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The great Andromeda Galaxy owes a bit of its beauty to a dalliance with another galaxy billions of years ago, according to new data gathered with NASA’s orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

Photo Album ‘USA & Canada 2011’

More Brainless Tales

Yesterday, after a 3-year, 21-kilometer journey at top speeds of less than 0.2 kilometer per hour, the Opportunity rover finally arrived at Mars’s Endeavour crater. The intrepid explorer had already poked into 11 craters, the largest 750-meter-wide, 70-meter-deep Victoria, and analyzed rocks and soil along 33 kilometers of track.

Damp and lively? # Dark streaks a few meters wide grew from rocky outcrops down steep, equator-facing slopes beginning in the martian spring and continuing until the early fall as in the animated HiRISE image (above).

At 318 times the mass of Earth and more than twice the mass of all the other planets combined, Jupiter is the undisputed master of the solar system. But no spacecraft has ever gotten close enough to the gas giant to probe deep beneath its colorful cloud tops to decipher how the planet came together.

Earth has a new sidekick. Astronomers have spotted a small asteroid traveling around our sun in the same general path as our planet. The 300-meter-wide rock, dubbed 2010 TK7, is Earth’s first so-called “Trojan” asteroid, a class of bodies that gets its name from the asteroids that orbit the sun at the gravitationally stable points 60° ahead of and 60° behind Jupiter - which, according to astronomical convention, are individually named after prominent figures from the Trojan War ( Brad Pitt excepted).

A small, bright feature that suddenly appeared in Saturn’s northern hemisphere late last year and grew to a diameter approaching Earth’s in a matter of weeks is a thunderstorm that’s still raging.

Spouting plumes of ice and water vapor certainly make Enceladus one of the solar system’s liveliest places. But continuing studies of the composition of those plumes are now making Saturn’s icy moon the most promising place to look for extraterrestrial life.