NASA's LCROSS spacecraft has successfully completed its first Earth-look calibration of its science payload. During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation.

Author(s): Roopesh Ojha, Norbert Zacharias, Gregory S. Hennessy, Ralph A. Gaume, and Kenneth J. JohnstonAffiliation(s): NVI/United States Naval Observatory, Washington, DC 20392, USA; United States Naval Observatory, Washington, DC 20392, USA; Visiting astronomer, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which are operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF).

(University of Washington) A likely comet collision on Jupiter last week caused a minor sensation, but new research shows that similar impacts on Earth are most likely not responsible for any of the planet's mass extinctions, nor have they been responsible for more than one minor extinction event.

Author(s): Yixuan Li and Gregory D. FleishmanAffiliation(s): Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA; Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St. Petersburg 194021, Russia

Author(s): Bart De Pontieu, Scott W. McIntosh, Viggo H. Hansteen, and Carolus J. SchrijverAffiliation(s): Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab, 3251 Hanover Street, Org. ADBS, Building 252, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA; High Altitude Observatory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307, USA; Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Blindern, Oslo 315, Norway; These authors contributed equally to this work.