CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private space capsule called Dragon soared into the predawn sky Tuesday, riding a pillar of flame like its beastly namesake on a history-making trip to the International Space Station.

The unmanned capsule, built by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), is the first non-governmental spacecraft to launch to the space station, ushering in a new era of partnership between the public and private spaceflight programs.

“I think this is an example of American entrepreneurship at its best,” said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA’s commercial crew and cargo program, in a briefing before the launch. About 100 VIP guests were on hand to witness the launch, NASA officials said.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX launched its Dragon capsule at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) today (May 22) from a pad here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It blasted off atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, a 157-foot (48-meter) booster powered by nine Merlin rocket engines. The space station was flying 249 miles above the North Atlantic Ocean as the rocket lifted off, NASA officials said. [Launch Photos: SpaceX’s Dragon Blasts Off for Space Station]

Details have been emerging of the plan by billionaire entrepreneurs to mine asteroids for their resources.

The multi-million-dollar plan would use robotic spacecraft to squeeze chemical components of fuel and minerals such as platinum and gold out of the rocks.

The founders include film director and explorer James Cameron as well as Google’s chief executive Larry Page and its executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

They even aim to create a fuel depot in space by 2020.

However, several scientists have responded with scepticism, calling the plan daring, difficult and highly expensive.

They struggle to see how it could be cost-effective, even with platinum and gold worth nearly £35 per gram ($1,600 an ounce). An upcoming Nasa mission to return just 60g (two ounces) of material from an asteroid to Earth will cost about $1bn.

The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months, would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for asteroid targets rich in resources. The intention will be to open deep-space exploration to private industry.

Within five to 10 years, however, the company expects to progress from selling observation platforms in orbit around Earth to prospecting services. It plans to tap some of the thousands of asteroids that pass relatively close to Earth and extract their raw materials.

The company, known as Planetary Resources, is also backed by space tourism pioneer Eric Anderson, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, former US presidential candidate Ross Perot and veteran Nasa astronaut Tom Jones.

The founders of the venture are to give further details in a press conference on Tuesday.

That’s a pretty big surprise to most people. They’re used to seeing magnificent detail in Hubble images, stars in galaxies and wisps of gas in beautiful nebulae. But those objects are far, far larger than the Moon. Hubble’s resolution is 0.1 arcseconds no matter how far away an object is. Those wisps of gas appear to be finely resolved, but they’re billions of kilometers across. That’s a bit roomier than the lunar landers were.

So even if we built a colossal sports arena in Tycho crater, Hubble would barely see it at all. The landers, rovers, and other junk left on the lunar surface by the astronauts are totally invisible.

Using a bigger telescope won’t help much. You’d need a mirror 50 times bigger than Hubble’s to see the landers at all, and we don’t have a 100 meter telescope handy.

However, there are two tricks we can use here. One is to look not for the artifacts themselves, but for their shadows. At sunrise or sunset, the shadow from a lander might be long enough to detect, even if the lander itself is invisible. However, this is a very tricky observation and has to be timed just right (and the landscape itself may hide the shadow; crater rims, mountains, and natural dips and bumps might prevent sunlight from hitting the lander until the Sun is high in the sky, and that will shorten the shadows).

Plus, try to convince a committee in charge of hotly-contested and hugely over-subscribed telescopes to give you a night to try this and see how they react. Good luck ever getting an observation again.

The other method is obvious enough: go back to the Moon and take a look. Later this year we will be sending the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to the Moon, and it will be able to resolve objects as small as 0.5 meters across (it’s far smaller than Hubble, but it’ll be a lot closer to the Moon). It will easily resolve the landers, and even the rovers.

The two-day event will bring programmers together on seven continents to see how creative they can be with Nasa’s store of space data.

Problems Nasa wants solved include improving data sharing after disasters and spotting good lunar landing sites.

Coders on the International Space Station and at McMurdo base in Antarctica will join in.

The event runs from 21-22 April at more than 25 venues around the world. Hundreds of people have registered to go along and take part in the various challenges.

SpaceX and NASA are moving ahead with the scheduled April 30 launch date of the Dragon spacecraft and its historic docking with the International Space Station after the flight readiness review was approved at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

The comprehensive evaluation of the SpaceX mission is one of the last major steps before the company becomes the first commercial carrier to deliver payloads to the ISS. Although SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk was careful to remind everybody that the flight is a test and success is far from guaranteed.

“I think we’ve got a pretty good shot, but it is worth emphasizing that there’s a lot that can go wrong in a mission like this,” Musk told reporters after the review.

The Falcon rocket being used to launch the Dragon has been used twice, once inserting a Dragon capsule into low earth orbit . But Musk and NASA did emphasize that this is not an actual mission. The goal is to demonstrate SpaceX’s capabilities to launch, rendezvous with the ISS and return to earth. And while there will be some cargo on board and some cargo will be carried back from the space station, nothing on board is considered critical or irreplaceable. Musk reminded reporters of the difficulty of the mission, but he remains confident SpaceX will succeed.

North Korea duly launched its satellite mission from the Sohae base on the Chinese border but soon had to admit the venture was a failure.

The nation’s own engineers will be trying to find out precisely what went wrong but so, also, will analysts from the international community, who will be keen to assess just how far Pyongyang has progressed in its efforts to master rocket technology.

The 30m(100ft)-long Unha-3 vehicle is said to have lifted off at 07:39 local time on Friday (22:39 GMT Thursday), and headed south out over the Yellow Sea.

The rocket’s trajectory, according to North Korea, was intended to take it and its Earth observation satellite payload towards a 500km-high polar orbit.

Within the hour, however, officials from Japan, South Korea and the US were briefing reporters that the mission had failed.

America in particular had a number of military systems in the region able to track the ascent.

The available information suggests the rocket disintegrated about 90 seconds into its flight, just before first-stage separation and ignition of the second stage.

One account talked of an unusually bright flaring coming from the vehicle.

All that fits with data indicating debris fell into the Yellow Sea about 165km (103 miles) west of Seoul, well short of the impact site where the North Koreans had planned to drop the first stage on a nominal flight.

A long-standing mystery about how dying stars spew out the material of future planets is now solved, scientists say.

While stars like our Sun are known to eject much of their mass in their final years, it has remained unclear just how the dust is blown away.

Scientists reporting in Nature describe an astronomical study of extraordinary resolution to tackle the mystery.

They found dust grains of nearly a millionth of a metre across, big enough to be pushed out by dying stars’ light.

The team of astronomers from Australian and European universities took a look at three so-called red giant stars - stars that were once like our Sun is now, but that have exhausted their supply of hydrogen and grown to gargantuan proportions.

In a process that is an extreme case of the kind of solar wind that our own Sun experiences, such stars blow much of their mass away in the form of gas and grains of mineral material on their way to becoming white dwarfs.

Lead author of the study Barnaby Norris, of the University of Sydney, told BBC News that the stars were “the galaxy’s great recyclers” - the material that they spit out “goes on to make the next generation of stars and planets”.

What Werner Becker of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching has realized (and announced yesterday at the UK-Germany National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester), is that the universe comes equipped with its own set of exquisite clocks – pulsars – the timing of which can, in principle, be used to guide spacecraft in a similar way to how GPS is used here on Earth. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as all that.

A significant obstacle to making this work today is that detecting signals from the pulsars requires X-ray detectors that are compact enough to be easily carried on spacecraft. However, it turns out the relevant technology is also needed by the next generation of X-ray telescopes, and should be ready in twenty years or so. Perhaps one day our spacecraft will map their routes through the cosmos thanks to yet another spinoff from basic research.

