JP Aerospace

A 2-inch-long paper model of a 1960s-era Gemini capsule hangs from a string in front of a camera mounted on a balloon-borne platform at an altitude of more than 97,000 feet. Meanwhile, the moon hangs in the far background, sans string.

So what if it's only a paper spaceship? This year marks the 50th anniversary of Project Gemini's christening, and you could regard this small-scale re-creation of a Gemini space mission as a fitting tribute to the times.

The original 19-foot-long Gemini spacecraft was built to accommodate two astronauts for missions that would lay the groundwork for the Apollo missions to the moon. This 2-inch-long Gemini model was built by John's Paper Models and hung from a string during one of JP Aerospace's high-altitude balloon flights in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

"The model was flown to 97,704 feet on balloon during last month's PongSat mission. 980 student experiments were also flown," John Powell, the founder of JP Aerospace, told me in an email. The California-based venture sends payloads up to the edge of space at the end of a helium-filled balloon, and recovers the payloads after the balloon breaks.

The payloads range from mini-experiments that can fit inside a pingpong ball — hence the name "PongSat" — to the occasional chair or cellphone. These flights don't come anywhere close to the internationally accepted 62-mile (100-kilometer) boundary of outer space, but they do rise high enough to provide exposure to cosmic rays, the near-vacuum of near space and other conditions that can put space hardware to a rigorous test. And as you can see here, the flights provide an awesome view as well.

JP Aerospace

JP Aerospace's "Away 66" mission rises. The tiny model of the Gemini capsule can be seen hanging from the left side of the balloon-borne platform.

Meanwhile, another near-space mission has successfully sent "Star Trek" captains and celebrities into space, at least in miniaturized, plasticized action-figure form. StarTrek.com provides a photo essay chronicling the results of this month's "Send Picard to Space" balloon mission, backed by more than $6,000 in Kickstarter contributions. "The captains and equipment spent two hours aloft, 90 minutes of that in the stratosphere, until the balloon popped and the payload parachuted safely back to Earth," StarTrek.com reported. Stay tuned for the encore presentation. 

More adventures in near space:

• Balloons built for future frontiers
• Teens send toy above the clouds
• Twin-balloon airship hits high frontier
• Students reach high for launch photos

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Georgia Southern U. / Cornell / NASA

The asteroid Vesta has a huge crater on its southern side. This picture shows the asteroid in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (top left), as a reconstruction based on calculations (top right) and as a topographical map (bottom).

Astronomers have identified a space rock that they say came from the interior of Vesta, an asteroid that may be the only mini-world of its type left in the solar system. The finding is just a foretaste of what scientists will learn when a NASA probe begins orbiting Vesta later this year.

Vesta ranks No. 2 on the list of asteroids in terms of mass (after Ceres) and No. 3 in terms of size (after Ceres and Pallas). It's significantly denser and brighter than those other two asteroids, which suggests that it has an iron-nickel core and a rocky mantle layered beneath a cool lava crust. Scientists consider Vesta as well as Ceres and Pallas to be protoplanets — cosmic leftovers that were stuck in an intermediate phase of planet formation. But Vesta's density puts it in a class by itself.

Eons ago, the 325-mile-wide (525-kilometer-wide) Vesta was blasted in a cosmic collision that left a 16-mile-deep (25-kilometer-deep) crater at its south pole. That blast scattered fragments known as Vestoids out into space. Some of those fragments were flung all the way to Earth, ending up as a class of meteorites called the HED group.

Long-lost piece of Vesta
The HED meteorites have given astronomers a good baseline for identifying Vestoids that are still in outer space. One of those Vestoids is the subject of the newly reported research. The roughly kilometer-wide (0.6-mile-wide) asteroid known as 1999 TA10 was first spotted more than a decade ago, but it's only been recently that astronomers used NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii to analyze the rock's composition.

Astronomers from the University of North Dakota and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research reported their results this week in a paper published online by the journal Icarus. They found the signatures of calcium-rich wollastonite as well as iron-rich ferrosillite in their spectral observations of 1999 TA10.

"These materials can be found in Vesta's mantle and crust," Andreas Nathues of the Max Planck Institute said in a news release. "However, the ratio is decisive."

The researchers reported that 1999 AT10's concentration of iron is lower than that of any other known Vestoid. "This all points to 1999 TA10 having originated from the interior of Vesta," Nathues said.

If 1999 TA10 was blasted out of Vesta's mantle rather than its crust, that suggests that the crust can't be thicker than the mini-world's south pole crater. The crust would have to be 16 miles thick at most. That kind of information could be useful for determining how the different layers were built up on Vesta — and provide even deeper insights about the processes at work during the solar system's formation.

Here comes Dawn
The big reveal will come starting in August, when NASA's Dawn spacecraft arrives at Vesta and begins its year-long mapping mission. Dawn's observations would confirm whether Nathues and his colleagues are correct about the origins of 1999 TA10 and the composition of Vesta itself.

Christopher Russell, a geophysicist at the University of California at Los Angeles who serves as principal investigator for the $357 million Dawn mission, said the Icarus research could well be on the right track. But he's not ready to draw any conclusions about Vesta's composition quite yet.

"I'm basically withholding judgment until we get there and see the images," Russell told me. "I'm not being skeptical as much as I'm being cautious."

Even though Dawn was launched more than three years ago, the mission's real adventure is just about to begin. After studying Vesta, the spacecraft is due to move on to the dwarf planet Ceres, which could reveal even juicier secrets. Dawn should begin orbiting Ceres in 2015 — just as NASA's New Horizons probe closes in on Pluto, my personal favorite among the dwarf planets. And who knows? Maybe the data from Vesta will lead astronomers to regard that world as a dwarf planet too. So brace yourselves: This could be the decade of dwarf domination. 

More about dwarfs and other planets:

• Interactive: The new solar system
• Pallas: A protoplanet frozen in time
• Ceres: Asteroid may have more water than Earth
• Spot makes dwarf planet Haumea even stranger
• Pluto debate is about more than just one little world

Correction for 1:40 p.m. ET Jan. 8: My conversion of miles to kilometers for Vesta's diameter was mistakenly listed as miles. That's been fixed — sorry about the error.

In addition to Nathues, co-authors of "First Fragment of Asteroid 4 Vesta's Mantle Detected" include Vishnu Reddy and Michael Gaffey of the University of North Dakota.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.