It was a nailbiter this morning at the Mojave spaceport in California when SpaceShipOne successfully returned to space; half way to winning the $10 million X-Prize.

It's been said that an army travels on its stomach. Well, that's true with astronauts too. Especially when they're headed to Mars, and might need to stay a few years; or maybe even build a colony. The question is, how much space, soil, water, energy and air does it take to keep astronauts alive on another planet if they're growing all their own food? Ray Collins has locked himself inside a greenhouse in Alaska, and he's working towards discovering the answer.

Early rocketeers had a vision. They wanted to enable human beings to safely travel from Earth to any destination in the solar system. Wernher von Braun in the USA and Vladimir Chelomey of the Soviet Union both believed that a space station was a necessary first step to achieving this destination. Robert Zimmerman shares this vision and belief and in his book, Leaving Earth - Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel he shows how humankind, especially the old Soviet Union, has made substantial progress in achieving it. He also shows that, sadly, the rational for this progress was predominantly for disparate political benefits rather than for satisfying any vision.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has delivered a series of new photographs of the Red Planet taken in new high detail, including images of the Mars Exploration rovers. By rolling the spacecraft as it travels to match the movement of Mars underneath, NASA engineers have figured out a clever way to increase the resolution of images taken by the spacecraft. It's now capable of resolving images as detailed as half as 1.5 metres across (4.9 feet) - a threefold improvement. Mars Global Surveyor has been systematically mapping Mars since it arrived in 1999, and its latest mission extension beginning October 1 will keep it running into September 2006.

When it comes to astronomy, size is everything. The biggest telescope on the planet is the 11-metre Hobby-Eberly on Mount Fowlkes in Texas. And the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes perched atop Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii can work in tandem to act as an even larger telescope. But there are new observatories in the works, with telescopes that will be 30-metres across and larger. Once these turn their gaze into the heavens, astronomers will have some amazingly powerful tools at their disposal.

Asteroid Toutatis, a frequent visitor in our neighborhood, will pass as close as 1.5 million km (960,000) miles to the Earth on Wednesday. As spacerocks go, Toutatis is pretty big; it's 5 km (3.1 miles) long and weighs 2.5 billion kg (5.5 billion pounds) - an asteroid this size was thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although there are plenty of doomsayers predicting the Earth's demise, Toutatis will keep its distance, passing four times as far as the Moon. The spacerock isn't visible without a telescope, and its position depends where on Earth you're looking at it. This makes it a very challenging object for amateur astronomers to spot.

Data accumulated by the ASPERA-3 instrument on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft seems to indicate how Mars got so dry. Scientists believe that water used to cover Mars, but over the course of 3.8 billion years, it was stripped away from the planet by the Sun's solar wind. ASPERA-3 tracks the inflow of particles from the solar wind, and then tracks the outflow of particles escaping from the Martian atmosphere. It found that the solar wind penetrates deeply into the atmosphere to an altitude of 270 km, energizes particles, and causes about 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of material to trail away from Mars every second. Over the years it added up to make the planet bone dry.

The da Vinci Project, a Canadian team of amateur rocket scientists, has pushed back the launch date of its Wildfire rocket. The Wildfire was originally scheduled to launch on October 2, which would put it only a few days after Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne makes its launch attempt to win the $10 million X-Prize. The delay was required because the team was still waiting on some key components that they needed to install in the suborbital rocket. It's not known when they'll make their launch attempt.

NASA scientists picking through the wreckage of Genesis' capsule have shipped off the first sample to the University of California, Berkeley for further analysis. These samples were attached to the interior lid of the capsule - its "lid foils" - and the scientists think they'll be able to recover 75-80% of this material. The next challenge are the four collector arrays which were fairly damaged, but some large pieces have been recovered.

An international team of scientists have discovered one of the most powerful events since the Big Bang: a collision between two galaxy clusters, which is smashing millions of stars into each other. The galaxy clusters are colliding like hurricanes, tossing individual galaxies out into interstellar space, and creating shockwaves more than 100-million degrees hot. Although the cluster, Abell 754, has been known for a long time, the astronomers used the ESA's XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory to trace back the interactions and collisions with great detail, and get a much deeper understanding about how the Universe's largest structures are still forming.