There could be many billions of planets not much bigger than Earth circling faint stars in our galaxy, says an international team of astronomers.

The estimate for the number of “super-Earths” is based on detections already made and then extrapolated to include the Milky Way’s population of so-called red dwarf stars.

The team works with the high-precision Harps instrument .

Nasa’s science chief has told planetary scientists he is “in there fighting for you” after the swingeing cuts proposed to the robotic exploration budget.

Former astronaut John Grunsfeld was speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.

He faced more than 1,000 researchers at a special session to explain the 21% cut to planetary science in President Obama’s latest budget request for Nasa.

The decision forced the agency to pull out of joint Mars missions with Europe.

Mr Grunsfeld took over as science chief on 4 January this year, after the key budgetary decisions had already been made. He has previously admitted he was disappointed when he learned of the proposals for planetary science.

“The Nasa budget was really the result of some tough choices and national priorities,” he told his audience.

“The fact that the Nasa’s planetary budget took such a great hit was one of those tough priority settings,” and added: “It was a strategic decision.”

The planetary exploration budget funds robotic missions to other bodies in the Solar System, such as Mars, the Moon and the outer planets.

The proposal for the Financial Year 2013 reduced the planetary science budget from $1.5bn to $1.2bn. The cuts would, in the words of one scientist, plunge the field into its biggest crisis since the 1980s and is considered likely to lead to the loss of up to 2,000 hi-tech jobs.

Although planetary science was a loser in general, Mars exploration was singled out for particular cuts, receiving $360.8m, which amounts to a reduction of almost 40% from the FY2012 estimate.

This kind of funding drop precludes Nasa from starting new missions in this part of its portfolio.

After the speech, Mr Grunsfeld fielded a question from Jim Bell, a planetary scientist and current president of the Planetary Society, a space advocacy organisation in California.

Prof Bell, who was one of the lead investigators on the Mars rovers mission, implored Mr Grunsfeld and Nasa’s director of planetary science Jim Green to “fight back” against the plans, even if “you lose your jobs” because, he said, “it’s the right thing to do”.

In response, Mr Grunsfeld recalled a time in 2004 when he had considered resigning from Nasa’s astronaut corps over a decision not to save the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250,000 individual stars shining in it.

Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic center pull it slightly out of shape.

Globular clusters are thought to harbor some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, born when the universe was just a small fraction of its current age. As well as being far older than the sun — around twice its age — the stars of Messier 9 also have a markedly different composition, and are enriched with far fewer heavier elements than the sun.

In particular, the elements crucial to life on Earth, like oxygen and carbon, and the iron that makes up our planet’s core, are very scarce in Messier 9 and clusters like it. This is because the universe’s heavier elements were gradually formed in the cores of stars, and in supernova explosions. When the stars of Messier 9 formed, there were far smaller quantities of these elements in existence.

As well as showing the individual stars, Hubble’s image clearly shows the different colors of the stars. A star’s color is directly related to its temperature — counter-intuitively, perhaps, the redder it is, the cooler it is; and the bluer it is, the hotter. The wide range of stellar temperatures here is clearly displayed by the broad palette of colors visible in this image.

Your dream of visiting the Red Planet may soon come true if the claim made by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, actually comes to fruition. The commercial space travel entrepreneur told the BBC in an interview that he’s figured out how to send a person on a round-trip journey to Mars and back, and that it could be ready in as little as ten years. The best part? Musk says that the “average person” could afford the trip since it will only cost $500,000. I’m not sure which average person he means, but you can bet I am going to be getting a second job for the next ten years to try to make it!

Known for its Dragon spacecraft that has been awarded the contract to make resupply trips to the International Space Station, SpaceX certainly seems capable of dreaming up a low-cost method of visiting Mars. The principle behind all of its vehicles is total re-usability; every single system must be able to be serviced and pressed back into operation. This is to cut down on the already astronomical cost of space flight (pun intended), making it more affordable for private companies to conduct missions into the heavens. The company’s main goal is to eliminate the equipment cost for space travel, leaving fuel as the only financial burden.

A Nasa spacecraft has found further tantalising evidence for the existence of water ice at Mercury’s poles.

Though temperatures here can soar above 400C, some craters at Mercury’s poles are permanently in shadow, making them cold enough for water to stay frozen.

Previous work has revealed patches near Mercury’s poles that strongly reflect radar - a characteristic of ice.

Now, the Messenger probe has shown that these “radar bright” patches line up precisely with the shadowed craters .

Messenger is only the second spacecraft - after Mariner 10 in the 1970s - to have visited the innermost planet. Until Messenger arrived, large swathes of Mercury’s surface had never been mapped.

On March 9, NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station quietly began learning the space exploration equivalent of how to remove and replace a gas cap. It’s the first in a series of small demonstrations that are intended to have big future consequences, an attempt to learn how to refuel a spacecraft in space instead of on the ground. The experiments have been hotly anticipated in the space community.

The Robotic Refueling Mission demonstrations were organized by Dr. Edward Cheung and his team at the NASA Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO), formed in 2009 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr. Cheung is known for his team’s previous experience planning and executing five highly successful servicing missions for the Hubble Space Telescope.

A team of scientists did exactly this , using SOHO, which is a solar observing and solar-orbiting satellite. Because it’s in space, it doesn’t suffer from the problems of peering through a murky, dancing atmosphere. They were able to measure the timing of Mercury’s passage of the Sun to an accuracy of 3 seconds in 2003 and 1 second in 2006. They had to take into account a large number of effects (the Sun’s limb is darker than the center, which affects timing; they had to accurately measure the position of Mercury; they had to account for problems internal to SOHO like focus and the way it changes across the detector; and, of course, correct for the fact that Mercury cut a chord across the Sun and didn’t go straight across the diameter — but that only took knowledge of Mercury’s orbit and some trig) but when they did, they got the most accurate measure of the Sun’s diameter ever made: 1,392,684 /- 65 km , or 865,374 /- 40 miles .

The planet Mercury was once an active and dynamic planet, according to new evidence from a Nasa spacecraft.

Data from the American Messenger probe shows that impact craters on the planet’s surface were distorted by some geological process after they formed.

The findings, reported in Science magazine, challenge long-held views about the closest world to the Sun.

Another study looking at Mercury’s gravity field shows that the planet has an unusual internal structure.

As well as being published in the journal Science, the research has also been presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

“Many scientists believed that Mercury was much like the Moon - that it cooled off very early in Solar System history, and has been a dead planet throughout most of its evolution,” said Maria Zuber, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“Now, we’re finding compelling evidence for unusual dynamics within the planet, indicating that Mercury was apparently active for a long time.”

Dr Zuber and her colleagues used laser measurements from Messenger to map out a large number of impact craters, and found that many had tilted over time.

This suggests that geological processes within the planet have re-shaped Mercury’s terrain after the craters were created.

Observations of Caloris Basin, the planet’s largest impact feature, show that portions of the crater floor stand higher than its rim, suggesting that forces within Mercury’s interior pushed the surface up after the initial collision event.

The researchers also identified an area of lowlands near Mercury’s north pole that could have migrated there over the course of the planet’s evolution. A process called polar wander can cause geological features to shift around on a planet’s surface.

SpaceX’s Company President Gwynne Shotwell used the Satellite 2012 Conference to announce that it has a thin launch window on April 30 that would get it to a scheduled May 3 berthing slot at the International Space Station. The mission, known as COTS 2/3, carries a political payload far larger than the food and clean underwear inside the spacecraft.

