NASA today revealed the first close-up imagery of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in our solar system.

The ion-propelled spacecraft Dawn, which took nearly four years to reach the 330-mile-wide space rock, recorded the photos and beamed them to Earth on July 24, 2011.

“Our patience is paying off very handsomely,” said engineer Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and member of the Dawn mission during a televised press briefing. “We’re now exploring one of the last uncharted worlds in the solar system.”

Vesta is the second most massive object in the asteroid belt and has a ...

In recent years, U.S. special operations forces have regularly and “surreptitiously” slipped into Pakistan, raiding suspected terrorist hideouts on Pakistani soil. The team that killed Osama bin Laden — those guys alone had conducted “ten to twelve” of those missions before they hit that infamous compound in Abbottabad.

In a remarkable story for this week’s New Yorker, Nicholas Schmidle puts together the most detailed picture so far of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But the most combustible  component of the explosive article might be the disclosure that U.S. commandos sneak into ...