Astronomers have been studying the deepest optical view of the Universe - the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) - and they think they've found some of the first star forming galaxies. These galaxies began forming 0.5 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The team analyzed the HUDF, and found dozens of red, dim dwarf galaxies, which appear to be the first basic galactic building blocks. These would merge with other galaxies to eventually form the complex spiral formations like our own Milky Way. The also found regions which were more dense than others, which supports the theory that dense regions of space where the first places galaxies formed.

Something is radiating high-energy gamma rays at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, and astronomers aren't sure what it is. The object was discovered using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of four telescopes, in Namibia, South-West Africa. One theory is that it's the remnant from a supernova that exploded 10,000 years ago; this has enough energy to accelerate gamma rays so strongly. The object is also very near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, so this radiation could be somehow associated with it.

When the Larsen B ice shelf broke away from the coast of Antarctica two years ago, nearby glaciers surged, flowing eight times faster. This is according to a new study by NASA-funded researchers who used several Earth observing satellites to track the movements of Antarctic glaciers. It appears that the ice shelves hold glaciers back, like a dam. Once the shelf breaks up, the glacier is free to flow quickly. These glaciers aren't that large, but this research gives scientists an understanding of what will happen as rising temperatures continue breaking up Antarctica's ice shelves.

NASA has approved a six month extension for the Mars Exploration Rovers, giving them more time to continue exploring the surface of Mars for evidence of past water. Both Spirit and Opportunity have completed their original three-month mission, and an additional five-month extension. Even though the rovers are well past their expected operational life, neither one is showing much sign of wear, so NASA scientists plan to keep them running. The rovers took a 12-day break earlier this month as Mars passed behind the Sun, disrupting all communication to and from the Red Planet.

NASA has chosen Northrop Grumman Space Technology to build its upcoming Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) spacecraft, and awarded them a $400 million contract to cover costs up to 2008. JIMO will use a nuclear-powered ion engine to go into orbit around each of Jupiter's icy moons: Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa. Once in orbit, the spacecraft would be able to examine each of the moons in great detail with a suite of instruments to try and understand their composition, history, and if there could be conditions for life.

SpaceDev, the company that designed and built the hybrid rocket engine for Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne, announced that they've entered discussions with NASA to design a low-cost suborbital spaceship. The SpaceDev Dream Chaser would take off vertically, and carry up to three people to an altitude of 160 km (100 miles). If everything goes well, the spacecraft would be built by 2008, and would demonstrate a set of launch and flight technologies. Further versions of the spacecraft would eventually be able to go into orbit and transfer crew to and from the International Space Station.

This is an image of Saturn's tiny moon Prometheus, which shepherds the inner edge of Saturn's F ring. The irregular moon is only 102 km (63 miles) across but its gravity defines the edge of the ring, essentially keeping it in line. The image was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on August 5, when it was 8.2 million km (5.1 million miles) from the planet.

The Sun Observer's Guide by Pam Spence is a practical reference for how and why to view our nearest star. Though the uninitiated consider our sun to be a steady source of light and heat, nothing could be further from the truth. Using the proper equipment with appropriate safeguards, viewers can watch a seething tempest. Changes can occur in a few short minutes or, with appropriate record keeping, changes can be seen to vary over decades. This book can start you making worthwhile observations.

European scientists recently announced that they had discovered the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars using the Mars Express spacecraft. They've had a chance to perform further research on the data now, and produced a map of methane concentrations around the planet. This map surprisingly overlaps a similar map of Mars that shows where its water is located. It could be that geothermal processes are feeding the water table, and venting out methane at the same time. A more exciting possibility is that bacterial life survives wherever there's water, and it's producing methane as a byproduct.

You always hear that the early Universe was a violent chaotic time, with galaxies smashing into each other. Maybe it wasn't quite that crazy early on. Alister Graham from the Australian National University has analyzed images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and found that there were 1/10th the collisions that earlier studies had suggested. It was thought that it took multiple collisions for galaxies to clear away the stars at their cores - this is how astronomers built up the earlier model - but Dr. Graham calculated that it could actually happen with just one collision.