For Congress and the Administration, the launch might help make the case that the company’s Dragon spacecraft is a viable option for ferrying astronauts to the Station some day. Moreover, it might prove that the six-year-old COTS program, which allows NASA to partner with corporations to gain access to low Earth orbit, can actually transition to a backbone for manned and unmanned spaceflight.

The upcoming flight is a maneuvering and docking test, but some time this year (probably after the November elections) Congress will vote on the 2013 NASA budget. This will include funding for CCiCap (the successor acronym to CCDev), NASA’s commercial partnership for manned low Earth orbit flights. When that time comes, one or two successful private cargo flights would strengthen the case for human crews flying on domestic commercial rockets. It would also make a better case for justifying the full $850M NASA budget request for Commercial Crew.

Not least, SpaceX also hopes to continue to prove it can carry out a possible $3.2 billion in space station resupply flights. The company has twelve resupply flights on its launch manifest, the first scheduled tentatively for July of this year. Counting the first COTS mission and three DragonLab missions, that’s 16 SpaceX/unmanned Dragon spacecraft flights currently scheduled from now through 2015.

Our view of the Universe just grew quite a bit more detailed as NASA JPL released the compendium of results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer orbital telescope. WISE was launched into a 525 km orbit on December 14, 2009 and gathered data until the WISE team ran out of funding on February 17, 2011.

With hardware over 1,000 times more sensitive than prior infrared space surveys, WISE surveyed 99 percent of the sky at 4 different wavelengths. Over 15 terabytes of data and 2.7 million images revealed 560 million stars, galaxies, comets, asteroids, and various other objects too cool or red-shifted to show up in anything but the infrared. Astronomers saw Y-dwarfs for the first time, which are nearly-invisible brown dwarf stars too cool to see outside the infrared. The first Earth trojan asteroid also revealed itself to WISE—it scouts Earth’s orbit 60 degrees ahead of us around the Sun.

Our view of the solar system also grew quite a bit more detailed, as WISE identified or confirmed over 90 precent of the Near Earth Asteroids. One thing WISE was not able to do was see very much in the Kuiper belt; that task and many others remain for the James Webb Space Telescope now scheduled to be launched in 2018. The JWST will be several times more sensitive yet.

UC Berkeley has published many WISE images as they become available, and Cal Tech hosts JPL’s WISE website .

Squads of disposable mini-satellites able to provide reconnaissance to soldiers at the “press of a button” are being considered by the US military.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) says the machines could provide tactical information at times when existing satellites were not in position.

Darpa has invited manufacturers to discuss the project .

It says the satellites should cost $500,000 (£318,500) apiece.

“We envision a constellation of small satellites, at a fraction of the cost of airborne systems, that would allow deployed warfighters to hit ‘see me’ on existing handheld devices and in less than 90 minutes receive a satellite image of their precise location to aid in mission planning,” the agency says in a statement.

It adds that each constellation should consist of about 24 satellites able to stay in low-Earth orbit for 60-90 days before burning up on re-entry.

For the tl;dr crowd, let’s get this out of the way right away: asteroid 2012 DA14 is almost certainly not going to hit the Earth next February. And by “almost certainly”, I mean it: the odds of an impact are so low they are essentially zero. This does not rule out an impact at some future date, but for now we’re safe.

A Nasa spacecraft has detected oxygen around one of Saturn’s icy moons, Dione.

The discovery supports a theory that suggests all of the moons near Saturn and Jupiter might have oxygen around them.

Researchers say that their finding increases the likelihood of finding the ingredients for life on one of the moons orbiting gas giants.

The study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

According to co-author Andrew Coates of University College London, Dione has no liquid water and so does not have the conditions to support life. But it is possible that other moons of Jupiter and Saturn do.

“Some of the other moons have liquid oceans and so it is worth looking more closely at them for signs of life,” Prof Coates said.

The discovery was made using the Cassini spacecraft, which flew by Dione nearly two years ago. Instruments on board the unmanned probe detected a thin layer of oxygen around the moon, so thin that scientists prefer to call it an “exosphere” rather than an atmosphere.

But the discovery is important because it suggests there is a process at work around the solar system’s gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter, in which oxygen is released from their icy satellites.

It seems that highly charged particles from the planets’ powerful radiation belts split the water in the ice into hydrogen and oxygen.

Dione’s sister moon, Enceladus is thought to harbour a liquid ocean below its icy surface. The same is thought to be true of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede which orbit Jupiter.

Prof Coates is among a group of scientists lobbying the European Space Agency to send an orbiter to explore Jupiter’s icy moons - known as the Juice mission.

“These are fascinating places to look for signs of life,” he said.

As is Titan, Saturn’s largest satellite. Its nitrogen and methane atmosphere is reminiscent of the early Earth, according to Prof Coates.

“It may be an Earth waiting to happen as the outer Solar System warms up,” he said.

Nasa is developing a proposal to send a landing craft, or lander, to float on one of the planet’s oily lakes.

Venus is spinning more slowly and astronomers don’t know why.

In the 1990s, they worked out one Venetian day - the time for the planet to spin round once - lasted 243.018 Earth days.

But now, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter shows Venus’ spin is getting even slower and a day on Venus is now six and a half minutes longer.

Scientists aren’t sure why.

One cause could be Venus’ thick atmosphere and high winds pushing against the planet’s spin.

The news is important for future missions to the planet. Scientists use this data to plan missions to the planet and choose the best spot to land a rover.

The new speed means some features on Venus will be 20 kilometres away from they were expected to be.

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a new class of planet: a waterworld with a thick, steamy atmosphere.

The exoplanet GJ 1214b is a so-called “Super Earth” - bigger than our planet, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter.

Observations using the Hubble telescope now seem to confirm that a large fraction of its mass is water.

The planet’s high temperatures suggest exotic materials might exist there.

Swiss scientists say they plan to launch a “janitor satellite” specially designed to get rid of orbiting debris known as space junk. The $11 million satellite, called CleanSpace One, the prototype for a family of spacecraft, is being built by the Swiss Space Center at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne. The institute said Wednesday that the satellite’s launching would come within three to five years, and that its first tasks would be to retrieve two Swiss satellites that went into orbit in 2009 and 2010. According to NASA, more than 500,000 pieces of spent rocket stages, satellites and other debris are in orbit now and are moving fast enough to damage a satellite or spacecraft.

This image combines data from four space telescopes to create a multi-wavelength view of all that remains of RCW 86, the oldest documented example of a supernova. Chinese astronomers witnessed the event in 185 A.D., documenting a mysterious “guest star” that remained in the sky for eight months. X-ray images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory were combined to form the blue and green colors in the image. The X-rays show the interstellar gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by the passage of the shock wave from the supernova.

Astronomers have created the world’s largest virtual optical telescope linking four telescopes in Chile, so that they operate as a single device.

The telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal observatory form a virtual mirror of 130 metres in diameter.

A previous attempt to link the telescopes last March failed.

Thursday’s link-up was the system’s scientific verification - the final step before scientific work starts.

Linking all four units of the VLT will give scientists a much more detailed look at the universe than previous experiments using just two or three telescopes to create a virtual mirror.

The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry.

In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on earth.

Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope’s spatial resolution and zooming capabilities.

The VLT is one of several telescopes in the Atacama Desert, set up by the European Southern Observatory (Eso).

Eso is an international research organisation headquartered in Munich, Germany, and sponsored by 15 member countries.

