The Air Force is prepping its prototype space plane for a test flight. I guess they simply can't hide that they're doing it, but they sure are being tight-lipped about why they're doing it. In concept it sounds like a retread of the Dyna-Soar program, which got canceled in the early 60s for at least some of the same reasons people are wondering why this project is going forward.

New data seems to be indicating a small star is on a collision course with the solar system. Its arrival is predicted to happen in a relatively short time, too. Climate change claims yet another victim...

The on again, off again search for something really big orbiting the sun far, far away is now on again. No, the discussion of such an object indirectly causing mass extinctions on Earth is not particularly new, but the telescope with the equipment to detect the object is. Here's to hoping we'll be able to put this thing to bed once and for all.

NASA's mission to Pluto just passed the half-way point on its journey to the ACTUAL PLANET, DANG YOU. I was taught 9 planets, s'my story, sticking to it. Olivia won't quite be a teenager when it arrives.

Scientists are continuing their quest for dark matter by seeing if any can be found here on Earth. Seems they've spent a lot of money and not found much with what they bought. Then again, in science a negative result can be as informative as a positive.

NASA's VISTA infra-red probe has revealed previously unseen detail in the heart of the Orion nebula. Very cool article, but a big raspberry to the editors for providing no obvious (to me at any rate) way to actually see the photos in questions.

By using a lot of computers and Hubble telescope images, a scientist has constructed the most detailed map of Pluto made to-date. Turns out it sorta resembles a pizza. It even has orange blotches!

Now that NASA's funding has been tossed up in the air again, advocates of quirkier launch techniques are once again coming out of the woodwork. The space cannon concept has been around a very long time. I think the last time I heard anything about it the main stumbling block was acceleration. It's a big freaking gun, and that means the forces are much higher than a conventional chemical rocket. Engineers weren't certain regular satellites could survive the stress, let alone a bunch of meat bags.

Scientists have announced the discovery of yet another weird kind of supernova will help them figure out more things about what make such vast explosions tick. The explosion in question looked like a gamma ray burst, but its energy was concentrated in radio waves. It's thought this discovery, combined with a soon-to-be activated new radio telescope array, will allow the observation of a much larger variety of supernovae than was previously possible.

Looks like Spirit is now in that sand dune for the duration. This is not to say it'll lose its usefulness, far from it. It's just now more weather station than it is rover.

It looks as if the long-serving Mars rover Spirit may be facing its final winter on the red planet. They've survived far longer than anyone thought possible. Dying stuck in a sand trap is a rather ignominious end, but everyone's gotta go some day. But those NASA engineers are clever bastards, I wouldn't count them out just yet.

Pat gets a no-prize with a glowing heartbeat for bringing us news of a star that provides a sneak peek at what our own sun will likely look like as it dies. It would seem that, with very few exceptions, even the most mundane of stellar objects will end up being interesting at some point in their life cycle.

The first meteor to hit Virginia in more than eighty years punched a hole in a doctor's office in Lorton yesterday. Luckily nobody was hurt. Explain that one to the insurance adjuster.

NASA scientists have announced the discovery of two more meteorites which could hold conclusive fossil evidence of life on Mars. I'm pretty sure there is a tight knot of scientists who would deny the existence of life on Mars even while the little green man standing in front of them was setting his ray gun to "broast." For the rest of this, well, for me anyway, it's pretty cool!

By modeling cold dark matter and the kind of winds a supernova create, scientists have come up with what seems to be a more accurate model of how dwarf galaxies form. The combination neatly explains the small voids found at the center of these puzzling cosmic objects.

A new theory about Enceladus' geysers is predicting the activity we're seeing is a regular, albeit very long-period, phase. The small moon is stubbornly resisting attempts by conventional theories to explain it. It remains to be seen if this new attempt will hold up under further observations.

Conventional theories of planet formation have a fundamental problem, in that they have a tendency to predict no planets will ever form. A new theory, however, manages to explain planet formation without predicting away the planet the scientist is standing on.

Another day, another miraculous picture of the early universe. This time the galaxies imaged by Hubble are thought to represent the universe when it was only a fraction of its current age. Bonus: it would seem the Spitzer telescope is designed to get us all the way back to the reionization era, the furthest back we can see.

After decades of observation, scientists have confirmed all three scenarios to generate "blue straggler" stars are possible. These mysterious stars live longer than they should, shine more brightly than they should, and seem to gain mass as they age. Exactly what it all means, who knows?

So it may turn out that the people who save us from a massive impact in 2036 are... wait for it... the communists [ahem] Russians. Or, they could be the ones who bank-shot the thing from a near miss into a certain-hit. Think about how well all their other projects have turned out, and sleep well tonight.

Scientists have discovered the "Local Fluff" is held together by a previously unsuspected magnetic field. Why people get worked up over a thin layer of hydrogen and helium is a bit beyond me sometimes, but I guess they have to do something with those old space probes.

A fortuitous combination of sensors and camera angle have provided the first direct evidence of liquid on the surface of Titan. I wonder if the atmosphere on the surface is thick enough to do away with a pressure suit? I know, I know, it's so cold even the best parka wouldn't be enough, but it would seem nice to do away with the air tight requirement.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a "super-Earth" rich in water. I'm figuring they determined that by the spectra the planet is reflecting, but the article doesn't specifically mention the technique. It's bigger than Earth and circles a much smaller star, so it's ol' "it's life Jim, but not as we know it," sort of thing.

Scientists are claiming to have solved the mystery of Iapetus's weirdly contrasting sides. Turns out it's a combination of some other moon spewing crap into its orbit, as well as the rotation of the moon itself.

It would seem Uranus's weird "tire-rolling-down-the-road" axial rotation can be explained by a very large moon which could still be roaming loose somewhere in the solar system. You'd think we would've spotted something that big by now.

Mars rover Spirit has failed again in its efforts to un-stick itself. This time it looks like a problem with one of the wheels itself, instead of just the weird powdery soil it stumbled into a few months ago.

That rock that did show Martian life, then didn't, then did, then didn't, just had its status switched back to "did". I'm sure this isn't the last volley in this particular scientific tennis match, but it is nice to see the premise that the rock contains signs of fossilized Martian life is holding up to various counter-proposals.

Looks like Mars rover Spirit isn't going anywhere any time soon. Well, it's not like they can call AAA, ya know.

Scientists are creating a telescope that should be good both in the hunt for dark energy, and the quest for Earth-like planets. Turns out the same instrument works both ways. A metro-telescope!

Hey, you know with a name like the vampire star, the story's gotta be good. And it does not disappoint. It represents the first time scientists will be able to observe in detail just how a type 1-a supernova exists.

Excuse me? What, Wikipedia too good for your web browser or something?

Making the rounds: NASA nuked the moon, and all I got was this soggy T-shirt.

Robert H. gets a no-prize he can wring out into a bucket for being the first to bring us what might be the first discovery that takes us all back to the moon.

Scientists have determined that intelligent life is most likely to evolve around a star about the same size and density of our Sun. While at first glaringly obvious (thank you, thank you, be sure to tip your waitress!), the rigorous theory provides both explanations and predictions which could help us find other planets which host intelligent life.

Recently announced space probes from both NASA and the ESA will target various interesting moons for exploration. So far nobody's seriously proposing anything that'll drill down into Europa's seas, but it sounds like they're doing just about everything else.

Today's Boston Globe Picture Album of Wonder comes to us courtesy of all those fancy orbiters parked around Mars. It's one thing to be told, "our cameras can image the tracks of the rovers." It's quite another to see it.

And in all the world, excepting the occasional landslide, the only sounds are the howling of the wind, and the whirring of two small golf carts.

The preliminaries for a real space elevator contest would seem to be heating up. I always hoped I'd end up seeing what the Earth looked like from orbit. I never imagined getting there would involve a box and The Girl from Ipanema plinking softly from speakers in the ceiling.

Another year, another "ahn-tra-pah-noo-ah" trying to book reservations on a not-quite-there space hotel. Yours, for only $4.4 mil for three nights. Reservations are opening for a 2012 stay. Hey, I got checks, that means I got money, right?

The Mars rover Spirit seems to be having a problem with its flash memory. NASA has, per usual, several back-up plans, but for now it seems they're content to wait and see if the problem will rise above the level of basic annoyance.

NASA's Kepler probe, designed to find extrasolar planets, will not be able to start its primary mission until 2011 due to electronic noise. Now that's one helluva patch right there, I tell ya.

No, really, a box full of stars. I know, I know. But still, explain how something that emerges from simple rules becomes so heart-achingly beautiful.

Well, ok then, explain to me why.

Yeah, thought so.

Astronomers are reporting the discovery of the oldest celestial object found to-date. The massive interstellar explosion measures out at a record 13 billion light years away, when the universe was only about 5 percent of its current age. I think that means that, less than 600 million years after the big bang, the universe was already 13 billion light years across?

NASA probes recently captured some amazing footage of a sun storm. Goodness only knows just how big that actually was.

It would appear that, with the right telescope, NASA's plan to bomb the moon will be visible to just about anyone. 7:30 is right in our "take off" window for work, but we don't have that kind of glass. My brother does. Hint, hint

Ellen's convinced this will hurry on 2012 apocalypse. Ellen needs to get out more.

A group of scientists are claiming the universe has much more entropy than previously thought. Just what sort of predictions their new theory makes isn't discussed in the article, and that's ultimately what will determine if they've found something, or just rearranged the numbers in a clever way.

Pictures from the Messenger probe's latest flyby are coming out and they're about as spectacular as you'd expect. Who would've thought a lump of baked rock would be this interesting?

The ESA's new space telescope has delivered its first set of spectacular images. From the article, it seems the device is still in shake-down. Goodness only knows what it'll do when they start actually using it.

Scientists are reporting cosmic ray concentrations are now the highest observed in the past half century. That said, there is evidence of even higher concentrations in the past, and since we're all still here presumably we'll survive this too. Whether or not our satellites will is a bit of an open question. The finding also has implications for manned spacecraft design.

I know, I know, after most of a year out of office it's still Dick Cheney's fault. Hope and change!

NASA's MESSENGER space probe has completed its third flyby of Mercury, putting it on track to orbit the planet in 2011. It'd be nice to see some more pictures, but I guess it's just not as interesting to look at as, say, Jupiter.

Scientists have announced the discovery of nearly pure water on Mars at much lower latitudes than previously observed. It's all based on observations of small impact craters about half way between the equator and the pole.

It would seem there actually is a lot of water on the moon. Having what's effectively a big ol' fuel dump living at the bottom of a gravity well only 1/6th as deep as the pit we live in would be a Very Good Thing Indeed. Of course, finding it is not the same as getting at it, but at least we know it's there.

It would seem being a moon of Jupiter can actually be a part-time job. It's good to be the king!

Scientists have found a planet that shouldn't exist. Wasp-18b orbits its start in less than twenty-four hours, and is only the second planet found to-date to do so. It seems current models predict such planets should be swallowed by their stars comparatively quickly, and this one, well, hasn't. If they knew why it wouldn't be called, "science."

Looks like NASA's latest lunar probe used up half its gas due to a software glitch. I bet they turned it off and turned it back on over and over again until it stopped. Hey, it worked for Mars Pathfinder back in the 90s!

NASA and the Air Force are testing a "green" rocket fuel. Using a combination of aluminum powder and water-ice, the article makes it sound like the new stuff will be cheaper than the old stuff. By how much, and even if it's true, the article doesn't say.

Like those glittering little squares that tend to litter any well-traveled intersection, scientists can tell there's been a collision between planetary bodies by the shards of glass they leave behind. Explain that one to the adjuster!

Thanks to a rare edge-on view of Saturn's rings, the Cassini space probe has imaged what appears to be a large object punching through one of them. Personally, I suspect Dick Cheney is behind it all.

NASA's Kepler planet-search probe has now proved it can in fact detect planets, by "finding" ones already discovered by other means. Unfortunately it also appears overly sensitive to cosmic rays, which seem to be causing it to spontaneously shut down every once in awhile. Here's to hoping they find a work-around, or that it doesn't affect the mission too much.

A group of amateurs volunteering their time to classify galaxies have has discovered a completely new type, which is forming stars at a much faster pace than current models predict. It's a cool article, but what I really wanted to do was use a line from a really old, really cheesy sitcom. I'm sure you'll understand.

So, says here astronauts sleep well but don't get a shower, yet I distinctly remember Skylab had one. Next space station not good enough for one, or something?

One of NASA's Earth Observatory probe captured this nifty image of the most recent total solar eclipse. The next one to happen in the continental US won't be seen in VA (as I recall). I've been waiting so long to see one I think I just may go traveling to catch it, if I can.

Looks like something may have hit Jupiter in the past day or two. Or not. As with most of these things, nobody's quite sure. Personally, I suspect Sarah Palin is behind it somehow.

Scientists have found evidence that Venus may have been covered by water once, and had continents driven by plate tectonics. The data is not conclusive, but at present there is no evidence which contradicts the theory that at some distant point in the past Venus was the most Earth-like planet in the solar system.

After 18 years of operation, the world's first solar polar orbiter is scheduled to be shut down on June 30th.

Looks like new data has conclusively disproven the idea that extremely long-period climate changes on Earth are caused by trips through the galaxy's arms. Sometimes it's too easy to forget what makes science tick is it can be proven wrong.

Using an innovative microwave detector, scientists are claiming to have direct evidence of lightning storms on Mars. Static doesn't just get built up by rain moving in a cloud, donchaknow?

The Cassini probe has captured the first images of one moon eclipsing another in the Saturn system. The video is about what you'd expect, all four frames of it. Hence, the need to punch up the fact one of the moons was the "Death Star" Mimas.

Reason #23 the Catholic church has it all over the protestants: they've got their own observatory:

“Exposing, 30 minutes,” she says. As Celtic ballads play in the control room, data is sucked up by hard drives, and a column of numbers scrolls down her computer screen. Dr. O’Donoghue, who was raised Roman Catholic, is the author of “The Sky Is Not a Ceiling: An Astronomer’s Faith,” in which she describes how she lost and then rediscovered God “in the vastness, the weirdness, the abundance, the seeming nonsensicalness, and even the violence of this incredible universe.”

In person she’s not nearly so intense. While waiting for an image to gel, she steps out on a balcony for a look at the unprocessed sky. The Beehive Cluster, one of the first things Galileo saw with his telescope, is sparkling in the constellation Cancer. Next to it is Leo, where Dr. O’Donoghue is looking for the gravitational tides.

Put that in your, "buncha superstitious men in dresses" pipe and smoke it!

Scientists have discovered a new type of supernova which could help explain the ratio of matter to antimatter in the universe. It seems that if a white dwarf were to suck the helium off a red giant companion, the kind of explosion eventually generated would not only account for the weird supernova seen in 2005 in a galaxy 100 million light years away, it would also account for the previously unexplained ratios of various sorts of positrons seen in the centers of galaxies. I think. Cosmology is hard.

Ron gets a no-prize that'll keep going and going for bringing us the latest discoveries being made by the Cassini space probe. This time around: photographic confirmation of the theory that small moons near Saturn's rings create "speed bumps" as much as a mile high.

Personally, I feel it still completely valid to blame the Bush administration.

The nearby star Betelgeuse may end its life in our lifetimes. Whether or not it'll go out with a bang or just fade away isn't mentioned in the article.

Using new measurements, scientists have discovered supermassive black holes are, well, super-er massive. As in 6.4 billion solar masses. The mind boggles.

The intrepid Mars rover Opportunity seems to have discovered some rusty rocks. If they are what they seem to be, it could provide evidence for past and present water on the surface of the red planet.

Scientists have discovered the X-ray "ghost" of a black hole eruption. If I'm reading the article correctly, what they've found is the remnants of an explosion so powerful it made the fabric of the universe itself glow for thirty million years.

Dang. That's one smelly damned burp right there, I tell ya...

Are they called lure floats? It's been so long I've forgotten. Those red-and-white spheres you stick on the end of your fishing line to hold up... bah, nevermind. Anyway A NASA-designed probe is being used to plumb the depths of Antarctica's mysterious Lake Bonnie, an ice-capped body of water in that continent's McMurdo Dry Valleys region. The hope is the lessons learned will help the design of a future Europa probe. Considering this particular analog weighs in at half a ton, it'll probably be awhile before the (presumably) aquatic critters of that moon have to worry about robot probes sent from nosy apes.

Those fancy space telescopes we linked up yesterday seem to have made it to orbit safely. It'll be a couple of months before any pictures are sent, but the devices are so sophisticated it should be worth the wait. KTHXBAI!

Mark gets a very high resolution no-prize for bringing us news that two new telescopes are about to be launched into orbit. I can remember a time when everyone just talked about how cool it would be to have a single telescope in space. With these two, the ones that've been launched must be creeping up past a dozen.

Oh noes! The Mars rover Spirit has sunk nearly to its axles in soft ground. Will this be the end of the intrepid little probe? Nobody's sure, but they're definitely trying to figure out if it can dig itself out. It'll be a helluva long time before a tow truck can get out there otherwise.

New findings from the Mercury probe MESSENGER are being released, and it turns out that, weirdly, the planet is much more similar to Mars than it is our Moon. Apparently, the opposite was what had been theorized before. Amazing, the difference a few pictures can make.

Isn't this a comforting thought:

Hundreds of massive black holes left over from the early universe may wander the Milky Way, according to new calculations.

These rogue black holes are thought to have originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.

They say the nearest ones will be far away from us, but then they also say: "[The theory] predicts that hundreds of such black holes would still be around today in the outer reaches of the Milky Way, each containing the mass of 1,000 to 100,000 suns."

Which causes me to raise my hand all Horshack-like to note "excuse me, but haven't you astronomers always said we're sitting in the outer reaches?* Sorta bragged about it, even? CURSE YOU, CARL SAGAN!"

----
* True (apparently) story: When my dad went to his first meeting about the capabilities of the Saturn V**, they said something like, "if a catastrophic explosion should occur, we expect total devastation in an area this large [draws big circle around map]. You, Mr. Johnson, and your assistant will be stationed here [dot inside the circle] during launch."

Dad: "'Scuse me, 'scuse me, sir! You made a mistake there, you put our station inside the circle!"

Mr. Man: "No, I did not make a mistake."

Dad: "..."

Mr. Man: "We don't expect it to explode. To continue..."