After its crash landing, NASA scientists weren't too hopeful that they'd turn up much science in the wreckage of Genesis' sample capsule, but the results so far have been a pleasant surprise. Even though the capsule smashed into the ground at nearly 320 km (200 miles) per hour, the samples aren't smashed up too badly, and scientists are able to extract fairly large pieces for further analysis. Genesis' purpose was to gather particles from the Sun's solar wind, which would be returned to Earth and then distributed to scientists around the world.

This is a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of a beautiful image of Saturn's rings, taken by Cassini on July 30. This image shows a view looking through the planet's C ring, which is closest to Saturn. It also shows the Cassini division, which separates the A and B rings by a 4,800 km (2,980 mile) gap.

Mira stars are a special class of variable red giants which pulsate. Over the course of 80-1,000 days, a Mira star can vary in brightness by a factor of 10 times or more during the cycle. An international team of astronomers has observed the environments of five Mira stars, and found that they're surrounded by a shell of water vapour and carbon monoxide; this makes them seem larger than they actually are. These new observations bring the size of Mira stars in line with mathematical models that predict their size and composition. By observing Mira stars, astronomers will get a preview of the fate that could befall our own Sun when it bloats up to become a red giant in a few billion years.

Although Hurricane Ivan spared NASA's Kennedy Space Center, several of the agencies other facilities weren't so lucky. The Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans were much closer to the point where the enormous storm came ashore on the US Gulf Coast. Stennis is where the space shuttle's engines are tested, so they were secured for the storm; one was returned to its container, another was wrapped in plastic, and two development engines were secured on their test stands. Michoud is where the shuttle's external fuel tanks are manufactured and assembled; these were secured, and assembly equipment was moved inside. NASA will get an idea of the damage later today or tomorrow, when its employees begin returning to work.

Researchers from Australia have demonstrated that an observatory in Antarctica can produce images of the sky several times better than telescopes at mid latitudes. A team of astronomers from the University of New South Wales made observations using a robotic telescope in an observatory called "Dome C" on the Antarctic Plateau, 3250 metres (10,600 feet) above sea level. They found that the sharpness of images was three times better than the best sites used by astronomers in other locations. An 8m telescope here would function like a 25m telescope anywhere else - at a fraction of the cost of a space-based observatory.

Even as it's battening down the hatches for another rough ride at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA is getting as much science as it can out of Hurricane Ivan. The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer aboard NASA's Terra satellite has provided a wealth of data about its formation and structure that will help improve future hurricane forecasts. Scientists need to learn what elements make hurricanes strengthen or weaken, and sometimes make last minute swerves as they approach land - the more they know, the more accurately they can predict hurricane paths to lead evacuation efforts.

Jupiter's moon Io is peppered with volcanoes spewing gas and dust up to 400 km (284 miles) high. You'd think that this material would all settle down again onto the moon, but something very unusual is happening: it's being accelerated to a velocity second only to the Sun's solar wind. This new space hazard came as a complete surprise when it was first discovered pelting the NASA/ESA Ulysses spacecraft. The dust came in a tight stream, moving at 300 km per second (200 mps), and it was detected again when Galileo visited the Jovian system. It turns out that Jupiter's powerful magnetic field picks up the material from Io and accelerates it.

It will probe the dark ages before the era of re-ionization, and perhaps before the birth of the first stars. It will observe the formation of the first galaxies. It will map the web of neutral Hydrogen that is spread across our universe, near and far. In 2015, an array of 4400 twelve meter fully steerable paraboloid radio dishes, called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is scheduled to be complete and operational.

Two, uh... people without clothes. That's what comes to mind when people think about the Pioneer space probes. From a series of some of the most advanced and original missions brought forward by NASA, people's subsequent memory is a sketch of a nude man and women that was used as a greeting card to alien life forms. Luckily, if you want some refreshing insight into the science and the politics of the Pioneer space probes, then you can read Mark Wolverton's book, The Depths of Space, to easily augment some half-forgotten image of people in their natural form.