Russia blamed radiation on Tuesday for a computer glitch that doomed its mission to a moon of Mars, but space industry experts cast doubt on the findings. Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft became stranded in Earth orbit in November and crashed into the Pacific Ocean on Jan. 15, one of five botched Russian launchings recently. But the state RIA Novosti news agency cited an industry official as saying it was “simply absurd” that Phobos-Grunt had not been made to withstand cosmic rays on its two-year mission.

Two spacecraft engineers join a grouping of vehicles providing a comparison of three generations of Mars rovers developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The setting is JPL's Mars Yard testing area.

Front and center is the flight spare for the first Mars rover, Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997 as part of the Mars Pathfinder Project. On the left is a Mars Exploration Rover Project test rover that is a working sibling to Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004. On the right is a Mars Science Laboratory test rover the size of that project's Mars rover, Curiosity, which is on course for landing on Mars in August 2012.

Sojourner and its flight spare, named Marie Curie, are 2 feet (65 centimeters) long. The Mars Exploration Rover Project's rover, including the "Surface System Test Bed" rover in this photo, are 5.2 feet (1.6 meters) long. The Mars Science Laboratory Project's Curiosity rover and "Vehicle System Test Bed" rover, on the right, are 10 feet (3 meters) long.

The engineers are JPL's Matt Robinson, left, and Wesley Kuykendall. The California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, operates JPL for NASA.

Five days after a failed launch, the Russian Soyuz rocket system has been pressed back into service.

The vehicle successfully put six spacecraft in orbit for US satellite phone and data company, Globalstar.

The Soyuz lifted away from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1709 GMT, ejecting the last of the six Globalstar platforms an hour and 40 minutes later.

Last Friday, a Soyuz malfunctioned soon after launching from the Plesetsk spaceport in northern Russia.

Parts were reported to have crashed back down into the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia.

Last week’s Soyuz was a type 2.1b, compared with the 2.1a version used for the Globalstar mission.

The two variants share many design features but use different engines in their third segment, or stage - the part of the Soyuz said to have been responsible for the failure five days ago.

Russia’s recent poor launch record has continued with yet another Soyuz rocket failure.

This time, a Soyuz-2 vehicle failed to put a communications satellite into orbit after lifting away from the country’s Plesetsk spaceport.

Debris is said to have re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere near the western Siberian town of Tobolsk.

In August, a Soyuz failure on a mission to resupply the space station led to a six-week suspension of flights.

Friday’s rocket was carrying a Meridian-5 satellite, designed to provide communication between ships, planes and coastal stations on the ground, according to RIA Novosti.

It was a Soyuz-2.1b, the most modern version of the rocket that has been in service in various forms since the 1960s.

The failure is said to have occurred seven minutes into the flight. Sources being quoted by the Russian media talk of an anomaly in the rocket’s third stage.

“The satellite failed to go into its orbit. A state commission will investigate the causes of the accident,” the spokesman of Russia’s space forces, Alexei Zolotukhin, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

August’s botched launch involved a Soyuz-U. An inquiry into that incident eventually traced the problem to a blocked fuel line, again in the third stage of the vehicle. But the U and 2.1b Soyuz variants use different engines in this segment of the rocket, so no immediate parallels between the two incidents can be drawn.

Friday’s failure now puts a major question mark against the next Soyuz launch, scheduled for 28 December from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This flight is intended to put in orbit six satellites for the Globalstar satellite phone company.

And it will raise concern again among the partners on the International Space Station (ISS) that there may be systematic problems in the Russian launch sector.

Following the retirement of the American space shuttle in July, the Soyuz rocket is the only means of getting astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS. August’s failure saw manned flights stand down even longer than the six weeks for unmanned Soyuz rockets, and the hiatus put a severe strain on the operation of the space station.

Russia has experienced a number of launch mishaps in the past 13 months.

On 18 August, the week before the loss of the space station mission, a Proton vehicle failed to put a communications satellite in its proper orbit.

Back on 1 February, a Rokot launch also underperformed with a similar outcome.

And on 5 December last year, a Proton carrying three navigation spacecraft fell into the Pacific Ocean. This particular failure is widely believed to have contributed to the decision of the Russian government to replace the then space agency chief, Anatoly Perminov.

Vladimir Popovkin took over as the head of Roscosmos in April.

The rocket failures come on top of the loss of Phobos-Grunt, Russia’s most ambitious planetary mission in decades. It became stuck in Earth orbit after its launch in November and will probably fall back to Earth next month.

Images and data collected by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity indicate that billions of years ago water once flowed through underground fractures in the Martian landscape.

The images were presented on Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's conference in San Francisco.

The exposed vein — seen here in an image taken from the rover's panoramic camera — is apparently made of gypsum, deposited by water. Called 'Homestake', the vein is 1-2cm long (about the width of a human thumb) and 40-50cm long, NASA said in a press release. 

Opportunity, which has been on Mars for almost eight years, has been exploring the area located along the west rim of the Endeavour Crater since August. The exposures were taken on 7 November. 

After identifying the visible deposit in November, Opportunity's Microscopic Imager and Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer on the rover's arm examined the vein and "the spectrometer identified plentiful calcium and sulfur in a ratio pointing to relatively pure calcium sulphate", NASA said.

Why would the shadow of a space shuttle launch plume point toward the Moon? In early 2001 during a launch of Atlantis, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence. First, for the space shuttle's plume to cast a long shadow, the time of day must be either near sunrise or sunset. Only then will the shadow be its longest and extend all the way to the horizon. Finally, during a Full Moon, the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the sky. Just after sunset, for example, the Sun is slightly below the horizon, and, in the other direction, the Moon is slightly above the horizon. Therefore, as Atlantis blasted off, just after sunset, its shadow projected away from the Sun toward the opposite horizon, where the Full Moon just happened to be.

Nasa has launched the most capable machine ever built to land on Mars.

The near one-tonne rover, tucked inside a capsule, left Florida on an Atlas 5 rocket at 10:02 local time (15:02 GMT).

Nicknamed Curiosity, the rover will take eight and a half months to cross the vast distance to its destination.

If it can land safely next August, the robot will then scour Martian soils and rocks for any signs that current or past environments on the planet could have supported microbial life.

The Atlas flight lasted almost three-quarters of an hour.

Contact has finally been made with Russia's troubled Mars mission, says the European Space Agency (Esa).

The agency reports that its tracking station in Perth, Australia, picked up a signal from the Phobos-Grunt probe.

Esa is now working with Russian engineers to see how best to maintain communications with the craft.

Phobos-Grunt has been stuck in Earth orbit since its launch on 9 November, unable to fire the engine that would take it on to Mars.

It raises the hope that Russian controllers can establish what is wrong with the spacecraft and fix it.

Phobos-Grunt still has a short window in which to start its journey before a change in the alignment of the planets makes the distance to the Red Planet too big to cross.

Nasa is in final preparations for the launch of its latest rover mission to the Red Planet.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is the biggest, most capable robot ever built to land on another planet.

It is expected to lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on Saturday.

Lift-off is actually a day later than originally planned, to give engineers time to replace a problem battery in the spacecraft's Atlas rocket.

The one-hour-and-43-minute launch window will now open at 10:02 local time (15:02 GMT). MSL's cruise to Mars should take eight-and-a-half months.

The rover will aim to touch down in an equatorial depression called Gale Crater, where it will use its suite of 10 instruments to assess whether the Red Planet has ever been habitable.

It is not a life-detection mission as such; the $2.5bn robot cannot identify microbes or even microbial fossils. But it can assess whether ancient conditions could have ever supported organisms.

This means Gale must show evidence for the past presence of water, a source of energy with which lifeforms could have metabolised, and a source of organic compounds with which those organisms could have built their structures.

