The unluckiest bird in the world

among other things, photographed during today's space shuttle launch.

After the Columbia disaster naturally they're nervous about pieces falling off of the shuttle, so they've got cameras all over creation, and, lo and behold, all kinds of things fall off of the shuttle when it goes up, and it also hit a bird. My impression is that this is basically the kind of thing that happens every time. You know there are going to be a lot of tense meetings about that tile on the underside, anyway.

July Enceladus mosaic

Here's a nice large photomosaic from the July 14 Cassini Enceladus flyby, made in false color to bring out the slightly different color of the weird, semi-regular fractures near the south pole.

I'd said earlier that the tidal deformation experienced by Enceladus doesn't seem to be sufficient to cause the internal melting that would be needed to produce these sometimes Europa-like features. That's assuming that Enceladus's rotation has been tidally locked to Saturn without much change through most of its history. There seems to be some speculation afoot that maybe Enceladus somehow swiveled around from some other orientation relatively recently in solar-system terms. That would have been a pretty violent event, however it happened.