** If you don't know, go review the Saturn Follies category.

Mark gets a no-prize that might go to the moon some day for bringing us news of Russia's replacement for the venerable Soyuz system. I wonder if they'll end up selling them to budding civilian space companies? As far as I know, Bigelow is still looking for a taxi to send people up to its stations.

The landing system looks to be controversial as well. The main trick will be getting the dratted thing built, of course.

Scientists have developed a technique which could allow them to find inhabited planets without actually observing the surface. The trick is to look for reflected light that's been altered by biochemistry's "handed-ness." If the light indicates it's been altered in this way, it could be a very strong indicator of life.

No, I didn't completely understand it either. Chemistry makes my head hurt.

Making the round: scientists have announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet found to-date. This one's only 1.5 times the size of Earth and goes around its star at a distance that doesn't prohibit liquid water from forming. The rest, at least in this article, seems to be a lot of unsupported hyperbole. But that's just me.

The intrepid Mars rover Spirit has rebooted itself twice recently, and mission operators don't know why. It would seem the rover is designed to be damned hard to kill, so right now this is a curious mystery, not a disaster. Could this herald the end of the line for Spirit? Only time will tell.

Ron gets a no-prize that'll work well below crush depth for bringing us this catalog of pictures taken from the surface of Venus. It's my understanding the atmosphere is so thick they didn't need to use for-real parachutes to slow the landers down. They just screwed a big, flat plate to the top and that was all that was needed. Sort of the like a well-weighted quarter thrown into a fountain, I guess.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shrinking. It doesn't sound as if it will disappear any time soon, but it does seem that it will be completely circular before the century's out. As with most things concerning the largest planet in our solar system, scientists have no idea why.

No, really... spiders in space:

An intrepid spider may have survived the long months at the International Space Station, with scientists eager to know for sure once it returns to Earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

The arachnid, one of two orb weaving spiders sent to the station last November, is due to land with Discovery's astronaut crew in Florida on Saturday afternoon. The spiders, and some butterfly larvae, are part of an educational experiment with students on Earth to compare their development in zero gravity with their counterparts on Earth.

I distinctly recall, although I can't remember where, other experiments involving putting spiders in orbit. Apparently the main roadblock to their survival is dehydration, since weightlessness apparently tricks their bodies into not consuming enough moisture.

It deserves to be asked: if all the galaxies in the universe are moving apart, how do the end up hitting each other?

The Mars rovers are still going strong, and now have their sights set on far away targets. Far away as in, "could take 2 Earth years." Hey, doesn't matter if it's ugly, long as you get there!

Ok, Ellen, no more complaining about... rmmm... "plus-sized" belly dancers:

How heavy can a pair of black holes be and still [dance]? Try 1 billion solar masses - the combined might of two black holes circling each other at the heart of a quasar 5 billion light years away.

Fun to look at I'm sure, from very very far away.

By using new instruments, scientists have determined that Pluto's atmosphere is some 50 degrees warmer than its surface. The difference leaves the atmosphere a balmy -180, so make sure to drink plenty of water when you go cloud surfing!

Images from the Mars Phoenix lander seem to show liquid water on the surface. Well, the surface of the lander's leg, at any rate. And it's not something you'd drink, at least not straight, since it would seem to have enough (natural) antifreeze in it to stay liquid in such an extreme environment.

The comet makes its closest approach to Earth (0.41 AU) on Feb. 24, 2009. Current estimates peg the maximum brightness at 4th or 5th magnitude, which means dark country skies would be required to see it. No one can say for sure, however, because this appears to be Lulin's first visit to the inner solar system and its first exposure to intense sunlight. Surprises are possible.

Read entire article here.

Adjusting the orbit of the ISS is apparently a bit, well, violent. When the only thing separating you from a convincing imitation of the opening of a soda bottle shaken too hard are the seals of a glorified thermos bottle, rattling them seems... bad?

With video!

New Scientist is carrying this article on the six "great" unknowns of the solar system. Some of the answers (such as the one re: relative sizes of the Moon and Sun) seem to rely on some awfully convenient coincidences.

Hey, man, don't look at me. I live on a planet where one of the greatest empires in history originated on an isthmus shaped like a human boot, complete with heel and calf bulge, that's kicking a football. It's all sitting at nearly the middle of a giant lake, which ensures it's even visible from space. If a planet like that had been put in a science fiction movie, nobody'd believe it. And that's just the start of the coincidences of this place. Don't even ask me about the triple alpha process.

Why, thank you, but you see I already have this foil hat of my own that fits just fine. I will keep it for an extra, though...

Scientists and engineers still appear to be beavering away at flying Martian probe. The conditions on Mars must make for some damned interesting aeronautic challenges.

Scientists have announced the discovery that Mars is alive, at least geologically and perhaps even biologically. The evidence? Substantial amounts of methane in the atmosphere, which is normally rapidly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere.

If this interview is to be believed, there's yet another bunch of entrepreneurs all set to conquer space. This time they've got an innovative engine design which promises "mo' fastah' bettah'" access. Only time will tell if it's vaporware or not.

Alternate title: Have Shuttles, will Travel:

The co-founder of a rocket launch firm has proposed an audacious plan to send astronauts on a one-way trek to Mars using a pair of tethered U.S. space shuttles that would parachute to the Martian surface.

I'm pretty sure he's not all that serious about it, and mostly threw it out there to generate precisely this sort of publicity. Still, it would beat having them moulder away in museums across the country. However, I'd want some way to get back home before I volunteered for something like that.

Scientists think they've found a significant number of galaxies which appear to be in a transition state between a spiral and an elliptical . Such galaxies had been observed before, but in so few numbers nobody could be certain if they were part of a trend or some weird one-off.

Scientists have determined that all black holes, no matter what size, will all look alike. That's the talk of a black hole bigot, I tells ya, a black hole bigot!

It seems clear now that at least some parts of Mars were hospitable to life in the past. The MRO seems to have finally found evidence of calcium carbonates, which cannot form in acidic oceans that would be hazardous to life. The findings should help NASA target future space probes to search for past evidence of Martian life.

So, was the moon formed by a giant impact, or a massive nuclear-powered outgassing? I've known for awhile that the impact theory had a few significant problems with its predictions. It'll be interesting to see if this new theory covers them and provides new predictions of its own.

Using the MRO's HiRise camera, scientists have identified several geological formations which appear to have formed in response to variations in the red planet's orbit over time. Interestingly, it's a "10 beat" rhythm, compared to Earth's "5 beat." Bonus: everyone seems to be skirting around what this might imply for climate change on Earth.

The private manned spaceflight program you haven't heard about has surfaced just long enough to provide a few new details about what they're up to. Apparently not content with trying to capture the space tourism market, Blue Origin is also quietly letting folks know that, hey, we'll fly your experiments too.

For a price, of course. :)

Scientists have discovered evidence that Mars's climate varied in time to the "wobble" of the planet around its axis. Bonus: Reporter declares conclusively that the same mechanism is behind the Earth's ice ages. Meh, it was news to me!

NASA's troubled Mars rover mission has been officially delayed until 2011. Sending a nuclear-powered four-wheel-drive vehicle is hard, donchaknow?

I didn't even know what an Advent calendar was until Olivia brought one home full of chocolates. Now she's making very sure I never forget what one is! For those with less of a sweet tooth and more of an interest in the cosmos, this Hubble-based Advent calendar may do the trick. Great hi-res goodness!

Scientists are proposing a new, more detailed space probe who's targets will be the Jovian moon Ganemede and Europa. The ambitious plan would have NASA and ESA send one probe to orbit each respective moon. No landers or diggers, because right now they'd be too heavy/expensive, and because the scientists say they really need the information these proposed probes would provide before anyone could realistically design an effective lander.

Of course, proposing is not the same thing as launching, but it's a start!

A new model is suggesting Jupiter has a rocky core much larger than previously thought. The article doesn't mention the funky liquid-metallic hydrogen that I'd heard other models predict, so perhaps that's wrong too?

Researchers may have discovered the reason why Mars's atmosphere is so thin. The culprit? Perhaps the weird Martian magnetic field, which appears to allow giant chunks of its atmosphere to be ripped away by the solar wind.

Should this theory hold up to further observations, it would put a king-sized dent into the all those futurist plans of terraforming mars. Planting all the genetically engineered super-tough vegetation you can on the surface will do no good if the planet lets the #%$#@ sun toss it all into deep space every chance it gets.

An international group of scientists is reporting they've found even more evidence that Mars was once covered with huge oceans of water. As with most of these sorts of things, the finding is not without controversy. I'm old enough to remember reading in old science books about how puzzled scientists were to find absolutely no evidence of anything even vaguely canal-like on the surface. We've come a long way!

Scientists have, for the first time, directly imaged an entire solar system's worth of planets. Imaged from the ground, no less. If this doesn't put paid to the myth that there's something spectacularly magical about a twenty five year-old lump just because it orbits the Earth, I'm not sure what will. And yet we're still going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars "rescuing" the thing. Gah.

First Phoenix, next Spirit?

A dust storm on Mars has cut into the amount of sunlight reaching the solar array on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, leaving the rover in a vulnerable state.

I hope Ellen's evergreen "rule of threes" doesn't apply, because I think there were only three functioning probes on the surface of Mars in September. By December there might not be any.

Making the rounds: the Mars polar probe Phoenix has been declared officially "dead". Now that it's winter, there's not enough sunlight to keep the probe's batteries charged, and it's speculated the cold finally got to something important. The demise was expected, in fact the probe lasted a few weeks longer than projected. Regardless, scientists will be poring over the data the probe returned for years. Lift a glass!

Scientists are proposing that, under certain conditions, dark matter may not be all that dark after all. I guess we'll have to come up with a new name for it then, eh?

It's not even the end of November yet and we're already seeing "best of the year" lists. Fortunately, this one is a list of the 10 best astronomy pictures, so it's cool. I thought the lightning one was surprising & neat.

First it was water that could be at the bottom of Shackleton crater. Now it would seem evidence for life itself may be down there. It's an interesting speculation, but until we send a probe of some sort to go look that'll be all it is.

Ron gets a moose-shaped no-prize for bringing us what seems to be a Swedish entry into one of NASA's X-prize contests. I'm thinking this is a lunar rover mock up, but who knows?

Scientists have found a solar system with both a "well behaved" Jupiter-like planet and an asteroid field. The implication is that this is the solar system most like ours found to-date, which makes it a leading candidate to host an Earth-like planet. The twist? It all orbits the star Gene Roddenberry picked as the home system of Vulcan, which all good Trekkies know is the home of Spock.

Fans of things outer space should find this collection of Enceladus photographs worth a look. Some of those shots would make for great posters.

The "yes there is, no there's not" debate on whether there is water ice deep inside polar craters on the moon seems to have gotten another "no there's not" answer. However, just because the bottom of Shackleton crater doesn't look like an ice rink is no reason to think there's nothing there. We probably won't know a definitive answer until someone sends a probe specifically designed to look for the stuff.

It seems Saturn has massive storms on both its poles:

New images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal a giant cyclone at Saturn's north pole, and show that a similarly monstrous cyclone churning at Saturn's south pole is powered by Earth-like storm patterns.

I wonder just what the conditions are like inside the eye of a storm big enough to cover the pole of a gas giant? Maybe, unlike Jupiter or Venus, this could be a place we could live without a pressure suit? Probably be pretty cold though...

Scientists have demonstrated that even under extreme conditions, the result of a black hole collision is not a naked singularity. It's not a proof, in the mathematical sense, that Penrose's "cosmic censor" exists, but it definitely seems to provide more evidence for it.

Scientists are reporting the Mars Phoenix lander has detected snow at its landing site. It's not clear whether or not the snow actually reaches the ground.

Scientists think they may have the answer to Mars's unusual magnetic field. By modeling an impact with something bigger than Earth's moon (!), the study, led by Sabine Stanley of the University of Toronto, neatly explains many unusual things about the red planet's geology. No word on if this may have been the trigger to cause Mars to dry up and die.

Scientists have finally determined what, exactly, causes Mars's "residual" south polar cap to be asymmetrical. Having a crater 1200 miles across and 4 miles deep will tend to screw with a planet's weather, donchaknow?

Japan appears to be getting serious about creating a space elevator. Considering that their economy has been doing an amazing "fish in the bottom of a boat" imitation for more than a decade, I'm not going to hold my breath on this one. Still, anything that offers such a discontinuity in dollar-per-pound prices is worth pursuing, IMO.

At least one team of scientists thinks water may have flowed on the surface of Mars far longer than previously thought. "Longer" here seems to mean "3 billion years ago." A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real time!

NASA's managed to capture more images of Martian whirlwinds, this time from the Phoenix lander. It's not yet clear if this is a common site near the poles.

"Dammit Snarfle, I told you if we wanted to vaporize those hairless apes we needed to get started on our gamma-ray zapper before the bloody planet was half-way across the universe!"

Astronomers think they know what caused the brightest ever gamma-ray burst, which was observed in March: a tightly beamed jet of matter that happened to be aimed almost directly at Earth.

And yes, I do know there's an inconsistency in there. Never let the facts get in the way of a really cheesy joke!

Scientists are reporting that tiny creatures known as "water bears" are the first animals known to be able to survive the harsh environment of space. They didn't all survive... the UV radiation got most of them. However, enough did to prove it's possible, and if it's possible here it just might be possible for some small ET somewhere else to survive as well.

Scientists have used observations of galactic superclusters to put a much more precise upper limit on the amount of antimatter which could exist in our visible universe. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), that amount was not actually zero.

The Phoenix lander team celebrated the probe's 90th day on the Martian surface by asking it to compose a special sort of post card. It would seem that, as the area in which Phoenix landed receives less and less sunlight, the probe itself does not have much longer to "live." I guess it was too expensive and/or heavy to equip it with a nuclear power source?

Not only are the Mars rovers still going strong, Opportunity has managed to make it out of the crater alive. They pitched it down into Victory crater last year not completely sure if they'd ever get it back out.

It seems our solar system may actually be rather unique. If their model can be trusted, that is. And we all know how accurate those can be. Just ask Al Gore!

Recent research seems to indicate the centers of Jupiter and Saturn are composed of a metallic liquid helium/hydrogen alloy. Tests also seem to indicate both elements turn into a liquid metal at much lower temperatures than previously supposed.

I'm not at all sure what it'll mean for us, but it definitely sounds cool.

Ron gets a no-prize he can use to torment Zorak with for bringing us news of the discovery of (yet another) really weird object in space. I don't think it looks that much like Space Ghost, but wtf do I know?

The guys at NASA seem to have come up with a workable method of deflecting asteroids on a collision course with Earth. "We have a little bitty spacecraft with this monster swinging its butt at it." Indeed.

Scientists have confirmed the existence of a lake, complete with beach, on Titan. The lake is about the same size as Lake Ontario, but is filled with liquid methane and ethane instead of water. Strangely, scientists could not detect any wave motion, making this one helluva smooth body of liquid.

The Martian polar soil continues to give Phoenix troubles. I guess this sort of thing is bound to happen when one of the basic assumptions of the mission proves wrong. Then again, since nobody knew what to expect, I'm pretty sure this couldn't have been avoided.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot may have claimed a stormy victim. The observation of the GRS "in battle" with another storm will hopefully provide insight into just what makes this enigmatic weather system tick.

NASA scientists have created a video of the Earth and Moon together taken from more than 30 million miles away. Since we know our planet has life, it's thought these sorts of pictures will help guide us to building instruments which can detect life on other planets. Plus it's just a darned cool video.

The Cassini space probe has uncovered even more evidence that the Saturn moon Enceladus may have a liquid ocean underneath the surface.

Slashdot linked up this detailed interview with Peter Gluck, the project software engineer for many of the recent Mars probe projects. In it, Peter provides an in-depth look at just what goes on under the hood of the latest successful probe, the Mars Phoenix lander. It's all in C! Ha! Take that you "I-hate-all-those-semicolons-everywhere" VB'ers!

It would appear the moon itself once had water in it. The finding provides some real challenges to current impact-driven origin theories of our largest natural satellite, since presumably the monstrous forces predicted by said theory would've presumably vaporized (perhaps even atomized) any water in the rocks which eventually made up the moon would've had.

New science about the recent MESSENGER Mercury probe fly-by is finally being published, and the results appear to be even more than people were hoping for. Seems to happen an awful lot when the space probe doesn't smash itself to bits or disappear for no reason at all, eh?

I can't wait to see the Discovery documentary this stuff triggers.

NASA recently announced the Saturn space probe Cassini has completed its primary mission and started a secondary one. After four years, the spacecraft is is very good shape and will now be used to more closely study the moons Titan and Enceladus.

Ron gets a no-prize that probably just needs a solid bang on the side to work for bringing us not-so-good news about the Phoenix lander. Looks like the little oven meant to bake soil samples is fritzing. It may work, it may not, and the nearest repair shop is a darned long walk from there.

Making the rounds: the Earth emits weird transient high-frequency radio signals. They're caused by interactions with the ionosphere and the solar wind. With proper gear, the find could help in the search for Earth-like planets, since the signals are many times more powerful than the most powerful man-made transmitters on our planet's surface.

The latest data from the Mars Phoenix lander seems to indicate life is at least possible using Martian soil. Specifically, for reasons not quite clear to me, asparagus. But not tomatoes. Scientists have a weird sense of humor, sometimes.

For the first time scientists have found conclusive evidence of galactic cannibalism. Yep, you read that right, galactic cannibalism. Take that, Galacticus!

Pat gets the coveted Lucifer's Hammer no-prize for bringing us new developments in early Martian history. It would seem scientists have found even more evidence that very early in its history Mars was smashed by a huge object, fundamentally changing its geography.

Scientists have used an innovative photographic technique to reconstruct a scoop that can dig stuff up on the Moon. The thing is, I'm just about certain there are several engineering models of the Surveyor space craft hanging from the ceilings of various museums around the country, including A&S downtown. Perhaps those just don't have the scoop attached?

The Phoenix space probe has discovered conclusive evidence of water ice in the area of Mars in which it has landed. It would seem the probe itself has had a few glitches in its first month of operation, but things seem to be rapidly sorting themselves out, allowing for "mo' bettah" science to continue.