Gale has been chosen as the landing site because satellite imagery has suggested it may well be one of the best places on Mars to look for these biological preconditions.

I don’t have a solid conclusion here. I’m marginally happy about JWST, but as I predicted, funding it means robbing Peter to pay Paul. How many missions will be savaged to pay for this?
And as I’ve said before, over and again: this is all ridiculous. The thing to do is double NASA’s budget. It’s a tiny fraction of the US budget — less than 1% — and it produces a huge amount of knowledge, inspiration, and, if that’s the sort of thing you need as justification, return-on-investment in real dollars. We choose to spend a ton of money on things that really are useless — I’m sure you can think of something that fits that description — but then cut NASA to subsistence levels and ask them, literally, for the Moon. It’s counterproductive, and it’s bizarre.
So what’s next? In the near term I’ll be curious to see how NASA figures out what to cut and what to keep, of course. In a few months the White House will release its budget request for fiscal year 2013. We’ll see how that pans out, especially with the push for Mars exploration.

Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft has docked successfully at the International Space Station (ISS).

The rocket, carrying a US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts, blasted off from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday.

It was the first manned launch since an unmanned cargo rocket crashed shortly after launch in August.

The Soyuz is the only means of reaching the ISS after the US ended its shuttle programme earlier this year.

Russia's Mars-bound probe Phobos-Grunt had an almost immediate engine failure after launch, and now the race is on for the space agency to correct its course and get it back on track toward the red planet.

The craft successfully launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 9 November (Moscow time), and separated from its Zenit-2 booster rocket some 11 minutes later. But its engines failed to kick in, and it's now trapped in Earth's orbit.

The Russian space agency says that it now has three days to correct the probe's fault remotely, turn on its engines and break out of Earth's orbit, before the $167 million craft's batteries run dry.

The first flight of Orion, Nasa's new astronaut vehicle, will take place in early 2014, the agency has announced.

For this particular mission, the capsule will be unmanned, however.

It will see Orion make two highly elliptical orbits of the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the ocean.

The vehicle is being designed to take astronauts beyond the space station to destinations such as the Moon, asteroids and even Mars.

Nasa is also developing a dedicated new rocket, known at the moment only as the Space Launch System (SLS), to put Orion and any associated equipment in orbit.

Because the SLS will not be available until at least 2017, the Exploration Flight Test, or EFT-1, of Orion in 2014 will have to use an existing heavy-lift rocket.

This is likely to be the Delta-IV Heavy rocket that is used currently by the United States Air Force to launch its big surveillance and communications satellites.

The launch will take place from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Russia has launched an audacious bid to scoop up rock and dust samples from the Martian moon Phobos and bring them back to Earth for study.

The dusty debris should provide fresh insights into the origin of the 27km-wide moon that many scientists suspect may actually be a captured asteroid.

The mission is called Phobos-Grunt - "grunt" means "soil" in Russian.

It is a significant venture also because it is carrying China's first Mars satellite.

Yinghuo-1 is a 115kg probe that will ride piggyback and be released into an observation orbit around the Red Planet.

The craft lifted off from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Zenit-2SB rocket at 00:16 local time on Wednesday (20:16 GMT Tuesday).

The moon samples could be back on Earth in 33 months' time.

The US government has formally denied that it has any knowledge of contact with extraterrestrial life.

The announcement came as a response to submissions to the We The People website, which promises to address any petition that gains 5,000 signatories.

Two petitions called for disclosure of government information on ETs and an acknowledgement of any contact.

The White House responded that there was "no evidence that any life exists outside our planet".

More than 17,000 citizens joined the two petitions, and the White House has since amended the requirements for response to a minimum of 25,000 signatories.

NASA’s Deep Space Network personnel sent commands to the Voyager 2 spacecraft Nov. 4 to switch to the backup set of thrusters that controls the roll of the spacecraft. Confirmation was received today that the spacecraft accepted the commands. The change will allow the 34-year-old spacecraft to reduce the amount of power it requires to operate and use previously unused thrusters as it continues its journey toward interstellar space, beyond our solar system.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are each equipped with six sets, or pairs, of thrusters to control their movement. These include three pairs of primary thrusters and three backup, or redundant, pairs. Voyager 2 is currently using the two pairs of backup thrusters that control the pitch and yaw motion of the spacecraft. Switching to the backup thruster pair that controls roll motion will allow engineers to turn off the heater that keeps the fuel line to the primary thruster warm. This will save about 12 watts of power. The spacecraft’s power supply now provides about 270 watts of electricity. By reducing its power usage, the spacecraft can continue to operate for another decade even as its available power continues to decline.

The thrusters involved in this switch have fired more than 318,000 times. The backup pair has not been used in flight. Voyager 1 changed to the backup for this same component after 353,000 pulses in 2004 and is now using all three sets of its backup thrusters.

520 days after being locked inside a fake spaceship in a Moscow car park, a six-man team of volunteer astronauts is about to emerge back on planet Earth.

The year and a half of isolation, dubbed Mars500 and run by the European Space Agency (ESA), was designed to see how real space crews would cope with confinement, daily activities and psychological stress on a lengthy trip to the red planet and back.

The all-male crew could only shower once a week, ate canned food and received emails on a delay, depending on how "far away" they are from Earth. Their living quarters are the size of a bus and, outside of a quick stint on mock Mars, they've spent two eight-month periods in total confinement.

But Patrik Sundblad, the human life sciences specialist at the ESA, says the simulation has proved a complete success. "Yes, the crew can survive the inevitable isolation that is for a mission to Mars and back," Sundblad stated. "Psychologically, we can do it."

China has joined two space vehicles together in orbit for the first time.

The unmanned Shenzhou 8 craft, launched earlier this week, made contact with the Tiangong-1 space lab at 1729 GMT. The union occurred over China itself.

Being able to dock two space vehicles together is a necessary capability for China if it wants to start building a space station towards the decade's end.

Although no astronauts were in the Shenzhou craft this time, future missions will carry people.

US space agency Nasa has funded a study of "tractor beams" to gather samples for analysis in future missions.

The $100,000 (£63,000) award will be used to examine three laser-based approaches to do what has until now been the stuff of science fiction.

Several tractor-beam ideas have been published in the scientific literature but none has yet been put to use.

China says it will launch a unmanned spacecraft on Tuesday that will dock with a capsule already orbiting the Earth.

A rocket carrying Shenzhou 8 will blast off early in the morning from the Gobi Desert and rendezvous with the Tiangong 1.

The space capsule was launched in late September and has already been manoeuvred into position.

China is practising docking in order to build a space station by 2020.

Yesterday, October 30, 2011, the Russian space agency Roscosmos successfully launched a new Progress spacecraft on a Soyuz rocket, the same kind of rocket that failed in August and caused such worry.

This means it looks like the Russians have indeed figured out what went wrong in the previous launch and fixed the issue. I’ll be happier with two successful launches rather than one — they may have gotten it right by accident — but still, I bet a lot of folks at NASA are breathing easier now, and this will ease discussion of de-crewing the ISS, which NASA was considering a few months ago.

On November 8, an asteroid 400 meters across will pass by the Earth, missing us by the very comfortable margin of about 320,000 kilometers (200,000 miles). Named 2005 YU55, it’s been known for some time that this pass will occur, and astronomers are jumping on the chance to observe it.

First off, it’s no danger to Earth right now. It’s what’s called a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid because its orbit intersects ours, but observations have shown it won’t be a danger to Earth for at least a century, and probably much more. There’s been some scare-mongering about it over the past few months, but as usual that’s all baloney. This rock will pass us safely, sailing on into the night.

