippling wisps of ionized gas, named DEM L316A,
are located some 160,000 light-years away within one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors — the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

The explosion that formed DEM L316A was an example of an especially energetic and bright variety of supernova, known as a Type Ia. Such
supernova events are thought to occur when a white dwarf star steals more material than it can handle from a nearby companion, and becomes
unbalanced. The result is a spectacular release of energy in the form of a bright, violent explosion, which ejects the star’s outer layers
into the surrounding space at immense speeds. As this expelled gas travels through the interstellar material, it heats up and ionizes it,
producing the faint glow that Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 has captured here.