Scientists are claiming to have discovered evidence of a time before the "Big Bang." Folks have been postulating that universes could be formed in "bubbles" of space time for... oh, gosh, I don't know when the first time it was I read about that. Say, thirty years at least. Nobody, until now it would seem, could come up with any way of testing the idea. While it does seem to neatly account for some previously observed quirks in the cosmic background radiation, it remains to be seen if the theory makes testable predictions.

Phoenix has already made an inadvertent discovery about polar Martian soil, it would seem it's a lot clumpier than originally thought. Having the very first soil sample clog the filter is apparently not as bad as it would at first seem. Considering how far away the nearest repair man is, it's a good thing!

Mark gets a no-prize that'll descend on him using a clever bungee-rocket thingamajig for bringing us this nifty summary of what's up next in Mars exploration. Mostly, it's about the one-ton rover (!) scheduled to land there in 2010. Hopefully it won't run over the little ones which've been puttering around for the past few years, eh?

Phoenix may have already discovered ice. Pointing retrorockets at dusty tundra and punching go will tend to do that, I would think.

Another day, another high-res photo of the latest Martian lander. Now that we have what seems to be a flotilla of high resolution-capable orbiters whirling about the red planet, failed landers may become less of a mystery.

Ron gets a remarkable no-prize for bringing us news that one of NASA's Mars orbiters managed to take a picture of its latest lander on its way down. Even though they don't specifically mention it, the picture was probably yet another layer of belts and suspenders laid on in case something went wrong. Since nothing did, we have a new space probe on site and this nifty picture.

... the Phoenix has landed. Congratulations to NASA for pulling off the first soft landing in 32 years. Is it just me, or does NASA seem to have gotten in the habit of landing stuff on Mars during federal holidays? A clever ploy by JPL for overtime pay? Who knows?

It would seem that, after some four hundred years of observation, Jupiter's great red spot may soon cease to be the largest storm on that planet. Personally, I blame John McCain.

Those of you in the peanut gallery who've thought they saw something flash on the moon can stop worrying about the guys with the butterfly nets now. To this day I'm somewhat surprised a really big impact has not happened in the past four hundred years or so.

Scientists have, for the very first time, witnessed the start of a supernova. The pictures certainly don't look like much, but considering this is happening in another galaxy, whaddayagonnado?

It would seem information is not in fact destroyed in a black hole. This would appear to have profound implications for the way we view the universe. The standard model has been fraying around the edges for years. I'm surprised it's taken this long for people to come up with a spectacularly different alternative.

The on-again, off-again hunt for the origin of high-energy cosmic rays is on once again. It turns out the strong correlation between these exotic bursts of energy and the planes of nearby large galaxies wasn't nearly as strong as it was first thought. I think. Cosmology make Thag's head hurt!

Scientists think it's snowing inside Mercury. Snowing iron, no less. It would seem to be the only model found (thus far) which explains the planet's weak magnetic field. Now that's a lava lamp!

Scientists are working on spacecraft which would use electromagnets instead of thrusters to hold position. While the benefits are obvious, there are a number of engineering problems yet to be solved.

It seems that, a very long time ago, Earth may have had more moons that just the modern one. Having rocks the size of small buildings smash into the planet as the result of their orbits decaying doesn't sound like too much fun. I wonder if they'll be able to correlate a mass extinction or two with such events?

It would appear a telescope that doesn't have a conventional lens or mirror may be able to image extra-solar planets 30 light years away. Which is the line that got me to read the article, but further reading strongly suggests practical considerations make this far less likely than it would at first appear.

Scientists are still in the process of observing the largest and longest-lived electrical storm on Saturn found to-date. It's been running for five months now, with no sign of letting up. Now that, friends, would be one helluva storm to chase.

In celebration of Hubble's launch anniversary yesterday, NASA released some of the space telescope's most spectacular galactic collisions. Explain that one to the insurance adjuster!

Scientists have discovered "compelling evidence" that Mars experienced extensive glaciation as recently as 10 million years ago. This contradicts the widely held belief that Mars has been completely dead for billions of years, and could have signification implications for the existence of life on the planet.

Mike P. receives the coveted "Made the Mods LOL" no-prize for In Soviet Russia, Atmosphere Enters You!!!

It would seem there's a whole lot of finger-pointing going on 'round Baiknor way. A 9g entry with a parachute which subsequently started its own cheery-beery brush fire does not a happy crew make!

Scientists have discovered a group of large icy objects in the outer solar system that look much brighter than they should. A phenomena termed "solar weathering" should've darkened them a very long time ago, but for reasons characteristically unknown that's not happening here.

The Japanese space agency JAXA has released a new "Earth rise" video taken by their Kaguya orbiter. I still haven't seen any high-res imagery of the lunar landing sites from one of these snazzy new orbiters, but then again I haven't been looking very closely for them.

Conclusive observations about Titan seem to finally be hitting the journals. Hopefully a Discovery Channel documentary or two will follow. It would seem Titan is eerily Earth-like. Well, except for all the liquid methane flowing around, that is.

Via Daffodil Lane

Ron gets a potato-shaped no-prize for bringing us news of new ultra-high resolution photographs of the Martian moon Phobos. It's my understanding (such as it is) that the... Phoboian?... gravity is so weak it's possible to throw an object into orbit. Remember that old cartoon when Bugs throws a baseball in one direction, then waits awhile and catches it coming in the other? Yeah, like that.

Scientists have discovered evidence that the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way flared to life just 300 years ago, and then mysteriously fell silent again. 300 years ago our time, which (if I'm reading the article correctly) means 26,300 years ago "actual" time. I think. Relativity makes my head hurt.

Ron gets a no-prize that can call a square dance for bringing us news that scientists have accurately modeled a three-black-hole merger. This wildly strange event has already been observed "in the wild," and having an accurate model will help other scientists who are designing gravity wave detectors.

Scientists have developed a theory about the conditions in the universe before the Big Bang which actually provides testable predictions. Scientists have for years been fascinated by the, for want of a better phrase, "bouncing" universe. Infinite collapse and expand cycles appeals to the aesthete in them, I guess. Unfortunately every previous test for this scenario (that I know of) has failed, so I'm not holding out a lot of hope for this one either.

Still, it'd be neat to know, either way.

New discoveries continue to come from the Venus Express space probe, each one more fascinating than the next:

In the early stages of the Solar System, Venus seems to have evolved very rapidly compared to the Earth. Data from Venus Express supports the theory that the Earth’s twin once had significant volume of water covering the surface but it appears that these oceans were lost in a very short geological timescale.

While it's pretty obvious it will be a very long time indeed before anyone sets foot on the Venusian surface, I sometimes wonder how difficult life would be in the very high upper clouds. There are almost certainly areas in the atmosphere with Earth-like temperatures and pressures. If they're clear of Venus's famously acidic lower atmosphere, it would seem an interesting place to set up a "floater's camp."

Mark gets a no-prize stuff full of pressies for bringing us this update on the Jules Verne remote resupply space ship. Considering we only have, what, two more years of shuttle operations, I imagine this system's success is very well-received.

Scientists have now managed to get a 3D movie of one of those monstrous Sun tsunamis. The higher frame rate and better resolution allows them to square the phenomena with widely held theories about what makes the sun tick. Me, I just think it's cool to watch.

Scientists have announced the discovery of the smallest black hole found to-date. At a mass of "just" 3.8 suns, it's mass is significantly less than the previous record holder (6.3 suns). It's hoped the discovery will help prove just how small a black hole can really be, as well as the kind of star that would generate one.

It appears that a big chunk of Mars may be covered in good ol' table salt. While not surprising on the face of it (it is, after all, what you'd expect if huge amounts of water slowly evaporated away), it does provide even more confirmation of liquid water some time in that planet's past.

Scientists claim to have discovered the oldest rocks in our solar system found to-date. The three asteroids contain a relative abundance of calcium and aluminum, the signatures of which are tell-tales of a very ancient age.

Scientists were able to closely study the brightest explosion ever witnessed in the universe. The object that exploded was about half-way across the universe, and it was so bright if a person looked in the right place at the right time they could've seen it without a telescope. Whoa.

Via Instapundit.

Looks like what was thought to be very recently flowing water on the surface of Mars, well, wasn't.

But they are catching nifty pictures of landslides in progress.

Another day, another amazing Earth-Moon picture from Mars. What business do we hairless apes have doing such miraculous things?

To commemorate the recent shoot down of that defunct spy satellite, Space.com is carrying a top 10 list of the most memorable space junk hits. Considering the amount of crap up there, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.

NASA has awarded a contract to MIT for the design of a huge new radio telescope array meant to study the universe's earliest beginnings. The catch? To see that far back, it must be deployed on the far side of the Moon.

Scientists have found evidence of massive one-time floods on the surface of Mars. The one in question occurred long ago, and could provide a target for a future rover or lander mission.

It would seem our Milky Way galaxy is actually twice as big as previously thought. I guess I'll have to use the hybrid space ship instead of the SUV to get across now.

The Pentagon has decided the errant spy satellite poses too great a risk to simply let burn up on its own, and therefore must be shot down. Space.com has the details of just what, exactly, this will entail and how it might look. The intercept is taking place at a much lower altitude than did China's last year, so presumably the debris hazard will be much reduced.

Scietists have discovered a solar system very like our own. By "very" they mean two planets about the size of Jupiter and Saturn orbiting twice as close to a star half as bright as ours. Of course, considering just how weird the planetary systems found so far have been, maybe "very" really isn't that much of an exaggeration.

Via Instapundit.

Scientists have discovered, well, titanic liquid hydrocarbon reserves on Saturn's moon Titan. Great. Now we all know the real reason behind sending that Cassini probe. Put Rumsfeld on trial! Impeach the President! Arrest Carl Rove!

A new theory seems to indicate that dark matter and dark energy are actually the same substance. Termed a "dark fluid," the theoretical stuff accurately accounts for all known observational evidence for either substance. It also (seems to) make more testable predictions, allowing headway to be made in one of the most mysterious phenomena in astrophysics today.

What does it mean? Hell if I know. But even the most esoteric scientific phenomena can lead to wonderful things, so why not cheer from the sidelines?

Private enterprise space station builder Bigelow Aerospace is in talks with United Launch Alliance discussing just what it would take to man-rate the Atlas V launch vehicle. Getting a privately-funded manned spaceship into orbit is seen as the next (huge) challenge in the effort to commercialize manned spaceflight. I'm actually kind of surprised it's taken this long for someone to approach the commercial launch industry for a solution. Perhaps if I understood just what was involved in "man-rating," and why it's such a big damned deal, it wouldn't seem so surprising.

Those of us hoping for a rock to smash into Mars will have to wait longer to get our wish. Ah well, it's not like there isn't anything else to look at on the planet, eh?

I've seen quite a few comparisons of SpaceShipTwo to the Air Force's old DynaSoar program, but this is the first time I've seen it compared to a Soviet program. The resemblances are more than striking, but I don't know enough about aeronautics to say if it's just the easiest answer to a tough problem, or that Rutan has someone with a name that ends in "ski" on the payroll.

Pictures of SpaceShipTwo and White Knight II, Virgin Galactic's launch vehicles, have been released. Looks like they're on-track for their announced 2010 start date. Hooray for private enterprise!

Imagery from the recent Messenger flyby seem to indicate lava once flowed on the planet's surface. Considering how close the thing is to the Sun, I'm surprised lava can cool. Then again, I'm (quite obviously) no geologist, so most likely I'm misunderstanding how lava works.

Mercury probe Messenger's initial flyby of the planet is already producing surprises. Which is, of course, the whole point, otherwise why bother?

Recent discoveries about supermassive black holes seem to suggest they spin at nearly the speed of light. One of the funnier stories I was told by a physics student in college was that Einstein's theory of relativity actually suggests it's quite easy to make a time machine. One simply needs to spin a mass more than tens times that of the sun to more than 90% the speed of light. Spacetime gets so twisted by this object time becomes another direction in which one can travel.

Well, here's our object. Is it a time machine, or was I just told a silly story by someone who was better at math than he was at science?

Scientists have finally discovered exactly what created the gigantic antimatter cloud that surrounds the center of our galaxy. In other news, a gigantic antimatter cloud circles our galaxy.

Scientists have observed the largest black hole found to-date. So large it took another black hole orbiting the primary to understand just how big it was. I can't get my head around a mound of 18 million pennies. Don't ask me to comprehend something that's 18 billion times bigger than the sun. Just won't do it, no sir not me.

Bad news: gigantic gas cloud to hit Milky Way galaxy. Good news (of a sort): ETA, 20 million years. So you'll have plenty of time to pack away the dishes, sort of thing.

Slashdot linked up news that scientists have discovered an extremely rare Einstein "double ring". Created when three galaxies line up perfectly behind each other while being great distances apart, the phenomena is an observable proof of Einstein's general relativity. It's not often you get to see a picture of space-time being warped by gravity, eh?

While it hasn't exactly arrived yet, NASA Mercury probe MESSENGER will be making a very close fly-by on its way toward a permanent orbit. Scientists are expecting some good science to be produced, since this is only the second probe to ever get close to the planet.

And how about that tortured acronym?

Science coming from the Stardust probe's material is beginning to be published. Pretty good for something that made a small hole in a big desert when it came home.

Space.com has some speculations about what, exactly, would happen should that asteroid actually smack Mars. Good news: the rover should be plenty far away enough to be safe. Bad news: still doesn't look like it's going to actually hit the planet.

Now that scientists have a better idea what to look for, they're coming up with new ideas to scan Jupiter's most enigmatic moon, Europa. Thankfully, not all of them require sending (and, therefore, funding) a new probe. If Ares V ever makes it to production, we'll be able to send heavier probes, like a potential Europa lander, faster. No more three year loops around the solar system!

It would appear the odds of a previously announced potential impact on Mars have increased substantially. More refinements will be needed for a definitive prediction, but right now it's 1 in 25. Nice to know it's happening to someone else's planet.

Scientists have announced the first observation of an extra-solar planet via reflected light. For now it's still more pictures of wacky twirling gas giants, but it would seem only a matter of time before we're able to directly observe earth-like worlds.

Olivia's already going to grow up in a world in which the discovery of extra-solar planets is considered routine. Kinda wild we may be peering directly at such things before she graduates high school.

A group of US Astronomers believe there's a chance an asteroid could strike Mars some time next year. If it does, the 50-meter wide object may create an explosion roughly comparable to that of the 1908 Tunguska incident. NASA believes if an impact does occur it should be close enough to the Opportunity rover to provide good observations from that platform.

Mark gets a no-prize he can use to mess up whiskey for bringing us news of the discovery of active glaciers on Mars. As per usual, scientists are in disagreement over just how these things form, but, if Martian life exists and is hiding underground, these formations would be an ideal place to start searching for them.

Astronomers see gigantic explosions all the time. They don't often see them out in the middle of nowhere, with no obvious source. Those damned teenagers got loose and blew up another Death Star, I tell ya.

Scientists have observed a giant beam of charged particles being fired from one galaxy into another. Any Earth-like planets in any part of the beam would have their ozone layers blasted away in the space of months or years, making underground real-estate in such areas premium grade.

In all seriousness, it's thought the unique pair will provide insight into how particles and beams interact.

The Mars rovers, and the Mars orbital probes, just keep moving on. This time with "innocent bystander" and "gullies carved by uphill flow" goodness!

Scientists have discovered that the solar system is "squashed" by the force of the local interstellar magnetic field. The concept of something as big as our solar envelope being "sloshed" makes my head 'asplode. Surf Sol!

Looks like super-massive black holes may have started life inside still-active stars. It's one way to account for the existence of such odd beasts, some of which have apparently been around for so long it's difficult to explain their existence via the normal "grab-and-swallow" method more commonly understood. Just when you thought the universe couldn't get any weirder...

The ESA has released a new summary of findings from the Venus Express probe. This one includes some pretty neat animations!

It seems the Earth's moon is quite rare. Considering the way it formed, I'm not completely surprised. I do think it's interesting we are beginning to predict which solar systems might have moons like ours. Gives us another reason to keep looking.

Northrop Grumman has announced the successful test of an innovate type of rocket engine. Looks like it's a smallish one, at least for now meant mainly for maneuvering rockets. Still, a rocket engine with no moving parts aside from a few valves sounds like a damned impressive achievement. Here's to scaling up!

Making the rounds: A Japanese probe to the moon has re-created one of the most famous photographs of all time. I wonder if this one is of appreciably high resolution than the last? Large format cameras of the 1960s had some pretty impressive specs, ya know.

Scientists have determined the brightest supernova ever recorded was caused by a giant pileup of giant stars. It's probably for the best we were some 240 million light years away when it happened. Something tells me it wouldn't be very pleasant if it happened up close.

Scientists appear to be getting serious about sending a rover to Venus. The hook? A cooling system with roots that go back nearly two centuries. Seems there's no idea too old to be made new again, eh?

Scientists are finding more proof that phenomena of gamma ray energy bursts are caused by supermassive black holes at the centers of nearby galaxies. I'd call this solved, but I think this is the fourth or fifth "solution" we've linked up over the years.

Another intrepid group of scientists has made a claim on the location of the Tunguska crater. They claim the ultimate resting place of whatever the hell it was that blasted the remote Siberian area is underneath Lake Cheko, a small body of water a few miles north of the main devastation zone.

The "missing mass" of the universe, once thought discovered, seems to have disappeared once again. It would seem the team which claimed the first discovery realized, from later evidence, that their energy sources were nowhere near as massive as they first thought. Poof! No more mass for you!

I think. Due to remodeling most of my office's ceiling tiles are down and there's a roaring plenum over my head. Thinking's hard when your ears are ringing.

Some scientists believe the previously reported "cold spot" in the universe is actually a cosmic defect. Others are, of course, not so sure. And I couldn't find any inklings as to just what such a thing might mean to the naked apes living in a nondescript portion of a universe with a defect far far away. But that's just me.

The beleaguered standard model of the universe got a boost today with the discovery of a long-predicted, but never before observed, bunch of supermassive black holes. By using the Spitzer and Chandra orbiting observatories, scientists for the first time were able to take images of previously unobservable quasars, ancient structures which are formed by the aforementioned black holes.

A previously little-remarked comet has suddenly become much brighter. So bright it seems to be visible even in brightly lit urban areas. While not much more than a speck now, it will soon grow a tail that should make it one of the more impressive comets to trace the northern sky in quite some time.