But given that this is close in astronomical terms, astronomers will be observing it carefully. There are plans to use NASA’s Deep Space Network of radio telescopes, as well as the Arecibo ‘scope in Puerto Rico (which was used to make the image above back in April 2010). They’ll be able to see features on this rock as small as two meters across, which means we’ll actually get some interesting images of it, I hope. I’ll post those as soon as I see ‘em (which will be after November 8).

What powers the Heart Nebula? The large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. A close up in high dynamic range (HDR) spanning about 30 light years contains many of these stars is shown above. This open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our Sun, and an absent microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago. The Heart Nebula is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of Cassiopeia.

A big German spacecraft is about to make an uncontrolled fall from the sky.

The Roentgen Satellite (Rosat) is due to come back to Earth at some stage over the weekend - possibly Sunday.

Just as for Nasa’s UARS satellite, which plunged into the atmosphere in September, no-one can say precisely when and where Rosat will come in.

What makes the redundant German craft’s return interesting is that much more debris this time is likely to survive all the way to the Earth’s surface.

Experts calculate that perhaps as much as 1.6 tonnes of wreckage - more than half the spacecraft’s launch mass - could ride out the destructive forces of re-entry and hit the planet.

In the case of UARS, the probable mass of surviving material was put at only half a tonne (out of a launch mass of more than six tonnes).

Randy Halverson is an astrophotographer who takes gorgeous pictures of the sky and puts them together into amazing time lapse videos (see Related Posts below for links to his work). On Google+ this morning he posted a picture he took last night, and it’s simply stunning: the International Space Station rising into the Milky Way, with both reflected on a lake’s still waters:

India has successfully launched a new satellite, the Megha-Tropiques, to study the patterns of the monsoon.

The one-tonne satellite was one of four spacecraft fired into orbit on Wednesday from Sriharikota, about 80km from Madras.

The Megha-Tropiques satellite is a joint venture with France.

Its should give meteorologists fresh insight into how water moves through the atmosphere to produce the intense weather associated with monsoons.

It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible to the right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way. The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble's central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. The Bubble Nebula, pictured above in scientifically mapped colors to bring up contrast, is about 10 light-years across and part of a much larger complex of stars and shells. The Bubble Nebula can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia).

Inspections have found that the Soyuz rockets intended to carry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station do not have the flaw that caused an unmanned cargo ship to crash in August, Russia’s space chief said Friday. The Soyuz became the only way to reach the space station after NASA retired the space shuttle in July. Vladimir Popovkin, head of the Russian Space Agency, said that a check of 18 rocket engines from the same batch has not found the manufacturing flaw blamed for the August crash.

Scientists have discovered that Venus has an ozone layer.

The thin layer, which is hundred of times less dense than the Earth’s, was discovered by the European Space Agency’s Venus Express craft, researchers report in the journal Icarus.

Until now, ozone layers have only been detected in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars.

The find could help astronomers refine their hunt for life on other planets.

Comet Hartley 2 contains water more like that found on Earth than prior comets seem to have, researchers say.

A study using the Herschel space telescope aimed to measure the quantity of deuterium, a rare type of hydrogen, present in the comet's water.

The comet had just half the amount of deuterium seen in comets.

The result, published in Nature, hints at the idea that much of the Earth's water could have initially came from cometary impacts.

Just a few million years after its formation, the early Earth was rocky and dry; something must have brought the water that covers most of the planet today.

Water has something of a molecular fingerprint in the amount of deuterium it contains, and only about a half-dozen comets have been measured in this way.

All of them have exhibited a deuterium fraction twice as high as the oceans, so the current theory holds that asteroids were likely to be the carriers for water; meteorites that they give rise to have roughly the same proportion of deuterium that the Earth's oceans contain.

Europe is to lead the most ambitious space mission ever undertaken to study the behaviour of the Sun.

Known as Solar Orbiter, the probe will have to operate a mere 42 million km from our star - closer than any spacecraft to date.

The mission proposal was formally adopted by European Space Agency (Esa) member states on Tuesday.

Solar Orbiter is expected to launch in 2017 and will cost close to a billion euros.

Nasa (the US space agency) will participate, providing two instruments for the probe and the rocket to send it on its way.

The Esa delegates, who were meeting in Paris, also selected a mission to investigate two of the great mysteries of modern cosmology - dark matter and dark energy.

Scientists are convinced that these phenomena dominate and shape the Universe but their nature has so far eluded any satisfactory explanation. The discovery in the late 1990s of dark energy and its influence on cosmic expansion was recognised with a Nobel Prize earlier in the day for three scientists.

In among a raft of papers published in this week’s edition of the journal Science, researchers reveal strange hollows that pock Mercury’s surface.

Irregular in shape, these depressions seem to form in the bright deposits that have been excavated where meteorites have impacted the surface.

The Messenger team cannot be sure what has caused them, but on Mars similar features are also known to exist.

In the case of the Red Planet, they are probably a consequence of evaporating carbon dioxide ice.

As the ice is driven off in the warmth of the Sun, it leaves a hole in the ground that produces a kind “Swiss cheese” terrain.

On Mercury, there is no carbon dioxide ice, so it would have to be some other kind of volatile material in play.

“It could be that there is some component in Mercury rocks that is unstable when it is exposed to the environment at the surface,” said David Blewett of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

A paper has been accepted for publication in a science journal (PDF) where the author has analyzed data from NASA’s Kepler planet-finding observatory, trying to figure out how many Earth-sized planets there might be in the galaxy orbiting their stars in their habitable zones; that is, at the right distance so that the star warms the planet enough to have liquid water. In the paper, he estimates that on average 34% (+/-14%) of Sun-like stars have terrestrial planets in that Goldilocks zone.

Though the sizes are not to scale, the Sun and planets of the inner solar system are shown in this illustration, where each red dot represents an asteroid. New results from NEOWISE, the infrared asteroid hunting portion of the WISE mission, are shown on the left compared to old population projections of mid-size or larger near-Earth asteroids from surveys at visible wavelengths. And the good news is, NEOWISE observations estimate there are 40 percent fewer near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 100 meters (330 feet), than indicated by visible light searches. Based on infrared imaging, the NEOWISE results are more accurate as well. Heated by the Sun, asteroids of the same size radiate the same amount of infrared light, but can reflect very different amounts of visible sunlight depending on how shiny their surface is, or their surface albedo. That effect can bias surveys based on optical observations. NEOWISE results reduce the estimated number of mid-size near-Earth asteroids from about 35,000 to 19,500, but the majority still remain undiscovered.

China is due to launch its first space laboratory, Tiangong-1.

The 10.5m-long, cylindrical module will be unmanned for the time being, but the country's astronauts, or yuhangyuans, are expected to visit it next year.

Tiangong-1 will demonstrate the critical technologies needed by China to build a fully fledged space station - something it has promised to do at the end of the decade.

The space lab is set to ride to orbit atop a Long March 2F rocket.

It’s hard to imagine just how enormous this cluster is. So to help, I cropped out the big spot on the left and put the Earth to scale next to it.

So yeah. That’s our whole planet.

Sunspots are big.

In fact, these guys are so big I tried to get a picture myself using binoculars, projecting the image onto a white board. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my set up to work well and all the pictures were out of focus. You might want to try it yourself, but be warned: the bright Sun can damage optics, so you might fry your binocs. Also, of course: NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN. Not with your eyes, not through a telescope, not through binoculars. There are ways to do that, but it takes specialized equipment, and it’s not worth the risk if you don’t know what you’re doing. The Stanford Solar Center has some advice about all this.