British scientists are working on a project that would link up robotic telescopes around the world so they could get the jump on events in the night sky, and keep watching regardless of day or night, or local weather conditions. It's always nighttime somewhere, so the network would connect the telescopes so they can transfer their targets to one another continuously, essentially watching an object around the clock. It's currently planned for three telescopes, but a future version would connect six telescopes.

NASA operators were so concerned about the safety of the fragile capsule from Genesis and its precious cargo of solar wind samples that they'd arranged an elaborate airborne capture with helicopter stunt pilots. So when the capsule's parachute failed to open, and it slammed into the Utah desert at hundreds of km per hour, you'd think it was a total writeoff. Well, apparently not. NASA scientists have been analyzing the wreckage, and found enough is intact that they should be able to achieve most of their scientific objectives - enough samples of the Sun's solar wind have survived to keep the scientific community busy for a long time.

The crew on board the International Space Station restarted the malfunctioning Elektron oxygen system on Friday, but shut it down about an hour later. Russian engineers are trying to figure out why the system is automatically commanding itself to shut down. Commander Gennady Padalka used spare parts that were on hand to get a backup system ready if necessary. There's still plenty of oxygen available to the two men on board the station, including full tanks on the docked Progress cargo ship, and 84 solid fuel oxygen canisters which can last them 42 days.

NASA's Terra satellite took this photograph of Hurricane Ivan as it roared past the island of Jamaica on Saturday. The US space agency is gearing itself up for another potential encounter with a hurricane; just a week after Hurricane Frances damaged the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Forecasters are expecting that KSC will receive winds of 75 kph (45 mph) and more rain on Tuesday. 1,500 employees have been working to get the space centre back online, and managers are still planning to reopen to its full 14,000 employees on Monday.

Astronomers from the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) in Cambridge, England have watched a bundle of matter at the heart of a galaxy 100 million light-years away as it orbited a supermassive black hole four times on its way to being destroyed. The material was approximately the same distance as our Earth is from the Sun, but instead of taking a year, it only took a quarter of a day, because of the massive gravity of the black hole. By tracking the matter's doomed orbit, astronomers were then able to calculate the mass of the black hole: between 10 and 50 million solar masses.

Scientists working with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) have demonstrated that they can track changes in the Earth's environment by measuring its gravity field. Launched in 2002, Grace is actually two identical spacecraft that keep track of their precise distance from each other. As they pass over the lumpy gravity field of the Earth, their distance changes, which they can measure and turn into a gravity map of the planet. The mission demonstrated that it could measure 10 cm (4 in) of rainfall in the Amazon, just from the effect of its gravity.

This perspective image of an eroded crater on Mars was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft in May 2004. It's at Solis Planum, in the Thaumasia region of Mars. The larger eroded impact crater is about 53 km (32 miles) across, and the crater rim is nearly a kilometre high. The blue-white areas at the upper left have light clouds, changing the colour.

A team of European and US astronomers think they've taken the first direct image of a planet orbiting another star about 230 light-years away. Until now, planets have been discovered because of the effect they have on their parent star - they haven't been "seen" directly. Using the European Southern Observatory's 8.2-m telescope in Chile, the team found a faint, red object nearby a brown dwarf star called 2M1207. By analyzing the object with various instruments, they believe the object is approximately 5 times the mass of Jupiter. There's still some uncertainty, though, so the team will make regular observations over the next 2 years to see how its position and composition changes.

Brian Hynek, an associate researcher from the University of Colorado at Boulder thinks he's found evidence for a vast ocean or lake that once covered the region around NASA's Opportunity rover landing site. The data comes from the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey spacecraft, which have extensively mapped the area. He estimates that the ocean must have been 330,000 square km (127,000 square miles), which is more than all the Great Lakes combined. Hynek used several pieces of evidence to make this prediction, including gray hematite scattered around the whole region, and outcrops of sedimentary rock.

Scientists have theorized that the inside of a neutron star - the remnant from a star that has collapsed under its own gravity - is a special place where the laws of physics begin to break down; atoms are squeezed so tightly by gravity that all protons and electrons are crushed into neutrons which swirl around like a liquid, but without friction (called a superfluid). This theory has gotten some confirmation according to new research from NASA which observed neutron star EXO 0748-676, located 30,000 light years away. Using various instruments, NASA scientists determined that it's approximately 11.5 km (7 miles) in diameter, and contains 1.75 solar masses. With this much mass packed into a small area, the observations match the theory that neutron stars exist in this superfluidic state, but without being crushed further.