Predictably, we're forecast for cloudy skies most of the week.

Space.com is carrying this interesting roundup of enduring mysteries about our sun. It's nowhere near as well known as you think.

Scientists have announced the discovery of the most Earth-like extra-solar planet found to-date. This sorta sounds like the last one we linked up, but I'm not completely sure. As I understand it, the next generation of space telescopes will be able to directly image these bodies.

Scientists are beginning to think perhaps Mars's volcanoes aren't extinct, but merely dormant. The evidence from new, more precise probes like the Mars Global Surveyor seem to indicate that a single "hot spot", moving underneath the Martian crust, may have powered all the volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge. This is exactly opposite of what happens here on Earth, bringing yet more weirdness into one of the more peculiar places in the solar system.

There appears to be more and more evidence that Saturn's moons are rich in water. Without the monstrous radiation emissions that bathe the similar Jupiter moon system, it would appear possible, perhaps even likely, that the second-largest planet in our solar system may end up the most likely place for extraterrestrial life.

Planetary flybys don't just happen every day, ya know, so even if your probe is ultimately bound for Pluto, it's always a good idea to take pictures of Jupiter as you go by. I mean, since you're in the neighborhood anyway...

While I'm just about certain these trees on Mars, well, aren't, it would be interesting to hear what NASA thinks they really are. Assuming, of course, they really are pictures of Mars, and not something in the back yard of a New Mexico trailer park.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a new "periodic" comet, similar to the world-famous Halley's comet. Even more interesting, this one appears to be some sort of "extinct" comet nuclei, orbiting the sun very closely, about once every two years.

The Mars Odyssey space probe has discovered evidence of caves on Mars. They're way up high, on the upper slopes of Arsia Mons, which is a sister volcano to the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. While it's quite unlikely these particular caverns could host life, their existence implies there may be caves at much lower altitudes which could provide shelter for current or former life.

Making the rounds: Google is now offering a 30 million dollar "x-prize" for the first group of privately-funded individuals to place a robotic rover on the moon. Now that I think about it, this may not be as utterly impossible as it may at first seem. I'm pretty sure there are commercial launch vehicles capable of putting a sizable unmanned payload into lunar orbit, and of course there is a lot of existing expertise out there in remote exploration rovers. Which is not to say it'll be easy, just that it most likely won't be impossible.

Cassini's recent close flyby of Saturn's moon Iapetus has revealed it to be even weirder than previously thought. Considering it was already one strange bit of football-shaped stuff, that's really saying something.

... if he stepped on them in the night:

The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing. These nine Lego-like "building block" galaxies initially detected by Hubble likely contributed to the construction of the universe as we know it.

Of course, the question is are these lego-like because of some grand pattern of How Things Get Put Together, or do we just think of them that way to make something mind-numbingly awesome at least somewhat comprehensible?

It seemed so obvious to me I never really gave it much thought, but really, how do you measure the rotation of a gas planet? After all, there's nothing fixed on the surface. In the case of Saturn, the problem is actually quite vexing:

Using data collected by NASA's Cassini, Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, scientists have revised the ringed planet's rotation period to 10 hours, 32 minutes and 35 seconds-about 15 minutes shorter than an estimate made only last year.

Those precious minutes could have big implications for how scientists think about Saturn and other gas giants.

"While that may seem like a small uncertainty for the average person, it makes an enormous difference in terms of how we can understand the interior of Saturn," said study team member Gerald Schubert of the University of California, Los Angeles.

It's not as if we can throw a plum bob down there, ya know?

Scientists have announced the discovery of an asteroid breakup event which eventually lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. By using sophisticated computer models, a joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague found an impact event that broke up the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina 160 million years ago created an unstable debris field, members of which eventually slammed into both the Earth and the Moon.

Scientists believe they've solved a major problem that has been a stumbling block in planet formation theory for thirty years. Sure, they start out as small accretions and build up from there, but why don't they all get sucked into their parent star? The solution has more to do with semi trucks and interstates than you'd at first think.

Congratulations to Boeing for winning the contract to produce the Ares I upper stage. Seems like we're one more step closer to replacing the Shuttle and (theoretically, at least) returning to the moon.

Scientists have discovered an enormous void in the universe, more than a billion light years across. Current theories do not account for a structure like this existing, so it'll be back to the drawing boards for the astrophysicists. Again.

Hey, they gotta keep busy somehow, ya know?

Robert H. gets a no-prize that's the same size as a ball point pen for bringing us another nifty "universe to scale" model. The one I like best is the one set up on the DC Mall. Pluto is a damned long way off!

Armadillo Aerospace's entry for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge x-prize contest has literally crashed and burned. Apparently they were considered the walk-away winners, so now the field is both more level and interesting. Rockets R hard!

Scientists may have discovered an entirely new type of asteroid. Two objects, (7472) Kumakiri and (10537) 1991 RY16, contain basalt, a mineral which should be abundant in the belt but isn't. If scientists can prove these objects originated from previously-known sources (such as the astronomical body Vesta), then all is well. If not, back to the drawing board yet again.

Some scientists are invoking an extremely exotic object to account for an observed supernova that was 100 times brighter than it should be. A substance that's denser than neutron start stuff which turns matter that touches it into more of that substance is some damned queer material, I gotta say. Of course, that's assuming it exists at all.

Looks like Virginia's not going to get a full solar eclipse any time soon. Dammit. However, in '24 it looks like New York (and Ohio) will be on the list. Weirdly enough, Arkansas, which has never had a full solar eclipse in my lifetime (that I can recall), will also see the '24 event and will damned near see another in '17.

Of course, I'm sure Ellen, Olivia, or Gimpy Gramma will have given me a heart attack by then, so you all enjoy yourselves, ya hear?

Via Violins and Starships.

Scientists have observed a comet-like trail a massive 13 light-years long behind the star Mira. By using the new ultra-violet telescope Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex), scientists were able to capture a unique image of the dying star. It's hoped that by examining the "tail" in greater, well, detail, scientists will be able to determine much more about its history.

Scientists have discovered that at least some quasars are powered by consuming outside galaxies. Not all of them do this, but there are enough of them to be observed consistently. The early universe was a very inhospitable place!

Slashdot is reporting the announcement of the first "hotel in space." Scheduled to open for business in 2012, a three night stay is expected to cost $4 million dollars. Sure, there are most likely enough people willing to pay that much to make it profitable, but considering there is no commercial orbital vehicle in operation or even in the planning stages (to my knowledge at least), how they gonna get there?

Personally, until shown otherwise I'm placing this one on the same shelf that all the Popular Mechanics pipe dreams sit on.

Ron gets a no-prize no insurance adjuster in the world's gonna look at for bringing us news of the mother of all intergalactic pileups. Includes comparison of the day, "galaxies as dust bunnies."

The recently-launched Mars Phoenix lander has some surprising cargo. My first thought was, "why didn't you strap a library of useful stuff on that thing?" Which immediately led me to, "who decides what's useful?" which just screams, "giant, unwieldy committee that takes four times as long to do half as much." They were probably better off just including the Sci-fi.

Via ASFD.

Scientists have announced the discovery of the biggest planet in the universe. Well, the biggest planet we've found so far in the local area, at any rate. It's size and density are difficult to account for with today's planetary models, so it would seem this one will trigger another round of revisions.

Spaceflight Now is reporting the Mars rover Opportunity is experiencing a critical power shortage. The dust storms continue to block the sun, and now settling dust is making the solar arrays less efficient. According to the report, they're right at the break-even point for minimum operations. If the rover experience a net loss in power, it apparently goes into a special survival mode which could last days, weeks, even months until the available power rises again. Where are those mysterious Martian homeless people with their glasses of Windex when you need them?

Scientists are claiming to have found a potential cause of the cyclical mass extinctions Earth has experienced throughout its history. By examining the "roller-coaster" like way the sun orbits the center of our galaxy, scientists discovered that the times when our solar system is at its highest or lowest in relation to the galactic plane corresponded exactly with periods of mass extinction on Earth. It's thought that during those times the entire solar system is more vulnerable to exotic, and dangerous, cosmic rays emanating from intergalactic space. More research must be done, of course, but to my knowledge it's definitely a plausible explanation of these mysterious events.

NASA is proposing to fly the Cassini space probe directly through the geyser plume discovered on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Scientists apparently really want to know what's in the plume, and this is the simplest way to do it. According to the director of NASA's Planetary Division in Washington, D.C. James Green, there are dangers but they're manageable. Time to wash the probe!

Carrie gets a no-prize full of wonder for bringing us the Hubble Space Telescope's picture gallery. It even has way-nifty Hubble wallpaper for your PC! Woot!

I'm sure fans of Queen have known for a long time that guitarist Brian May was an astrophysics student when the band started out. I bet they don't know that he's finally getting his PhD this year. I think. British uni != US uni, so the rules may be different. At any rate, at least it's good to see he's keeping busy.

Slashdot linked up Space.com's top 10 list of Mars rover discoveries. I thought the one about Mars's geological eras was the most interesting of all. Not sure how that got past us the first time.

Scientists have discovered that the iron that enriches stars with planets seems to be coming from the planets, and are not part of the star's makeup. Stars which show strong iron signatures are much more likely to have planets than those which don't. Scientists weren't sure whether the star formed with the iron, or if the iron "fell" onto the star like chocolate powder on the dessert in the title. By examining red giant stars with planets, scientists did not find the expected iron signature, strongly suggesting that the iron is pollution from the planetary disk, and not something that the star formed with.

Slashdot today linked up this intriguing article detailing the difficulties involved in getting a manned mission to the surface of Mars. There's a surprising number of difficulties involved, to the point that (according to the article) we simply have no idea how it can be done with current technologies. Which is to say, if we really want to do it it's going to be a helluva lot more expensive than NASA first believed.

Which is another way of saying, "business as usual at NASA."

Scientists have discovered a whole cluster of galaxies colliding with each other. Unlike the previously discovered (and aptly named) bullet cluster, whose collision we see from the side, this cluster faces us with the collision oriented head-on. Having two different views of the same spectacularly humongous type of event will of course provide important insights into just how these things happen. And make me want to go have a lie down.

In other news, "humongous" is actually in Firefox's spell check dictionary. Ask me how I know!

This reminds me of college:

The three-man crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will do a little housekeeping during a spacewalk next week to make way for future expansion of the laboratory.

On July 23, Expedition 15 crewmember Clayton Anderson will journey outside of the space station to throw two large hunks of unneeded equipment towards Earth, officials said during a press conference today at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

I mean, doesn't everyone toss something out the window of their first high rise?

Scientists claim to have discovered the most distant galaxies found to-date. By using gravitational lensing and the 10 meter Keck telescope, a team of scientists have discovered six galaxies approximately 13 billion light-years away, at a time when the universe was only four percent of its present age. If I'm reading the article correctly, these objects are thought to represent some of the very first objects that could be visible at all, since conditions that allowed stars to "turn on" are thought to have occurred right around that time.

I think. Ultra-deep space astrophysics make my head hurt. But it's a good pain!

Scientists have discovered conclusive evidence of water on a planet outside the solar system. Unfortunately it's one of those wacky twirly gas giants, with a surface temperature somewhere around 1000K no less, so no LGM are expected.

Looks like Orbital Express is not dead yet. Feeling much better, in fact. The Astro, the servicing side of the pair, has at least 300 pounds of propellant left, so it'd seem ashame to just dump it all into the sea.

Ron gets a no-prize with a wicked cool propulsion system for bringing us this update on NASA's Dawn space probe. After several trials and tribulations which nearly derailed the whole program, Dawn is scheduled to launch next Monday. It's mission is to visit several prominent asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. What enables this probe to do the to-date unprecedented task of orbiting and de-orbiting various objects is the real innovation: an ion engine which, while not powerful by terrestrial standards, is plenty strong enough to get the job done efficiently and economically.

I wonder if it'll make that cool howling noise as it goes by?

NASA has purchased a 19 million dollar toilet from the Russians for the ISS. The Space Shuttle's toilet was an running joke in the 1980s, so I'm actually rather happy NASA has decided to pony up for a design already in use. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

The Orbital Express satellites have completed their mission and will now be retired. I haven't been following the program as closely as I had when things were starting out, but according to the article it passed all the tests set out for it. Now it seems to just be a matter of waiting for the satellites to fall into the sea.

The long-suffering Mars rovers are stuck in a sandstorm so bad it's affecting their ability to collect sunlight for power. They've both been set to low power-level activity, but it's thought the worst may now be past.

Repeated fly-byes of the Cassini space probe have revealed that at least 40% of the volume of Saturn's largest irregular moon, Hyperion, is empty space. This helps to account for the moon's extremely cratered appearance, as hitting such a "soft" object would make for deep craters with little chance of being refilled.

On July 4, 1054 A.D. a supernova appeared in the sky. It must have been a spectacular sight to those ancient sky watchers. Outshining the most brilliant stars in the heavens, it was even seen during daylight. Although such a brilliant object must have been seen by many around the world, what we know of this event comes mainly from the ancient Chinese chronicles.

What we now know as Messier 1, or the Crab Nebula, is the remnant of this supernova explosion. Although this nebula was discovered in 1731 by John Bevis, an amateur astronomer, and then independently rediscovered by Charles Messier in 1758, it was not until professional astronomers Hubble (1928) and Mayall (1939) wrote papers suggesting that the Chinese "guest star" of 1054 A.D. be interpreted as the supernova associated with the Crab Nebula. Since then, exhaustive searches to find historic corroborating references in the world literature have taken place.

Check out the entire history here.

Not quite your very own trip to space, but it's still nice to watch. I wonder how well the Pelican Nebula can be imaged with a more pedestrian telescope?

The European Space Agency is engaging various Euro industrial groups to explore the creation of a man-rated booster and space capsule. It's all part of the Crew Space Transportation System initiative, which is looking to create an independent manned system primarily to access the ISS. Considering NASA's rocky record of getting there and back, it sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Scientists have observed a supermassive star dying in a previously unobserved type of double explosion. It appears the star, in the galaxy UGC4904 (78 million light years away in the Lynx constellation), was about 50 to 100 times the mass of the Sun, and generated at least two massive explosions in its death throes. The discovery has implications which could change the way we model star birth and death.

The Costa Rica-based Ad Astra rocket company has tested its new plasma rocket under continuous power for more than four hours. If the technology matures into a production engine, it could make for cheaper high-altitude orbits and faster interplanetary travel. A good thing!

Scientists now claim to have found definitive evidence that Mars once had very large oceans of liquid water on its surface. They did this not through examination of rover data, but instead by carefully examining the surface features of the planet, which revealed a deformed coastline warped by a "toppling" of the planet.

Aviation Week and Space Technology this week is featuring this detailed report on the upcoming Phoenix Mars probe. Scheduled to launch later this year and arrive in the summer of '08, this nearly Viking-sized probe will use a variety of advanced robotic laboratories to explore the north polar region of the red planet.

A new study seems to indicate that Mars has a completely molten core. The conclusion was reached by creating the temperature and pressure thought to be found there on a model of the core. This finding matches well with other observations, such as how easily the sun is able to distort the planet's shape. The finding supplies a neat explanation as to why Mars's magnetic field turned off so long ago while the Earth's keeps going strong. It also predicts that some day Mars's magnetic field could turn itself back on.

Scientists are predicting that super massive black holes can not only be "bounced" out of their galaxies, but can be detected by the accretion disk that follows them. The event is supposed to occur when two large galaxies merge with two fast-spinning black holes in their center. The merging black holes would emit gravitational radiation along a specific axis, booting the thing in the backside to the tune of perhaps ten million miles per hour (~ 15% of the speed of light).

Assuming the accretion disks are going much faster than the now larger and moving black hole, the newly merged disk should travel along with it "like sheep following a shepherd," being bright enough to see for perhaps several million years. Even then, the objects would still be quite difficult, but not impossible, to detect.

After that, one presumes, it's completely invisible, and perhaps impossible to track as it barrels through space, gobbling up anything unfortunate enough to be in its path.

Sleep well tonight!

And some of them even have drops to drink. It's nice to know that we're finally able to resolve entire solar systems that look like ours. However, "like" would seem to be a relative term since ours has planets with relatively circular orbits, instead of the highly elliptical ones found among the 28 new discoveries announced. However, the resolution will only get better (the "stellar wobble" technique has already improved by a factor of 10), so it may only be a matter of time before we can actually see pictures of these things.

Scientists have proposed a theory that, approximately 3 trillion years from now, the universe will appear to be static. The thinking goes that around that time the information that allows an expanding universe to be deduced will have disappeared over the visible horizon. So it won't be static, it'll just look that way.

"I'm not a static universe, but I play one on TV."

Making the rounds: the Mars rover Spirit has found even more evidence for a "wet Mars". You'd think by now the case was closed.

Scientists have developed a theory as to what is causing the mysterious water plumes discovered on the Saturn moon Enceladus. Every time the moon twirls around Saturn, a period of 1.37 days, gravitational forces stretch and compress the icy crust on the moon's surface. The resulting heat and pressure works on fissures known as "tiger stripes", liquefying enough water to create the jets visible in various Cassini pictures of the moon. While it does indicate there is liquid water somewhere on the moon, it most likely is very deep, on the order of several miles. This considerably complicates any attempt to sample or explore this potential source of extra-terrestrial liquid water.

The recently-reported Orbital Express satellite rendezvous program has experienced a critical error. Looks like one of its critical sensor control computers just flat died, causing a mission abort and fail-safe maneuver that resulted in the two satellites to end up a few miles apart. The backup computer is working properly, but the program's schedule is now seriously messed up. The current theory is that the primary may have gotten zapped by high energy radiation.

Using sophisticated techniques and the Spitzer infrared telescope, scientists have created the first map of an extra-solar planet. It's of one of those loopy gas giants twirling away two blocks from its sun, and it doesn't seem to show that much, but it is a map. It's hoped the techniques, when used with the upcoming James Webb space telescope, will enable scientists to map more Earth-like planets.

A group of scientists has put forward a theory that claims the earliest stars in the universe may have been "snuffed out" by massive influxes of dark matter. I think. At least, that's what the article seems to be saying anyway. Astrophysics, especially about stuff that nobody's completely sure exists anyway, makes my head hurt.