Have you ever dreamed of flying high above the Earth? Astronauts visiting the International Space Station do this every day, circling our restless planet twice every three hours. A dramatic example of their view was compiled in the above time-lapse video from images taken earlier this month. As the ISS speeds into the nighttime half of the globe, familiar constellations of stars remain visible above. An aerosol haze of Earth's thin atmosphere is visible on the horizon as an thin multi-colored ring. Many wonders whiz by below, including vast banks of white clouds, large stretches of deep blue sea, land lit up by the lights of big cities and small towns, and storm clouds flashing with lightning. The video starts over the northern Pacific Ocean and then passes from western North America to western South America, ending near Antarctica as daylight finally approaches.

The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies has updated their predicted re-entry time for NASA’s UARS satellite. It is now 9/24 (tonight!) at 05:10 UTC (01:10 Eastern US time), which puts it over the southern Indian ocean:

NASA has confirmed that the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellites, UARS, burned up over the Pacific Ocean last night, September 24, between 03:23 and 04:09 a.m. UTC (11:23 p.m. and 12:09 Eastern US time). I have no other reliable information on it, but I expect we’ll get more updates soon. There were lots of reports last night of it falling over Canada, but those were mistakes or hoaxes. Apparently some people were fooled by meteors, Chinese lanterns, and possibly even the planet Jupiter. That’s happened before.

If I find photos or such I’ll try to post them, but I’ve heard no reports of witnesses, and I’ll be away this afternoon for my TEDxBoulder talk, so if any pictures turn up I may not be able to get to them. I imagine SpaceWeather will post any if they crop up.

Thus ends that saga. If you’re curious, you can read about the history of the UARS and what we learned from its 15 year mission to investigate our planet’s atmosphere.

Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has put two large commercial telecommunications satellites in orbit.

The vehicle lifted off from French Guiana at 2138 GMT, ejecting the second of its "passengers" 35 minutes later.

Of key significance in an otherwise routine mission was the carriage to orbit on one of the satellites of a US Air Force missile tracking sensor.

The hosting of military and other government payloads on commercial platforms is set to become commonplace.

This piggybacking approach is seen as a fast and cost-effective way to get new capabilities into orbit without the need to develop a whole spacecraft.

The Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload (Chirp) represents the USAF's first such venture.

Chirp has been attached to the SES-2 satellite, which has a primary mission of transmitting TV channels across North America and the Caribbean.

The sensor will demonstrate a new wide-field telescope to detect missiles in the early stage of flight - the so-called boost phase.

It was the fifth flight of the year for an Ariane 5 rocket and the 60th in its 15-year history.

The second satellite launched on Wednesday's mission was Arabsat-5C, which will deliver telecommunications services to the Middle East and African regions.

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three returning astronauts from the International Space Station touched down safely Friday in the central steppes of Kazakhstan, but not without rattling nerves after a breakdown in communications.

NASA astronaut Ron Garan and Russian cosmonauts Andrei Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyayev landed some 150 kilometers (93 miles) southeast of the city of Zhezkazgan at 10 a.m. local time (0400 GMT) after 164 days in space.

Repeated calls to the Soyuz TMA-21 capsule from Mission Control in Korolyov, outside Moscow, went unanswered for several minutes, well after the craft had de-orbited. Communication was eventually established between the crew and an Antonov fixed-winged aircraft circling the landing site.

The landing was smooth in the area planned seconds before the expected arrival time.

Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, NASA's Michael Fossum, and Satoshi Furukawa of Japan's JAXA space agency remain onboard the international space station and are due to return to Earth on Nov. 22.

There will be some taut nerves in the run-up to that return, which Roscosmos announced Friday should be preceded by a manned Soyuz launch from Baikonur on Nov. 14. Earlier this week, Roscosmos announced that the launch was to take place on Nov. 12.

Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, had to postpone that launch from October amid concerns over a failed supply mission last month. Another delay would almost certainly mean the space station would have to be left unmanned. Astronauts have been living aboard the station, without interruption, for almost 11 years.

Since phasing out the U.S. space shuttle program earlier this year, NASA is relying entirely on Russia to get American and other astronauts to the international space station.

A defunct, six-ton NASA satellite will plummet out of orbit in about a week — on Sept. 23, give or take a day. But where it will land nobody knows. The orbit of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite passes over latitudes as far north as Edinburgh and as far south as Cape Town, and the trail of debris will stretch to about 500 miles long. NASA puts the chances that anything would hit anyone at 1 in 3,200 and notes that there are no known cases of injury by falling satellite, not even when its Skylab space station crashed into western Australia in 1979. The falling satellite, about one-tenth the mass of Skylab, was launched in 1991 from the space shuttle Discovery to study the dynamics and chemistry of the upper atmosphere and was decommissioned in 2005 when its fuel ran out and its batteries failed.

Russia says the first manned flight to the International Space Station (ISS) since the August failure of a Soyuz rocket will take place on 12 November.

All flights - manned and unmanned - are currently grounded as the Russian space agency Roskosmos investigates an engine anomaly that sent a robotic ISS cargo ship crashing to Earth.

An inquiry believes it has found the cause in a production line defect.

Roskosmos plans to fly an unmanned mission before the crewed flight.

This has been scheduled for 30 October and will see a Soyuz rocket attempt to lift another robotic cargo ship to the ISS.

If it performs well, the space station partners - which also include the US, Europe, Canada and Japan - will have the confidence to re-instate manned flights.

Following the retirement of the American space shuttle in July, the Soyuz is now the only means of getting people to the station.

The rocket's problems have put at risk the continued occupation of the ISS, which has had people living and working inside its modules since November 2000.

That’s the immediate issue. However, this rocket failure is a bit more problematic. The flaw appears to have happened in the manufacturing process, and that’s the sticky point. If it were something procedural setting up for launch (tanking up the rocket, for example), that’s a relatively easy fix. If it were some malfunction in the machinery used to make the rocket (again, possible to find and fix in general), the flaw would’ve turned up more often. That leaves something that happened by accident, and that’s not terribly reassuring. How do you know when a problem like that is mitigated? What was the exact circumstance that led to the pipe being faulty?

Until the Russians can figure that out, implement a fix, and make sure that problem is eliminated — and that other similar mistakes are prevented — it’s too risky to allow astronauts to fly on board the rocket. And that, currently, is the only way to get humans up to the space station. The only other rocket currently capable of getting up there is the Space X Falcon 9, which has not yet proven its reliability, and in any case has not been cleared by NASA to carry humans (the Space X Dragon capsule could theoretically do that, but needs to pass a set of strict regulations to be (pardon the expression) street legal).

I’ll note the Wall Street Journal is reporting that with the flaw being found, Soyuz flights could resume as early as October. Interestingly, the WSJ article reports that NASA is optimistic, while the NYT article says the Russian commission that investigated the crash is more cautious. The WSJ also says NASA may have a statement out this week, so we’ll see. I don’t see any mention of this on the NASA site (an ISS telecon will be held on Tuesday, September 20), but I’ll keep my eyes open.

Also note that three of the six astronauts on the ISS will be coming home in a Soyuz capsule on Thursday, September 15th (note the capsules are unrelated to the rocket that failed). They plan to undock and make the de-orbit burn at 03:06 UT Thursday (23:06 Eastern US time Wednesday night) and land in Kazakhstan 04:01 a.m. UT. That will leave three astronauts on the ISS; they will either have to come home to Earth by mid-November due to the limited fuel lifetime of their return capsule, or have a new capsule put in place. And that won’t be possible until flights resume.

