Over on the Planetary society there's an update on the Dawn Mission to the ice, and (maybe just maybe) ocean, bearing dwarf planet Ceres, and the giant volcanic asteroid Vesta. Ceres has very likely been host to liquid water at some point in its past, maybe even for billions of years. Vesta seems to have been a minature volcano world. That makes the Dawn mission one of the most exciting out there right now so I strongly reccomend you go see.

Another mission, one that I'm holding my breath for to launch, is the russian Phobos-Grunt mission. Literally translated it means 'Phobos soil' and it's a mission to one of mars tiny asteroid moons (called Phobos), designed to bring back a sample to earth. Phobos is a mysterious object, thought to be the origin point of one particulaly strange carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, the Kaidun meteorite, which contains minerals found nowhere else in nature. Being so close to Mars it may well preserve some of that planets history on its surface, in the form of materials blasted off Mars during asteroid impacts.

To cap it all of the probe will carry dormant micro-organisms to Phobos and back, to test the idea that some simple life might be able to travel to other planets on rocks thrown from Earth by aseroid impacts. One to watch closely!