DARPA's Orbital Express program is moving right along. OE is a proof-of-concept exercise to explore technologies that will enable automated in-space refueling and maintenance. So far all tests have been passed, and the program's final (and very complex) test should occur some time in the next few weeks.

One group of scientists think an extremely energetic supernova observed last year may have been caused by an exotic form of stellar collapse involving antimatter. The thinking goes that if a first-generation star was extremely massive, on the order of 150 times the mass of the sun, the high temperature and pressure would create conditions ideal for converting some of the star's photons into pairs of electrons and their antimatter opposite positrons*. This would result in a pressure drop, making the whole star unstable, eventually causing runaway nuclear reactions that rip the star apart and spew who knows what sort of exotic stuff into space.

At least, that's one hypothesis. Other scientists, of course, disagree. The article doesn't mention what sort of predictions are made by this team, but presumably there are some which can be tested in the future.

Ain't physics fun?

----
* I think, although the article does not explicitly state, that this is a natural case of inverting Einstein's E=mc². Unfortunately my algebra is so atrophied I can't even write the equation for turning energy into mass. Sue me.

The long-serving Martian rovers have come out of winter hibernation in style with Spirit discovering proof of explosive volcanic eruptions some time in Mars's past. While it may seem obvious, Martian volcanoes are primarily (maybe even exclusively) basaltic, whose eruptions are not normally explosive. Liquid water can make basaltic eruptions go "boom" via steam, so this seems to be yet another confirmation that liquid water once existed on the Martian surface.

Scientists think they may have discovered the dismembered remains of a galaxy trailing in our own's wake. That is one hypothesis which could describe how the globular cluster NGC 2808 ended up with three distinct generations of stars inside it instead of the far more common one. The thinking goes this may have been a dwarf galaxy that was taken apart by the Milky Way's gravity billions of years ago.

No, really, space.com is carrying a short film on what, exactly, happens when two stars hit each other out in interstellar space. As with most things involving such objects, the first answer is, "it depends." The second answer is a lot more colorful. Kinda puts a whole new perspective on that fender bender you had awhile back, no?

Spaceflightnow is featuring the coolest celestial panorama you'll see today. The largest too, as this anniversary present from the Hubble telescope is the largest ever made by that instrument.

Scientists have found what appears to be the smallest Earth-like planet outside the solar system. It's five times the mass and whirls around its sun every 13 days, but it appears to be the only one discovered so far that inhabits the "sweet spot" where temperatures and light should be just right to allow liquid water to exist, potentially making it a place where life could exist. The upcoming Spitzer telescope should be sensitive enough to gather more data on this enigmatic object.

Scientists have developed a new technique for imaging Earth-sized planets that's passed all its lab tests and "could literally be put on a space telescope today." Unfortunately the only promising candidate is the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, which (predictably) has no funds at the moment.

Ron gets a supermassive no-prize for bringing us this report on "ghost spirals" observed in a (relatively) nearby galaxy. By using a set of continually evolving (and increasingly sensitive) instruments, scientists have been able to determine the size, shape, and composition of "arms" of matter being shot out by the rather ungainly-named M106 galaxy's central black hole. The discovery proves, in a graphic and conclusive way, that these jets need not be perpendicular to plane of the galaxy in which they reside.

Aside from being just plain damned cool, the discovery and continued observations should provide insights into other wacky celestial objects.

Ron gets an inflatable no-prize for bringing us the latest progress report on Bigelow industries, who's eponymous founder hopes to one day make space-based hotel visits a reality. Aviation Week has been covering his progress for several years now, and as noted in this article their reporting has been that the space stations are the (relatively) easy part. The trick is for someone else to come up with a commercially viable manned orbital solution, which is orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than what Rutan's bunch did with SpaceShip One.

Slashdot linked up news of the discovery of one of the most symmetrical objects ever seen. As I read the article, the symmetry isn't in the squarish cloud, but rather in bands made of unknown material that cross the cloud's surface.

Scientists now think they'll be able to tell what color the plants will be on another planet. The thinking goes that the light reflected by a planet will be strongly affected by the color of the plants growing on it, creating a tell-tale signature that should be readable.

From across interstellar space.

Ain't science grand?

Robert H. gets a graduated no-prize for bringing us this interesting look at all solar system bodies greater than 200 miles in diameter. Note the Sun is so big it has no appreciable curve, and Jupiter's is only just noticeable.

NASA scientists have used the Cassini space probe to image a bizarre cloud formation above the north pole of Saturn. Shaped like a hexagon and about four times the size of Earth, the feature was imaged previously by both Voyager space probes, indicating it is either very stable or recurs regularly. As with most weird space observations, scientists currently have no explanation for it.

Scientists are reporting that, just as with single-star systems, planets appear to be quite common around multi-star systems as well. The orbital mechanics of such a thing must be enough to make any astrophysicist's eyes water.

"We are also aware that her most famous attributes may require special treatment, so we are planning on using the best quality marble only."

...move my body all nightlong.

WTF? Samantha Fox as a town statue?

NASA recently calibrated its new STEREO-B solar observation satellite, and unlike most calibrations the results were most definitely worth a look. I can't wait for the 3-D movies of sun storms to start coming out.

Scientists have discovered a massive amount of water ice buried under the south pole of Mars. Supposedly they've found enough to cover the whole planet to a depth of 30 feet. Strangely, this huge amount isn't large enough to explain many of the geological signs of water that have been found. However, this would appear to be only the first dataset from the last-to-be-deployed MARSIS radar probe installed on the Mars Express orbiter. Scientists will next try to measure the north pole, and then as much of the rest of the planet as they can. Who knows? It may all still be there.

Scientists have discovered even more evidence of liquids on the surface of Titan. This time the bodies of what are presumed to be liquid methane are near the poles and as big as Lake Superior. There's still no direct evidence that they are in fact filled with liquid, but no other likely explanation seems to have been proposed.

No, really, radioactive stockings! If it means mo' bettah' space probes, I'm all for it!

Scientists have come up with a new theory to explain the sulfate-rich deposits found by the Mars rover Opportunity. In this scenario, groundwater bubbles up to the surface and then evaporates, leaving behind the mineral deposits. This does not necessarily preclude oceans or other large water bodies elsewhere on Mars, but it does neatly explain the unique conditions found at Meridiani Planum.

The Cassini probe is at it again, this time returning unprecedented "high angle" pictures of Saturn's rings, and a movie of what it looks like to cross the ring plane. Amazing to think those structures are the leftovers from a collision thought to have taken place during the time of the dinosaurs.

The Rosetta space probe has completed its final orbital insertion maneuvers, in the process returning spectacular pictures of Martian clouds and weather. This makes something like half a dozen gizmos orbiting Mars (some long dead, others brand new), with more to come. Getting kinda busy over there, eh?

Clouds of dust (or even iron) may be obscuring predicted signs of water on extrasolar planets. The fact we can even observe such fine detail on something so far away is damned impressive.

An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday.

Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.

Oh great!

Looks like the Mars rovers are going to be even more capable this season. With the MRO slowly going blind it's nice to know the rovers are still going strong.

Looks like another potential test for string theory has popped up. Of course, they don't appear certain they can create black holes with the Large Hadron Collider, but if they can, and if those black holes have rings (no, really!) then it'll be a confirmation that our universe has more than its perceived number of dimensions. I think. Cosmology is hard.

It appears the recently-arrived MRO is slowly going blind. It'd be nice if they at least knew why.

So if the universe is destined to shatter into a billion pieces, with each piece forming a new universe, what, exactly, are they all traveling in? I mean, we're not talking about a sun exploding and flinging crap all over the place, we're talking about the place itself coming apart and re-forming in on itself. I think.

I'm going to go soak my head for awhile...

Looks like another test for string theory has been devised. With so many possible tests being suggested nowadays, I can't help but think something will happen in this field, soon.

Today's spectacular photo of an astronomical object comes to you via this SpaceflightNow article on a Cassini image of Saturn. Psychedelic indeed!

Scientists are doing even more research on so-called "hot Jupiters", and the results are just as bizarre as you'd expect them to be. Something bigger than Jupiter whirling around its star every 3.5 days. Who the hell ordered that?

Pat gets a mysterious no-prize for bringing us this update on "dark energy" research. It's an older article, but still discusses things I hadn't encountered before. Just when you thought the universe couldn't get any weirder...

FYI, these space pixes were taken today at Air And Space in D.C. by yours truely.

Seems that diamonds come in every damned color available, even black. Of course, since black diamonds seem to be made by supernova explosions, I personally think they're way cooler than the other kinds. My wife, the Queen of Bling, may disagree. Then again, she may not, and now suddenly has a new gem on her acquisition list.

Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy.

BBCnews is carrying this report detailing the discovery of what could become the largest and brightest comet in the solar system. Don't hold your breath though, as it looks like the football-shaped 2003 EL61 won't be wobbling inward until perhaps 2 million years from now.

Spaceflightnow is celebrating the second anniversary of the Huygens probe landing with this nice summary of what's been discovered about the enigmatic moon since. I still think slaloming across a lake of methane would be interesting. At least there nobody'd be showing up in a speedo!

Space.com is reporting the MRO has found the Mars Pathfinder probe, and may also have imaged the breadbox-sized rover Sojourner as well. NASA lost contact with Pathfinder (and, since Pathfinder was required to transmit Sojourner's signals, the rover was lost as well) after three months of operation in 1997. Imaging suggests Sojourner traveled back to its Pathfinder base in an attempt to contact it.

For some reason I'm reminded of a dog trying to wake its dead master, all alone in the desert. Geeze, when did I get so sappy?

Latest theory about the disappearance of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? It's not a bug, it's a feature. Oh well, it'd been there for 10 years, I suppose it'd fully depreciated. Or something like that.

Hopefully it wasn't another conversion mistake.

Mark gets his second no-prize of the day for letting us know this afternoon may be a great time to see a comet. Yeah, it's just a general link, so tomorrow it'll probably say something else. Take our word for it, this afternoon after sunset go look in the western sky. It may even be visible to the naked eye.

I always wondered why, if the Earth were so damned bright on certain radio frequencies, why we didn't listen to those frequencies when searching for ET. Eventually I found out it was because the telescopes of the time couldn't tell terrestrial signals from extra-terrestrial ones. Now that appears to have changed.

I wonder if an alien species would be embarrassed that the first we found out about it was by picking up its re-runs of I Love LU-324'ingy?

AAAG! I killed it:

Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing.

The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said.

NASA's sending a new probe to Mars later this year, and they've already expressed interest in trying to test the predictions this guy is making about what Martian life actually looks like. Of course, since the probe is already built, they'll have to figure out a way using existing tools. Something to keep an eye on, if nothing else.

Slashdot linked up the first images confirming the existence of liquid methane lakes on Saturn's moon Titan. Bet it'd be interesting to water ski on that.

Space.com is carrying this summary of planned activities for the two Mars rovers now that the Martian winter has ended. In short, it appears Opportunity will be sent to the bottom of Victoria crater, where it's been prowling the rim for some time. Spirit will return to "home plate", a previously explored region which turned out to have many more interesting targets revealed when the MRO used its hi-resolution camera to image the area.

Slashdot linked up this "top ten astronomy pictures of 2006." I especially liked the shot of the space shuttle and ISS crossing the sun, but they're all really neat.

Ron gets a no-prize beyond comprehension for bringing us photos of the recent "solar tsunami". Sometimes it's hard for me to remember that thing is just a gigantic ball of gas. Something tells me it's most likely nowhere near that simple.

Slashdot linked up news that NASA may have imaged the oldest objects to have formed in the universe. By using the new Spitzer infra-red telescope, and a great deal of computer power, scientists believe the clusters of bright, "monstrous" objects they've found are more than 13 billion light-years away. Just what those objects are is still unclear, but current theory seems to think they're smallish proto-galaxies composed of supermassive early stars.

Slashdot linked up NASA's latest Mars reports. This time the article includes pictures taken by the new MRO, which is returning spectacular images.

Pat gets a dark and mysterious no-prize for bringing us the latest developments in dark energy research. By combining Hubble space telescope observations with increasingly powerful ground-based systems, scientists have determined this mysterious force has been around since the beginning of the universe, but only became a real factor in its evolution in the past 4-5 billion years.

Pat gets a no-prize that dribbles water when nobody's looking for bringing us the latest Mars news. Looks like the late, lamented Mars Global Surveyor has found evidence that liquid water may have been flowing on the surface of Mars as little as just a few years ago. The implications for life on the red planet are, of course, profound. However, not everyone is convinced. The much more capable Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may be able to help confirm or deny the evidence.

NASA has released new images of the Mars rover Spirit taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The article also includes links to images of both Viking landers as well as Spirit's twin Opportunity. They're not much more than dots, but do at least seem to provide proof that LGMs* didn't 'jack the Vikings after we lost contact with them.

----
* Little Green Men. Hello? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?

Looks like NASA's giving up on the Mars Global Surveyor. At 10 years, I'd say it's had a good run. At least it hung on until the MRO got there.

Today's moment of celestial awe is brought to you by NASA's Spitzer and Hubble telescopes.

I've often heard it said science is cold because it takes all the wonder out of the world. For me, it takes the wonder of an unquestioning child and replaces it with something far more powerful, complex, and amazing.

BBCnews is carrying this summary of the discovery of a gigantic hurricane-like storm at Saturn's south pole. The thing is 5,000 miles across, and shows no sign of movement away from the pole. The article includes an extremely cool picture of the storm, whose appearance inspired our title.

Slashdot linked up news that NASA has lost contact with Mars Global Surveyor probe. The probe's control team celebrated its 10th anniversary just a few days ago.

The latest contender for the mysterious cosmic rays which are detected regularly but have no obvious source is perhaps gas left over from the Big Bang. By using the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, a team of astronomers led by Joydeep Bagchi of the University of Pune in India observed giant shock waves. These waves could have been formed by the collision of two gigantic galactic clusters about a billion years ago, but they also may have been created through the interaction of "filaments" of left-over gas from the Big Bang running into the much hotter gas given off by the cluster. Such a cold/hot boundary would be excellent at accelerating particles to stupendous speeds, and are therefore prime candidates for the mysterious cosmic rays.

See? Simple!

The Japanese solar probe Hinode has activated its primary sensors, and boy the stuff they see sure looks cool. Bubbles as big as continents! The sun has bubbles! I like exclamation points!

Hey, it's Friday, what do you expect?

Ron gets a spectacular no-prize for bringing us this MSNBC slide show of recently-made astronomical pictures. The show includes several pictures from the newly operational Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as one very cool picture made by an amateur astronomer.

While our star seems to be a loner nowadays, recent findings seem to indicate this was not the way things started out.

We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard:

The third time was not the charm for homebuilt hardware designed to win a Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

A privately-built vertical takeoff and landing rocket shot for NASA Moon money today but failed at the Wirefly X Prize Cup—an expo of private rocketeers devoted to personal space travel.

Called Pixel, the craft quickly tipped over and crashed shortly after liftoff. An onboard fire was quickly doused.

Hey, I'd rather it crash now instead of on the Moon. They've got plenty of time, and wouldn't it be cool to have something like this actually make it?

Problem: Astronauts heading to Mars risk exposure to deadly radiation. Shielding is heavy, and therefore expensive, if launched from Earth.

Solution: Grab some shielding that's already out there.

While burrowing into and grabbing material from asteriods for shielding is all well and good, I wonder why a ship couldn't just hide in the shadow of one of these asteroids? Must be missing something, or the asteroids are a lot smaller than I'm visualizing.

If these scientists are right there may be far less water on the moon than was previously hoped, and it will be far harder to get at as well. I always thought an enormous ice rink at the lunar south pole was more what people wanted than what was actually there. Still, I'm curious to know what, if anything, the NASA probe that smashed into that very region a few months ago found. The silence is quite puzzling.

MSNBC is carrying this article detailing the discovery of a pair of "dancing asteroids". One is about a mile wide and not much more than a pile of rubble held together with gravity, the other is about a quarter that size and solid. Both rotate about each other, with the gravity of each affecting the other each turn. The larger of the pair, "Alpha", is also spinning so fast it's close to flying apart.

Ain't space science grand?

Space.com is carrying this report on scientists finally observing a galaxy being born. Of sorts. By imaging the Spiderweb galaxy, scientists have confirmed predictions that supermassive galaxies are formed by the merging of many smaller galaxies.

Galaxies. You know, billions of stars, that sort of thing. Merging in some monstrous, epoch-long dance.

Oh don't mind the noise. That was just my head exploding.

Fark linked up this nifty sequency of Saturn pictures, taken by the Cassini space probe. For once it actually looks like it could float in a bathtub.

The MRO has successfully imaged one of the Mars rovers, and SPACE.com is there. Maybe now they'll be able to figure out what eventually happened to the Vikings, or the lost landers from previous missions.

Spaceflightnow is carrying this update on the Pluto-bound New Horizons space probe. The probe took some long-distance images of Jupiter, mostly as a shake-down test of its systems. Much more information is expected when it performs a fly-by of the planet in 2007. It's not expected to arrive at the recently demoted planetoid sub-planet mini-me whatever the hell the astronomers are calling Pluto this week until 2015.

New Scientist is carrying this update on the Cassini space probe's recent flybys of Saturn's moon Titan. While they have found no evidence for oceans of liquid methane, they have found strong evidence of lakes of the stuff filling and emptying at the poles. As per usual, the obeservation teams aren't sure why it's happening, only that it is.

Space.com is carrying this update on the long-lived rovers. Opportunity has reached its latest destination, Victoria Crater, and the images it has returned show great promise:

"This is a geologist's dream come true," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for NASA's twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit. "Those layers of rock, if we can get to them, will tell us new stories about the environmental conditions long ago. We especially want to learn whether the wet era that we found recorded in the rocks closer to the landing site extended farther back in time. The way to find that out is to go deeper, and Victoria may let us do that."

Pretty good progress for an interplanetary riding lawn mower, no?

Slashdot linked up this high-resolution look at the "Mars Face", courtesy of the Mars Express space probe. Not surprisingly, when looked at in a higher resolution, the thing turns out to be just another big lump of rock.

Then again, that face image was taken in 1976. Those Martians, they're clever little buggers. Wouldn't put it past them to... oh, hang on. Damned foil hat fell off again...