NASA specialists have begun cleaning up after the sample capsule from its Genesis capsule slammed into the ground at high speed in the Utah desert. The ground crew took their time picking up the capsule because there could have been live explosives, which failed to eject the capsule's parachute as it entered the atmosphere. Even though it was going 311 kph (193 mph) when it smashed into the ground, scientists were surprised at how little damage was actually done. Some of the wafers that had collected particles of the Sun's solar wind were actually unharmed, so scientists will be able to extract some useful particles; although, they could be contaminated with air, water and dirt after the rough landing.

Scientists from the United Kingdom have uncovered a new object and a new ring orbiting Saturn. While Cassini images, scientists at the University of London noticed a tiny object skirt around the outer part of the F-ring - it's probably 4-5 km (3 miles) in diameter. They also discovered a new ring in the same area, which is associated with Saturn's moon Atlas. This ring was only seen as Cassini was approaching Saturn, so scientists aren't sure if it goes all the way around the planet. While attempting to pin down the orbit of the new moon, scientists from the Space Science Institute in Boulder turned up another potential object in a similar orbit.

Bought a digital camera recently? It's probably got anywhere from 3.1 to 6 megapixels of resolution. Well, the European Space Agency is building a 1 gigapixel (a gigapixel is 1024 megapixels) digital camera for its upcoming Gaia space telescope, due for launch in 2010. It's actually not a single camera, but an array of 170. Gaia will be positioned 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) away from Earth, and will be designed to simultaneously photograph 1 billion stars and plenty of other celestial objects like asteroids, comets, galaxies, and nebulae. The goal will be to map the entire Universe down to a resolution one million times fainter than the human eye can see.

NASA workers are continuing to assess the damage that Hurricane Frances wreaked on the Kennedy Space Center when it tore through Cape Canaveral over the weekend. Many buildings suffered wind and rain damage, including the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the space shuttles are attached to the external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters - it had 820 panels blown off. The Thermal Protection System Facility, where heat tiles and blankets are manufactured suffered significant damage. It's still unknown if the effects of the hurricane will push back the shuttle's return to flight.

Astronomers theorize that most of the mass in the Universe is dark matter; it's invisible and detectable only by the pull of its gravity on objects. This dark matter is in long filaments, and galaxy clusters form where these filaments intersect. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has found a hot gas cloud hundreds of thousands of light-years across in the the Fornax galaxy cluster is collapsing towards an invisible centre of gravity. Computer simulations have accurately predicted this kind of interaction between galaxy clusters and filaments of dark matter, so this discovery will give astronomers a chance to understand the process better.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has taken this image of two galaxies colliding, creating destruction and a wave of new star formation. The image of the Antennae galaxies in infrared shows how they're churning into each other, and throwing off massive streamers of stars and clouds of dust. Spitzer can "see" through the dark dust, and has found large nurseries of young stars in the center of the galaxies, where they overlap. This cloud of buried stars appears red in this image, and the blue indicates older stars which can be seen in visible light.

The latest image released by the Gemini Observatory shows a group of galaxies tearing each other apart 300 million light-years away. The galaxies are members of Stephan's Quintet, and their shapes are completely warped by gravitational interactions that have been going on for millions of years. This ongoing chaos has spawned huge stellar nurseries - hotspots of furious star formation. They'll keep on interacting for a few more million years before merging into larger objects; the smaller galaxies will be completely torn apart.

It's bad, but it could have been much worse. Hurricane Frances devastated Florida over the weekend, with the eye sweeping close to NASA's Kennedy Space Center - the region sustained winds as high as 110 kph (70 mph). There were no injuries, and the worst damage was to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which lost more than 1,000 panels, leaving huge holes in its sides. None of the space shuttles or the Swift mission were damaged. The center is closed Tuesday for most employees, and a more detailed damage assessment should be released later today.