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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home to some of the most creative digital artists in the country, has a new interactive game that lets you build an exoplanet, using pre-sets for Mars, Earth and Gliese 581d, a rocky super-Earth about 20 light-years away.

By messing with the planets’ size, age and distance to their stars, among other factors, you can learn interesting lessons about planetary science, namely why it has been so difficult to find a planet habitable for humans.

Move your planet too close, and the water boils away, leaving it a lifeless rock. Make the star too dim, and the planet will freeze over. Embiggen your world too much and its atmosphere becomes too thick, turning it into a gas giant--and so on. Most choices lead to such unappealing backup-planet types as "Hot Rock" and "Ice Ball." When you’re done playing God, you can download a picture of your planet.

Extreme Planet Makeover was developed in conjunction with NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory, whose scientists build computer models of Earth-sized planets to figure out what they might look like.

[JPL]

Less than half an hour after the probe reached its closest distance from the comet, about 435 miles away, a series of images completed the 23-million-mile trip from EPOXI’s spacecraft to computer screens in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Almost an hour after they were taken, Deep Impact returned its most close-up images to astronomers, capturing the comet when it was 496,000 miles from Earth.

To accommodate the unpredictable flight pattern of Hartley 2, engineers switched the Deep Impact to autopilot, or AutoNav, allowing the probe to steer itself towards the brightest object (other than the sun) in its sight.

Deep Impact is the first spacecraft ever to visit two comets, and the close-up images of Hartley 2's nucleus were a long shot--EPOXI flight director Rich Rieber said the mission had a 0.1 percent chance of success, and attributed the accomplishment largely to AutoNav's precision.

The full series of images is available on JPL's website, and a post-encounter press conference will be streamed live at 4 p.m. EST.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a big week last week, mounting the Remote Sensing Mast and an array of navigation and sensing cameras on their latest Mars rover. Then on Friday Curiosity took its first drive, traveling about three feet back and forth on its brand new 20-inch aluminum wheels.

To the applause of cleanroom-clad NASA engineers, Curiosity crawled along the floor of a lab at JPL while being controlled remotely by wire, rather than by the software that will direct the rover’s movement on Mars. But as a milestone it’s fairly significant. Just a few weeks ago, Curiosity looked like spare parts; today it is the size of a small SUV – far larger than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers already on Mars – and looks the part of a next-gen space exploration vehicle.

But the best is yet to come. While Curiosity is now outfitted with two navigation chams, two mast cameras and a laser chemistry camera, it will soon enough be augmented with its principal geology tool: a 6-foot robotic arm sporting a powerful jackhammer drill and a microscope.

If the schedule holds up, Curiosity should launch next year and arrive on Mars in August 2012. From there, it will explore the landscape for a suitable landing site for future missions while collecting and analyzing rock samples that should shed more light on the planet’s geological history.

See Curiosity go in the video below.

[MSNBC via Discovery]