Slashdot linked up news of a student-run attempt to get into space for not quite $2000. Now not only are we building our own spacecraft in various garages, our kids are doing it in their spare time. Put that in your madrassa and smoke it.

Fark linked up news of the discovery of lunar meteorite in Antarctica. About the size of a golf ball, the rock was collected during a 2005 expidition. Its composition is quite different than that of samples recovered by the Apollo moon missions, which apparently are thought to be quite anomalous compared with the rest of the moon. This new/old sample is thought to be more representative of "the moon as a whole."

Yeah, I don't know what it means either. But personally, I welcome our new lunar overlords!

Today's "well that shouldn't be there" astronomical moment is being brought to us by this BBC article:

Astronomers have found a strange new world that has them pondering again the essential properties of a planet.

This new object, designated HAT-P-1, orbits one member of a pair of stars 450 light-years away in the constellation Lacerta.

Hell they can barely agree on what a planet is when it's in our solar system. Small wonder something that far away can cause problems.

Slashdot linked up news of the discovery of the oldest galaxy yet found. At 12.88 billion years, it's close enough to the beginning of the universe that it's probably one of the oldest things we can see, since that's right around the time the hydrogen filling the universe became transparent. Before that, if I recall my astronomy classes right (no promises), the universe was like the inside of a ping pong ball. A really large, really hot ping pong ball.

BBCnews is carrying this report summarizing new research that claims Earth-like planets may be far more common than we imagine. By using new computer models, scientists have discovered that the same environment that causes Jupiter-like planets to end up so close to their stars creates planet-making opportunities in the "habitable zones" of the system. The thinking goes that we may not be able to see them, but they certainly might be there, even in a system with something five times the size of Jupiter whirling around its star two or three times a day.

The Martian winter is nearing its end, so the rovers are back at it again. This time Opportunity is closing in on a new crater, Victoria, which already promises a much more detailed look at Martian bedrock than has been available before in that area. This year, the rovers will also have the assistance of the MRO, which should be able to provide detailed high-resolution maps as it orbits over the rover sites.

Looks like SMART-1 successfully met its fate on Saturday. This is just the basic press release, which unfortunately doesn't discuss if they discovered anything interesting or not. Anybody think to look? The skies were actually clear around here that night, but we forgot.

Anyone with a telescope, and perhaps even a pair of binoculars or a large camera lens, may want to be looking at the moon Saturday night:

Amateur astronomers, grab your telescopes. A spaceship is about to crash into the Moon, and you may be able to see the impact.

The spacecraft: SMART-1, a lunar orbiter belonging to the European Space Agency (ESA).

The impact site: Lacus Excellentiae (The Lake of Excellence), an ancient, 100-mile wide crater in the Moon's southern hemisphere.

The time to watch: Saturday, September 2nd at 10:41 p.m. PDT (Sept. 3rd, 0541 UT).

That is, as long as it's all clear anyway. Nobody knows if it will be bright enough to see from here, but it's worth a shot.

Space.com is carrying this update on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The vehicle has completed its aerobraking maneuvers and now will perform a final, and quite long, thruster burn to normalize its final orbit. They expect to start doing science with the probe beginning in November.

It's official, there's a food fight going down in Prague:

A fierce backlash has begun against the decision by astronomers to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

On Thursday, experts approved a definition of a planet that demoted Pluto to a lesser category of object.

But the lead scientist on Nasa's robotic mission to Pluto has lambasted the ruling, calling it "embarrassing".

And the chair of the committee set up to oversee agreement on a definition implied that the vote had effectively been "hijacked".

All of this over a big lump of ice that's so far away the Sun is just a particularly bright star in its sky. Ain't politics wonderful?

Nina gets a cold and lonely no-prize for bringing us news that Pluto's on-again, off-again planetary status is now off. Again.

Ok, that's it, no more conferences in Prague for Astronomers. No good comes of them, I tell you!

Making the rounds: Scientists claim to have discovered definitive proof of dark matter's existence. Again. Isn't this something like the third or fourth time?

Space.com is carrying this article summarizing the solution of a mystery surrounding the Martian southern ice cap. For years scientists had noticed strange, spidery formations of dust and rock, but had no clue as to what was causing them. By using data from the new Martian probes, a group of scientists has determined they're caused by seasonal jets of CO2 blasting into the sky at more than 100 mph.

Talk about your summer shows!

Pat gets a no-prize signed by Interplanet Janet for bringing us news of the latest attempt at defining what a planet really is. What they agreed on this time would increase the number of planets in our solar system from 9 to 12, with other objects potentially being candidates as well.

The definition itself, "that an object be massive enough that gravity has formed it into a sphere and that it circles a star and not some other planet", seems simple enough. Of course, a whole bunch of astronomers are already arguing about it, probably because they didn't get a vacation in Prague to argue about obscure things nobody else cares about.

It's time to get out the blankets and dig up that bottle of no-doze you got in college, because the Persieds are coming to town. Even though we're out in the 'burbs, our proximity to Dulles airport means our seeing conditions aren't what you'd call ideal. There's also the fact that Ellen and I think staying up late is when we make it past 10 pm. But it's good to know about, and maybe we'll try for some pictures.

Pat gets a no-prize en memorium for bringing us news of James A. Van Allen's passing. The discoverer of the radiation belts which now bear his name was 91.

Nearly every large paradigm shift in science seems to startout with an equation that don't quite balance, or a set of numbers that won't quite add up. To me, at least, it looks like a new thread has been teased loose, this time involving cosmological evolution:

A project aiming to create an easier way to measure cosmic distances has instead turned up surprising evidence that our large and ancient universe might be even bigger and older than previously thought.

If accurate, the finding would be difficult to mesh with current thinking about how the universe evolved, one scientist said.

Nobody's saying yet, but with all of these reports about exceptions, conflicting observations, and failed predictions, it definitely seems like the standard model is in serious need of revision, and just might need to be rethought entirely.

So says the anthropology major!

BBCnews is reporting on the discovery of a new and strange sort of interstellar object. Not quite planets, not quite stars, these "planetary mass objects" (planemos, for short) are very mysterious and completely unaccounted for in current cosmological theories. Scientists are now going to start looking around to see if more of these things exist, as their frequency may help unravel the mystery of their formation.

Space.com is carrying this article summarizing a new theory on how the moon got its shape. Turns out it's not actually round, but instead has a bulge around the equator. By studying past events and using computer models, scientists think they've figured out why.

New Scientist is carrying this report on the extremely bizzare case of the inelegantly named stellar pair WD 0137-349. The system consists of a failed star, known as a "brown dwarf", and the remnants of a dead star, known as a white dwarf. Orbital evidence (whose particulars are even weirder than the objects themselves) indicates that at one point the brown dwarf was actually enveloped by its companion during that companion's red giant phase. While it seems to have survived the encounter, models predict it will eventually be consumed by its white dwarf companion.

Just when you think the universe can't get any weirder...

Spaceflight Now introduces this article about a new theory regarding Martian weather and its effect on the environment with what must be some sort of "Captain Obvious" award winning headline: Peroxide snow on Mars may make planet inhospitable.

Ya think?

Slashdot linked up this New Scientist article detailing the discovery of evidence which may completely invalidate black holes as astronomical objects:

A controversial alternative to black hole theory has been bolstered by observations of an object in the distant universe, researchers say. If their interpretation is correct, it might mean black holes do not exist and are in fact bizarre and compact balls of plasma called MECOs.

"Controversial" most likely doesn't approach what the physics and astronomy people feel about a claim like this. Still, outrageous claims have overturned cosmological theory more than once, so you never know. Time for the fireworks!

The on-again, off-again speculation about liquid methane on Titan seems to be on again. The surface pressure is half again that of Earth's, which I think means you'd need lots (and lots) of insulation and a life support system, but not a pressure suit in order to walk around down there.

Of course, considering we haven't ventured to the Moon in nearly forty years, going all the way to Saturn might be a bit of a stretch. Still, fun to think about.

The sun in an ultraviolet image!

I'd seen things like it before, but this "sized to scale" series of pictures goes all the way up to (I think) red giant stars, which I hadn't seen before. Staggering to think that a single galaxy is composed of billions of such objects, and the universe contains millions of galaxies.

In the "wha??" category, we have news that the Earth is surrounded by a fizz of bubbles. Technically they're "density holes", where the density of gas in the space surrounding the planet drops precipitously. At 18,000,000 degrees, it's also a lot hotter than the surrounding gas, but since the density is so low it doesn't affect things like satellites.

New Scientist linked up this nifty article-and-picture of a new look at Saturn's two largest moons, Rhea and Titan. While beautiful, the picture also helps scientists navigate the spacecraft, as it helps refine the orbital models of Saturn and its moons.

Spaceflightnow is carrying this story about the discovery of several "stellar highways" circling our Milky Way galaxy. By studying data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, scientists have determined there are several narrow "rings" consisting of thousands of stars traveling at several hundred miles per second traveling around the galaxy. It's thought they are the remnants of galactic clusters which were very slowly torn apart by the Milky Way's gravity over billions of years. The streams are being used to explore the properties of dark matter, which appears to affect them different ways in different places.

Slashdot linked up this NASA announcement of an upcoming collision of storms on Jupiter. Which doesn't sound like much, until you consider one is the same size as the Earth and the other is twice as big. With picture!

BBCnews is carrying this update on upcoming changes to the Mars rovers. By using software developed for an Earth-observing space probe, NASA scientists will upgrade the rovers, allowing them to autonomously select data (in this particular case, involving images of clouds and dust devils) and only upload the most significant items to Earth. The systems work very well and have provided significant cost savings on some missions already. With refinement, it's hoped such techniques will make roving space probes to more remote places like Titan possible.

Slashdot linked up this BBCnews report detailing new efforts to discover extraterrestrial planets harbouring life. By using newer, more sensitive instruments, scientists are hoping a new generation of space telescopes will be able to pick up signs of life in the light reflected by planets. The Earth is known to have such signatures, so the trick is to see if we can find other planets with the same thing.

It appears all is not well with the Venus Express probe:

An instrument on the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft is stuck, rendering the device useless until mission controllers can move it to its proper position.

The instrument's main purpose is to measure the temperature of the atmosphere and surface of the planet, potentially spotting signs of volcanic activity and weather. Controllers are still working on different fixes for the problem. The probe carries seven instruments, so the failure of one will not cause a failure of the entire mission.

Pat gets an explosive no-prize for bringing us news that sometimes astronomers get things right:

A star once hidden by a stellar death shroud is the source of odd behavior of its companion supernova, a new study has found.

The find has laid to rest lingering questions over how the supernova, known as SN2001ig, seemed to change its cosmic stripes within weeks while astronomers looked on.

Nice to see the predictions working out for once!

New Scientist is carrying this article detailing efforts to protect future lunar astronauts from something nobody seems to have mentioned before:

A meteoroid blasting through a Moon base would be a bad day in space. So, with NASA now planning to return astronauts to the Moon as early as 2018, scientists are combing through 30-year-old seismic data to see exactly how big a threat impacts pose to future lunar explorers.

So much for the "useless" Apollo missions, eh?

New Scientist is reporting astronomers are learning more about what makes neutron stars tick by observing what happens when one turns itself inside out. Well, partially anyway. The mind boggles...

Spaceflightnow is reporting on a recent-rexamination of moon rock samples which has lead to the discovery of a significant "meteorite impact period" which ocurred about 4 billion years ago:

The idea that meteorites have hammered the moon's surface isn't news to scientists. The lunar surface is pock-marked with large craters carved out by the impact of crashing asteroids and meteorites, said Robert Duncan, a professor and associate dean in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

But the narrow range of the impact dates suggests to researchers that a large spike in meteorite activity took place during a 100-million year interval - possibly the result of collisions in the asteroid belt with comets coming from just beyond our solar system.

It's thought this might have had something to do with the formation of life on Earth. Or not. Regardless, it's yet another indication that when the Earth was young it wasn't even a nice place to visit, let alone a place you'd want to live.

New Scientist is carrying this article on the discovery that another "universal constant", well, isn't. This time it's the Mu constant, the ratio of a proton’s mass to that of an electron. By examining the hydrogen spectra of extremely distant quasars, a group of scientists are claiming to have discovered evidence that this constant has changed about 0.002% in the past 12 billion years. If confirmed, it could provide a powerful boost to string theory, whose multidimensional structure predicts just this thing.

Update: Link now works.

Finally, one thing less to worry about:

Are you losing sleep at night because you're afraid that all life on Earth will suddenly be annihilated by a massive dose of gamma radiation from the cosmos?

Well, now you can rest easy.

Some scientists have wondered whether a deadly astronomical event called a gamma ray burst could happen in a galaxy like ours, but a group of astronomers at Ohio State University and their colleagues have determined that such an event would be nearly impossible.

Ron giving "whoop whoop" to his alma mater in 3... 2... 1...

BBCnews is carrying this report on the activation of an optical telescope who's sole mission is to detect light signals from extraterrestrial intelligences. Much like its more famous radio-based cousin, this is a completely passive process, so no worries about sending out "gullible and potentially tasty natives are here!" signals.

Then again, the first thing any of them will see is, what, I Love Lucy re-runs? Sorta says it all...

Venus Express is already beginning to return images, and boy are they doozies:

Mission scientists are already intrigued by a dark "vortex" feature which can be clearly seen in one image [of the south pole].

Apparently there's a double vortex on the north pole. So in addition to being squashed by pressure, broiled by heat, and dissolved by acid, you could potentially be caught up in a spectacular storm as well. Venus is fun!

Congratulations to the ESA for the successful arrival of Venus Express. The main mission is scheduled to last more than a year and should help crack at least some of the mysteries that surround our nearest planetary neighbor.

Spaceflightnow is carrying this article summarizing new research into how the planet Mercury was formed. By using new simulations, scientists believe Mercury's unusually metal-heavy composition was created when the protoplanet collided with a very large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago. The impact was violent enough for ejected material to reach both Venus and Earth. The model also implies a "reasonable amount" (possibly as much as 16 million billion tonnes [1.65x10^19 kg]) of proto-Mercury is now part of the Earth.

Which of course begs the question, what would these guys consider to be a large amount?

Just when you think the universe just can't get any weirder:

When stars explode as supernova, they carve giant bubbles in space. Our own solar system is enveloped by such a structure from a long-ago explosion.

Now scientists have shown that our bubble is being pinched and bullied backward by another expanding bubble forged from multiple supernovas.

They use a lot of words like "superheated" and "hot expanding gas", which sorta makes it sound like what happens around my house after Olivia eats some chili. Something tells me, though, it's a bit different than that.

Instapundit linked up this NYTimes article detailing the response to NASA's new Centenial Challenges. Amazing what happens when you provide incentives instead of gauranteeing results, eh?

Slashdot linked up news of the discovery of a gigantic cloud of alcohol spotted in deep space, 463 billion kilometres across. Methanol, so while it'll power Indycars, trying to collect it for drinking purposes would be contra-indicated. Plus there would be that whole transportation cost thing.

Space.com is carrying this article detailing new discoveries relating to Saturn's rings. By using data from the Cassini space probe, scientists have discovered evidence that suggests the rings were created as the result of the breakup of a large icy moon about 100 million years ago.

Not addressed in the article is whether or not the rings might ever disappear one day. Considering, if the theory is correct anyway, they've been around so long already, it probably won't be any time soon.

Spaceflightnow is carrying this report on possible signs of life in Martian rock. By studying a meteorite which originated from Mars and was discovered in Egypt in 1911, scientists discovered tiny tunnels which are exact duplicates of those created on earth when bacteria bore through rock. However, unlike samples from terrestrial rock, scientists were not able to extract any DNA from the Martian samples. This could mean there is a way to create these tunnels that does not require a biological agent.

Then again, it very well could be another sign of life on Mars.

Making the rounds: the discovery of a new kind of icy asteroid may change the way we think the early Earth got its water. I still can't imagine how many comets and asteriods it must've taken to put enough water on the planet to fill the oceans. Let's just say I'm glad nobody was around back then. Probably was a pretty exciting place.

BBCnews is carrying this update on the long-suffering Hayabusa space probe. After any number of glitches and failures, it's finally starting to return valuable data, and lots of it. First up, evidence that the Itokawa asteroid is probably very young, and may in fact be a "rubble pile"... less a solid body than a loose aggregation of boulders all flying in close formation. Sort of like my brother's Trans Am, but with rocks instead of bolts.

The data is expected to provide insight into just how we might want to go about stopping one of these things should it decide to do a chicken little on us.

Looks like at least one of the rovers is really starting to show its age:

The front right wheel of NASA's Spirit rover has stopped working – just as the approaching Martian winter means it is increasingly urgent that it gets to a northerly facing slope, to maximise the sunlight falling on its solar arrays.

I just can't get the image of a golf-cart-sized robot dragging itself across the sand grumbling in a tiny electronic voice, "more brainssss!!!" I think I've been hanging around Joshua too much.

... and he is us:

Boulders blasted away from the Earth's surface after a major impact could have travelled all the way to the outer solar system, new calculations reveal. The work suggests that terrestrial microbes on the rocks could in theory have landed on Saturn's giant moon, Titan. But whether they could have survived once there remains unclear.

Now wouldn't that just be a kick in the teeth?

Spaceflightnow is carrying this article and spectacular picture of "an unprecedented elongated double helix nebula near the center of our Milky Way galaxy". The part they saw was 80 light-years long, about 300 light years from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy (which is about 25,000 light years from here). The structure strongly supports theories that postulate the existence of massive galactic magnet fields.

Me, I just think it looks amazing!

Space.com is featuring live coverage of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's arrival.

Slashdot linked up news that NASA has discovered compelling evidence for liquid water on the Saturn moon Enceladus. Unlike other non-terrestrial locations, Enceladus's water seems to be located just tens of meters below the surface, and is being spewed energetically into space by gigantic water geysers. Scientists have no idea what's made all this possible, but it opens up whole new realms of possibility in any number of astro-biological theories.

Space.com is carrying this article detailing the discovery of the most detailed ancient black hole formation observed to-date. First seen as a massive gamma ray pulse which was then followed by visible light and other energy in other wavelengths, the object was discovered to be 12.8 billion light years away. Since the whole universe is thought to only be about 13.7 billion years old, this event provided valuable insight into what stars were made of back then. The event itself was very different from what theories predicted, meaning that models of the early universe may have to be revised to accomodate the new observations.