Last week, NASA released new, higher-res images of three Apollo landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. BABloggee Rick Sheppe had a cool idea: why not compare these to ones taken by the Apollo astronauts themselves? In fact, by grabbing a frame taken by a 16mm movie camera on board the Apollo 17 ascent module as they left the Moon, you can compare the views seen by astronauts and LRO directly!

So I did it. I took a frame from the 16mm camera on Apollo 17, and the LRO pic of the same area. After rotating and adjusting the contrast of the original Apollo 17 picture a wee bit, here is what I got:

A Russian commission has pinpointed a clogged fuel pipe as the reason a Soyuz rocket crashed into a forest in Siberia last month before it reached orbit, but the panel offered no guidance on when this type of rocket would again be considered ready for manned missions.

While narrowing the cause of the accident to one part, the commission also raised broader and difficult-to-address concerns about quality control in the Russian factories that make parts for the country’s manned space program.

Confirming initial reports, the commission said the first and second stages fired as planned on Aug. 24. But the third stage shut down.

The doomed rocket was carrying supplies on a Progress unmanned cargo spaceship to the International Space Station, but it was similar to the model that used to ferry cosmonauts and astronauts into orbit.

The pipe that clogged was a small but integral part of the third-stage engine, according to a statement by the Russian Space Agency, which said its engineers had reached this conclusion by analyzing telemetry. Despite a lengthy search with helicopters, the authorities have yet to find any debris in the dense pine forest where the rocket crashed.

The pipe sent kerosene to a small turbine that was not generating thrust but, instead, providing power to pump kerosene and liquid oxygen into the main combustion chambers, according to the statement.“This disrupted the engine’s operations, affected its parameters and activated the system that switched off the engine,” the statement said.

However reassuring that finding may be for space officials in Russia and at NASA, which has rented seats on the Soyuz rocket as the only means for Americans to reach space after the retirement of the space shuttle this summer, pinpointing the cause as a manufacturing flaw is likely to increase jitters about Russian safety.

The commission shared this concern. “The members of the commission came to the conclusion that the manufacturing defect was accidental,” it said. “But a decision can be taken to qualify it as a single instance only after a thorough re-evaluation” of quality control in the entire parts supply for the third-stage engines.

The commission recommended that the space agency put into effect a better quality-control program for engine parts and offered a suggestion for the plant that made the flawed pipe: “video surveillance of workers at the final assembly line.”

The commission ruled out errors by the ground crew that prepared the rocket. Such an error could have been fixed by changing the launching procedure, said Marina Alekseyenkova , an aerospace analyst at the large government-controlled bank Gazprombank, in a telephone interview.

A design flaw might also be quickly addressed. But the design of the engine, which has been flown successfully for years, is hardly in question, she said, while manufacturing defects could be hard to systematically eliminate, with hundreds of parts made in scattered, Soviet-era factories.

“They are talking about an assembly problem,” she said. “This is really a bad sign for the industry. It means that everything made should be checked and checked again.”

The Russians’ troubleshooting comes at a critically important time for NASA, as members of Congress and the White House are in a dispute over the scale of financing for the private spaceship ventures that are intended to replace the shuttle. Underscoring the risks of private space designs, a test craft of Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, also crashed Aug. 24.

Nasa is sending twin probes called Grail to map tiny variations in the pull of gravity around the lunar body.

The information should give scientists fresh insight into the internal structure of Earth's satellite.

This will help explain many mysteries, such as why the farside of the Moon looks so different from that of the nearside with its great swathe of dark volcanic plains, or maria.

The data also will be an invaluable navigation tool for future exploration, enabling other spacecraft to make more precise landings.

A Delta rocket sent the Grail twins on their way. Its launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station occurred at 09:08 EDT (13:08 GMT; 14:08 BST).

The journey to the Moon is a slow cruise, however. The duo is not expected to enter into orbit until the turn of the year.

Nasa does not have enough astronauts, even though the space shuttle programme has ended, a report says.

The National Research Council, a non-profit group advising on science policy, said Nasa should increase the size of its space-flying crew.

It said astronauts were needed to staff the International Space Station (ISS) and pave the way for new exploration.

American astronauts currently have to travel on Russian spacecraft in order to reach the ISS.

The US space shuttle programme ended in July, after 30 years.

At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 17B in Florida, these spacecraft technicians may be the last persons to glimpse NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, spacecraft as the sections of the Delta payload fairing close around them. The fairing will protect the spacecraft from the impact of aerodynamic pressure and heating during ascent and will be jettisoned once they are outside the Earth's atmosphere. Launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from Pad 17B is scheduled for Sept. 8. The spacecraft will fly in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field. GRAIL's primary science objectives include determining the structure of the lunar interior, from crust to core, and understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon.

A spacecraft financed by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon.com, crashed during a test flight in West Texas, Mr. Bezos said on Friday.

No one was on board for the flight, and no one on the ground was injured when the spaceship went out of control on Aug. 24.

After the crash was reported Friday afternoon on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, Mr. Bezos acknowledged the failure on the Web site of his space company, Blue Origin. The vehicle reached an altitude of 45,000 feet and a speed of 1.2 times the speed of sound before a “flight instability” occurred.

“Not the outcome any of us wanted,” Mr. Bezos wrote, “but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.”

The company released a photograph of the stubby cylindrical rocket in flight before the malfunction.

Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., is developing a suborbital spaceship called New Shepard, which is to take off and land vertically for carrying people to the near edge of space.

The company did not announce plans for the latest flight test beforehand, but the Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary flight restriction for the morning of Aug. 24, telling aircraft to stay out of the air space around Van Horn, Tex., “due to rocket launch activity” by Blue Origin.

When the time period passed, the notice disappeared from the F.A.A. Web site, with no comment from Blue Origin.

Blue Origin is parsimonious in giving updates about its progress, even when it is successful.

When it got a test vehicle off the ground in November 2006 — reaching a not-so-high altitude of 285 feet — Mr. Bezos waited a month and a half before letting anyone outside of Blue Origin know. That was the last update on the Web site for four and a half years, until Friday. In addition to the failure, Mr. Bezos said the company had conducted a successful “short hop” flight test three months ago.

Blue Origin is one of several companies aiming to fly tourists above the 62-mile altitude that is typically considered the edge of outer space, offering a few minutes of weightlessness. The company also has a contract with NASA as part of its so-called commercial crew program to develop a system that can take astronauts to orbit. The crash was not related to the NASA work.

With a 3.5 meter diameter mirror, larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, ESA's Herschel Space Observatory explores the Universe at infrared wavelengths. Herschel is named for German-born British astronomer Frederick William Herschel who discovered infrared light over 200 years ago. Herschel's sensitive cameras have combined to deliver this spectacular skyscape looking toward the constellation of the Southern Cross. Spanning some 2 degrees the premier, false-color, far-infrared view captures our galaxy's cold dust clouds in extreme detail, showing a remarkable, connected maze of filaments and star-forming regions. Such observations are intended to unravel mysteries of star formation by surveying broad areas of the galactic plane.

Russia has grounded its fleet of Soyuz rockets after an unmanned spacecraft carrying cargo for the space station crashed shortly following launch.

Investigators want to determine the cause of the accident before moving ahead with any further flights.

The halt could delay a manned launch from Kazakhstan currently scheduled for September.

Emergency workers are using helicopters to search for wreckage of the Progress supply craft in Siberia.

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has found the very first asteroid that (more or less) shares an orbit with Earth! Called 2010 TK7, this asteroid is about 300 meters (roughly 1000 feet) across, and is the first in an up-to-now theoretical class of objects called Earth Trojans.