Opportunity took advantage of some exposed rock outcrop to perform an in-situ (contact) science campaign to sample the surface at roughly one-kilometer (0.62-mile) intervals.

On Sol 2315 (July 29, 2010), the rover performed a short 16-meter (52-foot) drive to position herself on exposed outcrop for a weekend science campaign.

The following new images taken by the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) on the Cassini spacecraft are now available:

• Beyond Saturn's South (Released 2 August 2010)
  Looking up toward Saturn's southern hemisphere, Cassini pictures a pair of the planet's moons orbiting in the distance.
• Flying by Pandora (Released 3 August 2010)
  Cassini captured this close view of Saturn's moon Pandora during the spacecraft's flyby on June 3, 2010.
• Pan in Action (Released 4 August 2010)
  Saturn's small, ring-embedded moon Pan, on the extreme right of this Cassini image, can be seen interacting with the ringlets that share the Encke Gap of the A ring with this moon.
• Black Blemish (Released 5 August 2010)
  A crescent Saturn is blemished by the black spot of its moon Dione seen orbiting between the planet and the Cassini spacecraft.
• Orbiting in Its Ice (Released 6 August 2010)
  As Enceladus spews water ice from its south polar region, Cassini chronicles the moon creating Saturn's faint E ring, in which the moon orbits.

The following new images taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft are now available:

• Kasei Valles Dunes (Released 2 August 2010)
  This small group of dunes in located within Kasei Valles.
• North Polar Dunes (Released 3 August 2010)
  Regions of densely coalesced dunes are common around the North Polar cap of Mars.
• Dunes (Released 4 August 2010)
  This dune field is located in an unnamed crater north of Antoniadi and Baldet craters.
• Dunes (Released 5 August 2010)
  A sandsheet with dune forms covers most of the floor of this unnamed crater within Coprates Chasma.
• Cerberus Fossae (Released 6 August 2010)
  One of the tectonic fractures of Cerberus Fossae is visible at the bottom of this VIS image.

A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light-years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red).

The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms," seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has seen a cluster of newborn stars enclosed in a cocoon of dust and gas in the constellation Camelopardalis.

The cluster, AFGL 490, is hidden from view in visible light by the cloud. But WISE's infrared vision sees the glow of the dust itself, and penetrates this dust to see the infant stars within.

The CNES microsatellite with its SODISM (SOlar Diameter Imager and Surface Mapper) 11-cm-diameter telescope, the nerve centre of the Picard observation system, has returned its first image of the Sun, dated 22 July, just one month after the satellite was placed in orbit.

Teams on the ground will use this image to make final adjustments before the science mission begins. The SODISM instrument is operating perfectly.

ESA and NASA have selected the scientific instruments for their first joint Mars mission. Scheduled for 2016, it will study the chemical makeup of the martian atmosphere, including methane. Discovered in 2003, methane could point to life on the Red Planet.

NASA and ESA have embarked on a joint programme of martian exploration, an unprecedented new alliance for future ventures to Mars. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is the first in a planned series of joint missions leading to the return of a sample from the surface of Mars. Scientists worldwide were invited to propose the spacecraft's instruments.

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the planetary nebula NGC 3918, a brilliant cloud of colourful gas in the constellation of Centaurus, around 4900 light-years from Earth.

In the centre of the cloud of gas, and completely dwarfed by the nebula, are the dying remnants of a red giant. During the final convulsive phase in the evolution of these stars, huge clouds of gas are ejected from the surface of the star before it emerges from its cocoon as a white dwarf.

On 22 July 2010, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) facility in Oberpfaffenhofen published the first 3D images from the TanDEM-X satellite mission.

Just one month after the launch of TanDEM-X (TerrraSAR-X add-on for Digital Elevation Measurement), which took place on 21 June 2010, DLR researchers have created the first digital elevation model -- almost a week ahead of schedule. A group of Russian islands in the Arctic Ocean was selected for the first test.

The following featured images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) are now available:

• New Impact Crater on the Moon! (Released 27 July 2010)
  Since this crater is not visible in images from the Apollo 15 mission, it formed sometime in the last 38 years.
• Not your average complex crater (Released 28 July 2010)
  The small, irregular terraces on the walls of Bürg Crater and the debris piles and outcropping wall material, with strong variations in reflectance, only hint at the geologic diversity of this complex crater.
• A molten flood (Released 29 July 2010)
  A flood of impact melt swept away from the rim of Necho crater.

Mission controllers have not heard from Spirit since March 22, and the rover is facing its toughest challenge yet -- trying to survive the harsh Martian winter.

The rover team anticipated Spirit would go into a low-power "hibernation" mode since the rover was not able to get to a favorable slope for its fourth Martian winter, which runs from May through November. The low angle of sunlight during these months limits the power generated from the rover's solar panels. During hibernation, the rover suspends communications and other activities so available energy can be used to recharge and heat batteries, and to keep the mission clock running.

Opportunity's activities were impacted by the Odyssey spacecraft safe-mode event. However, with the recovery of Odyssey, normal operations with the rover have resumed.

Direct-to-Earth (DTE) X-band communications and some Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter relay passes were used by Opportunity, while Odyssey was unavailable to support data relay.

Engineers have conducted a fuel tank check of one of NASA's GRAIL mission spacecraft (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory), scheduled for launch in 2011.

Confirming the size and fit of manufactured components is one of the steps required prior to welding the spacecraft's fuel tanks into the propulsion system's feed lines.

Something unknown is causing a strange, symmetrical structure in the charged-particle environment around Rhea, Saturn's second-largest moon. But contrary to 2008 reports, it's not a system of rings.

Using NASA's Cassini spacecraft, a team of astronomers led by Cornell research associate Matthew Tiscareno searched for narrow rings, broad rings and any material from dust to giant boulders that might be orbiting the 1,500 km- (950 mile)-wide moon.

The answer to the mystery of dune patterns on Saturn's moon Titan did turn out to be blowing in the wind. It just wasn't from the direction many scientists expected.

Basic principles describing the rotation of planetary atmospheres and data from the ESA's Huygens probe led to circulation models that showed surface winds streaming generally east-to-west around Titan's equatorial belt. But when NASA's Cassini spacecraft obtained the first images of dunes on Titan in 2005, the dunes' orientation suggested the sands -- and therefore the winds -- were moving from the opposite direction, or west to east.