There's traffic accidents, and then there's traffic accidents:

[The featured] false-color composite image of the Stephan's Quintet galaxy cluster clearly shows one of the largest shock waves ever seen (green arc). The wave was produced by one galaxy falling toward another at speeds of more than one million miles per hour. The image is made up of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and a ground-based telescope in Spain.

Large as our entire galaxy, no less!

Slasdot carried this spacenews article detailing a new effort in manned spaceflight:

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is asking NASA to help fund the demonstration of a reusable space capsule the El Segundo, Calif.-based company has been developing in secret with its own funding for the past 18 months.

SpaceX President Elon Musk said the capsule, dubbed Dragon, is a "mix between Apollo and Soyuz" and is being designed to ferry cargo and crew to and from the international space station starting in 2009.

I can distinctly remember when I was growing up seeing many enthusiast books and magazine articles trying to convince people there was money to be made in space. Back in the 70s, it seemed that was pretty much all that was going on... talk. I find it amazing we actually have three or four companies making stuff to get people into orbit today.

Spaceflightnow is carrying this update on recent findings regarding the Huygens Titan probe data. Scientists have now created a model that explains current observations and data by positing an ocean of liquid water mixed with ammonia that lies under perhaps ten or fifteen miles of methane-rich ice. Oh, and volcanoes that spew liquid methane. No, really!

So go the Days of Our Galaxies:

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has observed a rare population of colliding galaxies whose entangled hearts are wrapped in tiny crystals resembling crushed glass.

The crystals are essentially sand, or silicate, grains that were formed like glass, probably in the stellar equivalent of furnaces. This is the first time silicate crystals have been detected in a galaxy outside of our own.

The mind boggles...

Slashdot linked up news that a commercial venture to build a working space elevator has reached another milestone, this time getting robots to climb up and down special cables while hanging over the Arizona desert. Modest, yes, but I find it a little amazing that this has moved from SF concept to actual working hardware in my lifetime. This was something my great-grandkids were supposed to be seeing.

That Energizer-bunny-in-a-spacesuit rover Spirit is at it again, this time after arriving at one of its long-term goals, a region known as "home plate". All the scientists agree it's a really neat place, even if none of them seem to agree on what that place is.

Scientific American is carrying this article which details an interesting discovery about a globular cluster galaxy that orbits our own. By using a new series of telescopes, scientists have found Messier 12, seems to be missing a full million of its lighest stars. The culprit? Our own Milky Way.

Space.com is carrying this article detailing new theories about how the formations that make up "the man in the moon" were created. It seems impacts from the opposite side were so great they caused magma to spew out and pool into the dark "seas" we see today.

Slashdot linked up this BBCnews report detailing new discoveries about one of everyone's (well, our) favorite celestial mysteries, dark matter. By using the biggest telescopes available, scientists have made a detailed study of 12 dwarf galaxies that skirt the Milky Way. The biggest surprise so far? It appears dark matter is far more energetic than previously thought. This has profound implications for stellar, galactic, and even universal evolution.

Check out an artist's rendition of what the space elevator will look like.

No, if you press the button more than once it won't make the elevator move faster.

Space.com is carrying this article summarizing the announcement of plans to build a new Mars probe with a rather explosive technique:

Now, researchers led by Phil Christensen at Arizona State University in Tempe, US, are proposing a mission to search for that ice directly. The idea behind THOR (Tracing Habitability, Organics, and Resources) is to fly an observer spacecraft to Mars and, hours before it reaches the planet, release an "impactor" ball. It could be up to 230 kilograms in mass and would be aimed at a region about 40° north or south of the equator.

I keep getting this vision of a green Coyote looking up, then looking at the camera, then opening a very tiny umbrella and closing his eyes.

Discovery Channel on-line is carrying this summary of new discoveries in Martian climatology. By simply varying the axial tilt of the planet to 45 degrees (from the current 25-and-change), a team of scientists was able to model the creation of glaciers that appear to mimic the ones which left evidence on the planet long ago. No extra water was required. Since Mars does not have a large moon with which to stablize its orbit, these scientists say the planet probably regularly "wobbles off" to these extremes at random times.

~ We love the mooooon / 'cos it is good to us ~

Slashdot linked up this detailed Popular Mechanics article from none other than Buzz Aldrin, detailing an innovative plan to get people to Mars. His central proposal? Creating a "cycling" craft which constantly travels between Mars and Earth. While complex, the proposal does away with the need to build the super-massive and super-complex spacecraft that would be required to shoot the whole thing there from Earth.

Space.com is carrying this as-it-happens weblog of today's New Horizons space probe launch. If all goes as planned, the probe should be sent on its way in about 30 minutes. Keep your fingers crossed!

Pat gets a sparkly no-prize for bringing us news that everyone's favorite celestial navigation aid has an extra companion:

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed something just as constant as the North Star: a hidden companion.

Astronomers now have photographic proof that Polaris, as the bright star and navigational aid is formally called, has two stellar companions.

Finding the North Star is easy. Finding my keys, that's a different matter.

New Scientist is carrying this report on the most detailed simulation to-date of the impact which formed the Earth's moon. The new model indicates an impact speed of "only" 15 km per second (if I'm doing my math right, approximately 32,000 mph), and that the body was mostly solid or liquid, not gas. Did I mention previous models indicated it was roughly the size of Mars?

Ka-BOOM!!!

Scientific American is carrying this report on new findings concerning the mysterious not-quite-planet, not-quite-asteroid solar system object Charon. By observing the body as it passed in front of a star, scientists were able to determine it does not have an atmosphere. This apparently, at least to some folks, helps disqualify it from "real planet" status. However, the technique used could help confirm other "whatthehellizzit" distant objects as planets.

New Scientist is carrying this summary of all the planned space exploration activity for 2006. Looks like a bountiful year for un-manned space probes, and we may even manage to see a shuttle launch or two.

Space.com is carrying this summary of the highlights of the Mars rover missons. For a golf cart that creeps along at a few dozen feet an hour, they've done pretty good!

New moons and rings have been found around Uranus. Let the Beavis and Butthead impressions begin!

While not exactly from Mars, these "space spiders" sound interesting nonetheless:

Space 'spiders', small robots able to crawl along mesh webbing, will be tested during a joint mission with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency and the Vienna University of Technology. The Furoshiki satellite is scheduled to launch on January 18, 2006. To save on mission costs, the rocket carrying the satellite will have a sub-orbital trajectory; only about ten minutes of microgravity will be available before the satellite begins its descent.

The plan is to develop these little machines for use in very big space construction projects.

Scientific American is carrying this nifty article that explains just how scientists can figure out how much a planet weighs. Aside from, you know, that whole giant scale thing.

Spaceflightnow is carrying this nifty "article and picture" of what may be the brightest supernova ever recorded:

We now know that SN 1006 heralded not the appearance of a new star, but the cataclysmic death of an old one located about 7,000 light years from Earth. It was likely a white dwarf star that had been pulling matter off an orbiting companion star. When the white dwarf mass exceeded the stability limit (known as the Chandrasekhar limit), it exploded.

I always thought these sorts of events were novas, while the event caused when a supermassive star destroys itself is a supernova. Ah well, must've been sleeping in astronomy class that day.

BBCnews is reporting the failed Beagle 2 Mars probe may have been found. If the pictures and reconstruction are accurate, it would seem the thing hit the ground just a little too hard.

Slashdot linked up this BBCnews article detailing the first-ever measure of the mass of our closest white dwarf neighbor:

Sirius B is just 12,000km (7,500 miles) in diameter, similar to Earth, but its mass is 98% that of the Sun.

Studying Sirius B has been difficult because of the bright light coming from its neighbour, Sirius A, or the "Dog Star".

Heavy...

Spaceflightnow is reporting that Martian Aurora are far more common than previously thought:

The discovery of hundreds of auroras over the past six years comes as a surprise, since Mars does not have the global magnetic field that on Earth is the source of the aurora borealis and the antipodal aurora australis.

According to the physicists, the auroras on Mars aren't due to a planet-wide magnetic field, but instead are associated with patches of strong magnetic field in the crust, primarily in the southern hemisphere. And they probably aren't as colorful either, the researchers say: The energetic electrons that interact with molecules in the atmosphere to produce the glow probably generate only ultraviolet light - not the reds, greens and blues of Earth.

~ I was cruising 'round on Mars one day... ~

Space.com is reporting a new health problem with one of the Mars rovers:

NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has successfully moved its robotic arm for the first time in almost two weeks, prompting a series of discussions on the future use of the automaton’s appendage, the mission’s manager said Thursday.
...
The motor stalled on Nov. 25, fixing the arm in its stowed configuration – tucked close to Opportunity’s undercarriage for drives – and preventing study of a nearby rock outcrop at the rover’s Meridiani Planum landing site.

Their fix? Shove more current through the motor. Not subtle, but effective. Hard to say what that'll do to the longevity, but considering they're completing their first Martian year's worth of study, I'd say they've definitely gotten good mileage from the thing.

Space.com is carrying an article detailing the discovery of something you'd never expect to see on the moon:

Every lunar morning, when the sun first peeks over the dusty soil of the moon after two weeks of frigid lunar night, a strange storm stirs the surface.

The next time you see the moon, trace your finger along the terminator, the dividing line between lunar night and day. That's where the storm is. It's a long and skinny dust storm, stretching all the way from the north pole to the south pole, swirling across the surface, following the terminator as sunrise ceaselessly sweeps around the moon.

Pretty neat trick, considering there's no atmosphere with which to create weather.

Scientific American is carrying this update on the data Titan probe Huygens sent back:

... Titan is also clearly an exotic world swaddled in a dense layer of smog and frozen in a primitive, hydrogen-rich state. The methane and nitrogen that constitute its atmosphere form various aerosols in the sunlight--giving the moon its orange aspect--that then drift down through the atmosphere as alien snow leaving a soft covering as much as one kilometer thick on the surface, which is littered with water ice instead of rocks.

I recall reading an SF book years ago that mentioned methane snow such as this has such a low melting point that simply compressing it with, say, a boot would be enough to cause it to evaporate in a flash. No idea if that's true, but (as long as I got to come home at the end) I think it'd be neat to find out!

Pat gets a windblown no-prize for bringing us news of the latest Titan findings:

Saturn's planet-size moon Titan has dramatic weather, with freezing temperatures, carbon- and nitrogen-rich clouds and possibly lightning, scientists said Wednesday, describing a world that may have looked like Earth before life developed.

The European Space Agency's probe landed on Titan in January, uncovering some mysteries of the methane-rich globe — the only moon in the solar system known to have a thick atmosphere. Scientists presented detailed results of months of study in the journal Nature and at a news conference in Paris.

Speculations that life may have been creating the methane appear to be unfounded, but the place is still fascinating. Here's to hoping we some day get a rover out there!

New Scientist is carrying news that the Mars Express orbiter may have found liquid water using a newly deployed instrument:

Intriguingly, the signal reflected from the bottom of the crater is so strong and appears so flat that it may be liquid water. "If you put water there, that's what the signal might look like," Johnson told New Scientist. But he cautions the data is based on only one pass over the region and could be caused by another material.

As noted, the findings are extremely preliminary. Apparently the radar imaging technique has only been tried once before, on Apollo 17, and the results then were inconclusive. We'll see...

New Scientist is carrying this story detailing the first photographic evidence of ice volcanoes on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. The pictures were taken during a close flyby of Saturn's second-largest moon, Rhea. While that body revealed few immediate surprises, the pictures of Enceladus's eruptions could help scientists puzzle out just what might be causing them.

New Scientist is carrying news that the long-suffering probe with the hard-to-remember name might have successfully completed its mission:

The Hayabusa spaceprobe has snatched samples from the asteroid Itokawa, according to JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The probe touched down at 0707 Japanese time (2207 GMT Friday) and its computer system shot a metal ball into the asteroid to drive up material for collection. The operation went "without failure", said JAXA official Yasunori Matoba, and the craft then took off again.

They won't know for sure until it gets back. Which is, of course, their next big trick. Keep your fingers crossed for June 2007, when the probe is scheduled to return.

Rendova linked up this report noting the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has passed the half-way point on its journey to Mars. Everything seems to be running smoothly, and the craft is on-time for a March arrival. Assuming a successful arrival, the probe will apparently return more data "than all other previous explorations combined", whatever that means. :)

BBCnews is reporting the hapless Hayabusa probe has suffered another failure:

The Japanese space agency said the Hayabusa probe had got to within 17m (56ft) of the asteroid before contact was temporarily lost.

The agency said it hoped to make a second attempt to land the craft.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Aviation Week's latest issue carried this in-depth look at the ongoing Mars rover missions as its cover story. A little dry in places, yes, but if you're a serious space geek it'll be the only place you'll find all the savory little details about what makes projects like this really tick. A far better article (IMO) than you'd get from Newsweek or Time.

The long-suffering Japanese space probe Hayabusa has suffered another setback:

A small hopping robot meant to explore the asteroid Itokawa was lost in space after being released from Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft on Saturday. But mission officials say the main probe will still try to land and collect samples of the space rock at least once before beginning its return flight to Earth in December 2005.

Aviation Week's current issue has more shots of them completely missing the asteroid with a test target last week. If you were only reading mainstream accounts of this thing, you'd probably be surprised by all this, but AvWeek has been chronicling one failure after another ever since it launched. It really is almost a miracle the probe is functioning at all.

Which is not to slight this very real acheivement. Launching space probes is hard, donchaknow!

New Scientist linked up this article which describes a novel method of pulling Earth-collision asteroids off course. If we can detect them early enough, parking a comparatively heavy sattelite next to it will do the trick:

For a 200-metre-wide asteroid, the spacecraft would need to weigh about 20 tonnes and lurk 50 metres from its target for about a year to change its velocity enough to knock it off course.

Of course, 20 tons of spacecraft is a pretty heavy load to loft that far, but given enough time and motivation it's really just a matter of money and engineering.

Slashdot linked up news that the ESA probe Venus Express successfully launched yesterday. It's being billed as mostly an upgraded version of the Mars Express probe, which, considering the success of that spacecraft, is probably a very good thing.

Space.com is carrying news that scientists still have a long way to go understanding what makes stars tick:

A star 40 times the mass of the Sun collapsed to form a neutron star instead of a black hole, researchers said today.

When a massive star burns out, its outer layers crash down on the star’s core, creating a dense ball of matter from which nothing could escape. Scientists previously thought that when a massive star died and collapsed on itself, it had no choice but to create a black hole.

Now, new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory suggests that massive stars have a little wiggle room, and sometime produces a neutron star instead.

The thought of something 40 times as massive as our sun having "wiggle room" to do anything is a bit hard to get my head around. I'll take their word for it.

Slashdot linked up news that tonight Mars will pass unusually close to the Earth. All we have is a big zoom lens for Ellen's camera, so I'm expecting the "brilliant ball" view. My brother has a (I think) 12 inch reflector, which may yeild more detail. If he can dig it out of the garage, that is.

Slashdot linked up the latest on the Martian rovers. Both are going strong, with Spirit scheduled to descend Husband Hill (no, really) over the next two months while Opportunity continues its trek across the Meridiani Planum area.

Go rovers go!

Slashdot featured a series of links dedicated to what is currently believed to be the star closest to the supermassive black hole in the center of our own galaxy. Don't miss the video.

Kinda freaky to see entire star clusters whooshing around like billiard balls, eh?

Slashdot linked up news that the once-found Mars Polar Lander now, well, hasn't been:

After being lost and potentially found, NASA’s Mars Polar Lander appears to be lost once more.
...
Camera specialists at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) near San Diego, California initially thought they might have spotted the probe’s parachute, as well as disturbed terrain from the craft’s landing engines.

But comparative imagery of the same location taken in January 2000 and September 2005 provide “excellent evidence” that possible spacecraft components are “not real features on the surface of Mars,” a new posting on the MSSS web site explains.

<liberal tinfoil hat> Well duh, it's in Karl Rove's garage. Do you really think all this is about some stupid press leak?

<conservative tinfoil hat> Well duh, it's in Hillary Clinton's trailer. Haven't you noticed she's been pretty quiet lately?

<Ron's tinfoil hat> Boobies.

Once the exclusive pervue of governments, the ability to spy on other people's space programs seems to have been brought to the masses:

A commercial remote sensing spacecraft has caught Chinese space workers readying their second piloted space mission.

The Ikonos satellite, operated by Space Imaging of Thornton, Colorado, took images of China’s human spaceflight launch complex on October 3 and October 9, with a shadow covering much of the rocket between two structures. The very tip of the rocket can be seen emerging from the shadow.

Anybody have the co-ordinates? I bet you can look at this with Google!

Space.com is carrying this update on a recent test of a Russian vehicle designed to bring cargo from the International Space Station down to Earth. It's not only being pitched as a return truck, but also as a potential lifeboat replacement for the Soyuz modules currently used. While "collapsible" and "spacecraft" aren't normally words I'd want to see together, if it's your only ride home it'll have to do.

Slashdot linked up news that one of the biggest astronomical mysteries of the past 35 years may finally have been solved:

The most intense explosions in the universe come in two varieties. One type lasts several seconds, and the others are gone in less than a second.

Until now, astronomers had not pinned down the sources of the short-duration bursts.

New observations show convincingly that they are created by collisions of two very dense objects, likely neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, as theory had predicted.

I think we've linked up three or four "solutions" to this problem, so (in my oh-so-greatly-informed opinion) this one is probably also a "wait-and-see" sort of thing.

48 years ago Sputnik was launched.

BBCnews is reporting the long-suffering Japanese probe Hayabusa is about to make its scheduled encounter with an asteroid. If everything goes well (a first for this probe) it will make two brief touchdowns, collect some samples, and then return them to Earth in 2007.

Landers just sit there and rovers move too slow. How about something that literally flies over the surface:

Global Aerospace Corporation of Altadena, CA proposes that the Mars exploration vehicle combining the global reach similar to that of orbiters and high resolution observations enabled by rovers could be a balloon that can be steered in the right direction and that would drop small science packages over the target sites. The concept being developed by the Global Aerospace Corporation is funded by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC).

Balloons as planetary explorers is an idea that's been around awhile (I seem to recall plans for a balloon-tethered "snake probe" making the rounds when I was in college more than a decade ago). It's not the concept, it's the implementation, and so far I haven't heard of any of these things going further than paper studies.

Still, it would be awfully neat if they actually managed it.

Slashdot linked up news of a European Space Agency project to see if we really can deflect asteroids away from Earth. It doesn't seem to have gotten past the paper stage, but if everything goes well they should be bashing an asteroid by 2007.

One of the real advantages of having long-term space probe missions is we're finally beginning to see changes in planetary bodies over time. Specifically, after 8 years of scanning, the Mars Global Surveyor has recorded some remarkable changes. From sliding boulders to moving trenches to every greeny's favorite global warming, MGS has seen it all. With pictures!

New Scientist is carrying news of the strongest evidence yet for oceans on Saturn's moon, Titan. By using synthetic aperture radar, the Cassini probe has imaged what appears to be distinct flow channels and a coast. However, unlike Earth, Titan's seas are thought to be a soup of methane and other hydrocarbons. No boogie boarding there!

Making the rounds: analysis of NASA's deep impact probe reveals comet Tempel 1's composition is very different from previously studied comets. Most interesting is a much higher-than-predicted level of organic compounds, which help bolster the theory that comets helped seed the Earth with the stuff required for living things.

That's one helluva spitball:

Astronomers have spotted the fastest moving stellar corpse to date – and it appears to be headed straight out of our galaxy.

A team from the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, clocked the dead star at 1100 kilometres per second.

The object, called B1508+55, is a rotating neutron star, or pulsar. It is the superdense core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova about 2.5 million years ago.

The discovery is important because at this time astronomers don't have a computer model that predicts this sort of object can be ejected during a supernova with this much force. Back to the drawing boards with you!

Why yes, in fact, we do still have two functioning rovers on Mars, still producing science, thank-you-very-much:

The US space agency's robotic rover Spirit has sent back a partial panoramic view from the summit of "Husband Hill" at Gusev Crater on Mars.

Spirit was still sending down data that makes up the colour 360-degree picture when Nasa held a news conference.

As with Apollo, there's more than a little humor to be found in the fact that, when we could send anything at all to another planet, the most successful thing we explore with there is...

A car.

New Scientist is carrying this story about a startling new discovery about Saturn's moon Enceladus. By using both visible and infrared cameras, the space probe Cassini has imaged gigantic water geysers erupting on its south pole. The problem is, they shouldn't be there, and scientists can't come up with a convincing explanation as to how they work (well, aside from the "water shoots out under pressure" bit).

Forget a ticket to California. Anyone got a ticket to Saturn? Round trip, of course.

(Don't worry, there's only one person out there who's supposed to get the title.)

Slashdot's carryinig this update on developments in the private spacecraft industry. Virigin has announced its third generation spacecraft will be capable of Earth orbit. It now joins several other projects in vying for the fifty million dollar America's Space Prize for orbital flight.

Of course, announcing something is quite different from actually producing it. Orbital flight is supposedly much more difficult than the sub-orbital stuff that won the x-prize this year. Still, they've given themselves quite a bit of lead time, so who knows?

As if we didn't worry enough about big giant rocks falling from the sky, now we have teeny-tiny interstellar particles thwacking the Earth:

Earth is facing another threat from outer space. Scientists have come to the conclusion that two mysterious explosions in the 1990s were caused by bizarre cosmic missiles.

The two objects were picked up by earthquake detectors as they tore through Earth at up to 900,000 mph. According to scientists, the most plausible explanation is that they were "strangelets", clumps of matter that have so far defied detection but whose existence was posited 20 years ago.

As with all impacts, it's not just velocity, it's mass, and these things apparently don't have much. Well, compared to a lump of iron as big as Jamaica anyway.

Just when you thought the universe couldn't get any weirder...

After two delays, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is finally on its way to the red planet. Arrival is scheduled for early 2006 (as I recall). Let's hope for a successful arrival and many "kewl" pictures.

Scientific American is reporting on the first-ever discovery of an asteroid with two moons. Double-asteroid systems (one orbits the other) have been known for some time, and more complex arrangements have been predicted but not seen until now. Why doesn't this make it a planet? Well, by using the orbits of the "moons", scientists have determined the main asteroid is only a bit more dense than water. In other words, it's probably just a conglomeration of smaller rocks instead of a single solid body.

No launch for today, pushed back until tomorrow. The BBCnews article does, however, provide a nice summary of what the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is all about.

The Mars rovers continue to chug along. While I'm sure exciting for geologists, the current discoveries do seem a bit esoteric, at least to me. The article also includes a note that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is scheduled for lift off today, and due to arrive in November 2006.

Scientists have for years been using an averaging technique to figure out how many Quasars, supermassive objects as big as galaxies but thousands of times brighter, are actually out there in the universe. The problem was that when they actually got around to counting these objects, they came up far short. Now a new orbital observatory seems to be finding where the rest of them are hiding:

Most of the biggest black holes in the universe have been eating cosmic meals behind closed doors - until now.

With its sharp infrared eyes, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) peered through walls of galactic dust to uncover what may be the long-sought missing population of hungry black holes known as quasars.

Once thought to host entire seas of liquid methane, recent evidence is suggesting Titan may be "dry as a bone" over nearly its entire surface. The evidence comes from the Cassini space probe and infrared observations by the Keck observatory in Hawaii. However, this leads to yet another question... if Titan's methane isn't coming from gigantic seas, where is it coming from?

Behold, and be awed. At 5000 light years away and 50 across, it's actually one of the smaller astronomical features I've seen, well, featured in NASA's APOD series. Doesn't make it any less beautiful.

Who'd have thought the discovery of a new planet would result in the potential disqualification of another? Personally, since Pluto has a moon, I still think it should be classified as a planet, but that may just be the traditionalist in me. Even more interesting is the comment that there are almost certainly more, perhaps many more, (so far) undiscovered Pluto-sized objects out in the Kuiper belt.

New Scientist is carrying this update to the developing controversy over Martian methane. One group of scientists has found the methane is concentrated in certain areas on the planet, implying it's being destroyed before the Martian wind can disperse it over the planet. Another group is taking the position there's no methane at all on Mars, and even if there is they've come up with a way of explaining it that involves only geological processes.

Ain't planetary science fun?

Check It Out!.

Space.com is featuring an article about new discoveries regarding Earth's closest star. By examining other sun-like stars with the Chandra X-ray telescope, scientists have found them to contain three times as much neon as is observed in the Sun with different techniques. The implication is that these previous techniques (and therefore all the other observations that rely on them, about any star in the universe) don't actually work, or there's something very very strange about the Sun. Chandra can't be used on the Sun because it's too close... the sensors would burn out.

Anybody wanna buy me a ticket?

Russia's federal space agency took a giant leap in the field of cosmic tourism yesterday with the announcement it will offer a $100m (£57m) trip to the moon.

Roskosmos leaked details of the project as Nasa's space shuttle Discovery prepared for launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. A source at the Russian agency confirmed to the Guardian that the technology was in place for a flight to be launched within 18 months of a down payment.

The Soyuz system was designed initially as the USSR's answer to Apollo, so they definitely have a crew vehicle that'll do the trip. Not sure if they have a booster that'll get them from the IIS to the moon, but if they say they have that capability, hey, who am I to disagree?

Anyone have Donald Trump's number handy?

Forget Mars, if two scientists are right, we may end up finding life on Titan first:

McKay and Smith calculate that if methanogens are thriving on Titan, their breathing would deplete hydrogen levels near the surface to one-thousandth that of the rest of the atmosphere. Detecting this difference would be striking evidence for life, because no known non-biological process on Titan could affect hydrogen concentrations as much.

One hope for testing their idea rests with the data from an instrument on Huygens called the GCMS, which recorded Titan's chemical make-up as the probe descended.

It won't happen quickly, since the data has to be gone over quite a bit to separate the hydrogen stuff from the rest, but apparently there is a strong possibility that this will work.

These won't be your ancestor's life-forms though. It's speculated that they won't be much more than microbes, and eating acetylene for energy.

Fark brings us our remarkable Martian image of the day. They're going to be sending probes with even higher resolution cameras in the next few years. I can hardly wait!

New Scientist is carrying this article summarizing the latest Cassini flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus. What it found is apparently beyond explanation: giant boulders strewn across the landscape, surrounding the moon-crossing cracks for which Enceladus is famous. Unfortunately, no pictures (yet), but even the discription makes it sound, well, unusual.

Fark linked up news of an interesting upcoming NASA mission to the moon:

In 2008 a powerful camera aboard a new spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will photograph the moon's surface in fine detail - fine enough to pick out the Apollo 17 moon buggy abandoned 33 years ago, along with lunar landing platforms and other relics.

The real purpose of the mission is to provide hyper-detailed mapping data for future manned landings. While I fully expect to see and marvel at pictures of the long-abandoned Apollo sites, I don't expect it to change any minds about their legitimacy. If you're looney enough to think the Apollo program was a fake, you'll be plenty looney enough to think pictures taken as "proof" will be doctored.

Slashdot linked up news that a solar system with three suns has been discovered. The planet they've found is about the size of Jupiter, and (if I'm reading the article correctly) orbits the "center" star at about the same distance as Saturn from our Sun. Astronomers only think the celestial dynamics of our solar system are complicated.

BBCnews is carrying this update on the Deep Impact space probe. It's beginning to look as if the flyby part of the probe missed its chance to photograph the crator that the impactor created. While disappointing, the probe still delivered "heaps of data" that scientists will spend years pouring over. Apparently the thing is still spewing debris, days after the impact.

BBCnews is carrying this article-and-picture of what could be the first lake discovered on Titan. I wonder what the buoyancy qualities of liquid methane are? Something tells me it'd be a bit challenging to waterski on.

The Washington Post today carried this article detailing the discovery of the first sorta-Earth-like rocky world orbiting a distant star. Don't start holding your breath for ET though... this one is about 7.5 times the size of our planet and rockets around its star in less than two days.

As of yesterday, Opportunity is once again a rover:

After weeks of spinning its wheels in a Martian sand dune, NASA’s rover Opportunity has finally extricated itself. Its wheels are now running freely across the surface, with no slipping.

Just in time, unfortunately, for dust storm season, which cuts into the sunlight the rover's solar panels can collect for operational power. Still, I'd rather have a slow rover than a fast, rrm... stucker?

Ellen gets her very first no-prize for reminding me to post this brief animation that shows a dust-devil whirling around on Mars. I saw the thing when it came out last week, but at the time it'd been squashed by slashdot, and then I forgot. Very nifty!

While most scientists seem to be finding more and more evidence of a "wet" Mars, some are making strong arguments for quite the opposite:

One study reveals that a region rich in the mineral olivine - which suggests it is has been "dry" for about 3 billion years - is actually four times larger than previously thought. That adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting Mars was mostly cold and dry - and not warm and wet - in the past.

The second study asserts that subsurface reactions of olivine and water could produce enough methane to account for recent observations of the gas in the atmosphere, removing the need to invoke living microbes to do the job.

Of course, this gives us even better reasons to send more probes, so I think it all ends up being good.

So how did the solar system form? What sequence of events lead it to look like it does today? Well, according to this New Scientist article a recently published report suggest Jupiter and Saturn are the key:

In the model, the four planets [Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus] form in 10 million years within the current orbit of Uranus. Surrounding them in a ring are several thousand rocky objects called planetesimals, left over from the formation of the planets.

Gravity pulls the two types of object towards each other, so planetesimals begin to "leak" into the giant planet zone and the orbits of the giant planets gradually change. After 700 million years, Saturn has migrated outward and Jupiter inward to the extent that they reach a "resonance" point. This means they begin to march in lockstep with each other, with Jupiter completing two orbits around the Sun for every one of Saturn's. The resonance allows the pair to greatly disturb the orbits of the other planets.

The rest, it would appear, was cosmic calamatous history. The model neatly accounts for what we see here today, but nobody mentions any testable predictions. Until such predictions surface and are successfully tested, this model is extremely interesting but no more likely than any other competing model that can account for the same observations.

New Scientist brings us news that Voyager 1 has finally reached the fringes of the solar system. Called the heliopause, it marks the point where the solar wind creates a "termination shock" with the interstellar space around it. Oh, and this time they really mean it!

Slashdot linked up this nifty photo-and-story of the first time a spacecraft orbiting a foreign body has taken a picture of another spacecraft doing the same thing. Remember to wave as you go past!

It may only be 4cm, but it's a start:

NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has begun its long march out of the sandy dune in which it got stuck on 25 April. Ground controllers have got it to move more than four centimetres since Friday - considered a big victory.

I'd crack a joke about needing a come-a-long, but what would you tie the thing to? 4cm down, 4 meters to go.

New Scientist is carrying this article providing some details of what appear to be a developing proposal for CEV system, NASA's shuttle replacement. This take: launch the main CEV on a big horking rocket, then launch the crew on a much smaller air-launched vehicle. This should simplify "man rating" the parts that hold the crew, while still allowing existing heavy-lift rockets to be used to put the big stuff in orbit. The problem: the company behind the air-launch component, Airlaunch LLC, would need to scale up their prototype system a great deal to boost a meaningful payload, and their launch aircraft would need to scale up to match.

Still, good to see movement on this project, from all fronts.

Slashdot is running this summary and comments article on recent developments in the effort to replace the Space Shuttle. Looks like the new director wants to field the replacement far earlier than previously planned.

Space.com is carrying this summary of where planet hunting is today. While early techniques were only able to detect very large planets circling very close to their stars, recent advances have allowed far smaller objects to be found. Nothing the size of Earth, but they're getting closer every year.

We've covered the Pioneer space probe mystery a couple of times in the past. Now it would appear scientists have figured out a new way to test for this anomaly, and cheaply:

Gary Page of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and his colleagues have identified 15 asteroids that might also be subjected to the mysterious force. The asteroids' orbits all stretch far into the outer solar system. This is crucial because the Pioneer anomaly only shows up beyond about twice the distance from the sun to Saturn.

So, no need for an expensive, risky space probe, just some telescope time. Some preliminary observations already seem to indicate something is acting on these big rocks. More as it develops...

New Scientist is carrying this interesting article detailing what one group of scientists think a mobile probe to Venus should look like:

Space scientists in the US believe a solar-powered aircraft could explore the atmosphere of the second rock from the sun, and carry a flying "brain" to control a toughened rover on the ground.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Acta Astronautica (vol 56, p 750), a team led by Geoffrey Landis of NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio says that an autonomous solar-powered aircraft could cruise between different altitudes and locations in Venus's wild atmosphere, making measurements and radar-imaging the surface at 10 times the resolution possible with an orbiting craft. They say this would provide far better data than the Soviet and US probes of the 1970s and 1980s, which were only able to make atmospheric measurements for a short time as they descended to their doom in the planet's violent, corrosive winds.

Of course, NASA's famously tight budgets have no obvious room in them for such a project, but you have to start somewhere. I wonder if peanuts and prezels will be part of the cargo?

Jeff gets a little green no-prize for bringing us news that scientists are becoming increasingly convinced life exists on Mars:

Much of the excitement is due to the work of Vittorio Formisano, head of research at Italy's Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Space.
...
Formisano showed evidence of the presence of formaldehyde in the atmosphere. Formaldehyde is a breakdown product of methane, which was already known to be present in the Martian atmosphere, so in itself its presence is not so surprising. But Formisano measured formaldehyde at 130 parts per billion.

There are three mechanisms that could account for such a concentration, and two of them are non-biological. However, no evidence for the two non-biological methods has been found. Confirmation of life may have to wait until a new rover is sent to the red planet. NASA has one scheduled for 2010.

New Scientist is reporting that after a year of delays, the Mars Express probe will finally deploy its MARSIS radar antenna. Short for Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, the instrument consists of three whip-like antennas (two of which are nearly 20 meters long) strung with wire. If successfully deployed, MARSIS should allow the Mars Express probe to search for water as much as a mile and a half below the Martian surface.

The Washington Post today carried this update on the Genesis probe. Intended to gather pristine examples of solar wind particles, the probe crashed into the Utah desert this past September instead of being gently recovered by helicopters hovering above. While seen as a tragic failure at the time, eight months of examination have revealed the effort as far from wasted.

While the Huygens probe's mission may be over, Cassini continues to examine that enigmatic Saturn moon, Titan:

During its closest flyby of Saturn's moon Titan on April 16, the Cassini spacecraft came within 1,027 kilometers (638 miles) of the moon's surface and found that the outer layer of the thick, hazy atmosphere is brimming with complex hydrocarbons.

Scientists believe that Titan's atmosphere may be a laboratory for studying the organic chemistry that preceded life and provided the building blocks for life on Earth. The role of the upper atmosphere in this organic "factory" of hydrocarbons is very intriguing to scientists, especially given the large number of different hydrocarbons detected by Cassini during the flyby.

While Mars's atmosphere is thin enough that flying probes can be problematic, I wonder if Titan's is thick enough? After all, the chances for a liquid surface on Titan are much greater, and I'd hate for the next mission to that moon to end with a sad "splork!"

BBCnews is carrying this summary of the discovery of perhaps one of the first stars that formed in the universe. While some of the chemical signatures in its light properly identify it as such, others are just wrong enough to call some theories into question. Figuring out how such stars formed provides important insight into how the universe itself was created.

Space.com is carrying up-to-the-minute coverage of NASA's ongoing DART experimental satellite. Designed to test technologies that would allow fully automated rendevous and docking, DART was successfully launched this morning aboard a Pegasus rocket. If all goes well it will complete its mission sometime tomorrow morning.

While the technologies behind DART were planned as part of the now defunct Orbital Space Plane project, research was allowed to continue because of its value for future space projects. If successful, this will mark the first time a US space project performed a rendevous and docking with zero human input throughout the entire process.

BBCnews is carrying this report on what must be one of the most bizzare astronomical objects found to-date: a natural particle accelerator some 20 light-years across. Found using the European XMM-Newton x-ray space telescope, this ring was discovered when scientists made observations of the Arches Cluster, a star-forming region close to the Milky Way's centre. It's not clear if the object is in the cluster, or just happens to be on the same sight line. Not surprisingly, scientists have no idea how such an object could have formed, but it seems to be pumping out high-energy particles with energies in excess of a thousand trillion volts.

You know, I'd stop saying "just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder", but it wouldn't make any difference.