The newest residents of the International Space Station arrived at their destination on Saturday, as their Soyuz TMA-6 capsule docked automatically. Hatches between the spacecraft and station were opened a few hours later, and the three crew members joined the two men of Expedition 10 on board the station. Commander Sergei Krikalev and astronaut John Phillips will remain on the station until October 2005, while ESA Astronaut Roberto Vittori will return in about a week with Leroy Chiao and Salizhan Sharipov.

Here's a relief. Instead of being painfully stretched (aka spaghettified) by the immense tidal forces around a black hole, you'd probably just be roasted by the intense heat. Professor Andrew Hamilton at the University of Colorado predicts that only the smallest black holes would actually stretch you out like this. All the larger, supermassive black holes are already choking on enough material, that their surrounding environment is a superhot plasma heated to millions of degrees and blasting out intense radiation.

Michael Griffin addressed NASA employees on Thursday, when he became the 11th Administrator for the space agency. In his address, Griffin said he would focus on getting the shuttles ready to return to flight, and continue to fulfill the Vision for Space Exploration, which sees astronauts returning to the Moon and eventually continuing on to Mars in the coming decades. Griffin was nominated by President Bush on March 14, and was confirmed by the Senate on April 13.

The 11th crew to man the International Space Station blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Thursday. The Soyuz TMA capsule carrying Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, Astronaut John Phillips, and European Space Agency Astronaut Roberto Vittori of Italy reached orbit a few minutes after launch. Krikalev and Phillips will replace the current crew, while Vittori will only remain on the station for a week and then return with Expedition 10. The Soyuz will dock on Saturday.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this beautiful image of Saturn's moon Enceladus perched just above the giant planet's rings. Enceladus is 505 km (314 miles) across, and the photo was taken when Cassini was just below the ring plane. Saturn's A, B, and C rings are also visible in the photograph.

When astronomers discovered that the planets around Upsilon Andromedae had very strange orbits, they weren't sure what could have caused it. Researchers from Berkeley and Northwestern have developed a simulation that shows how an additional planet could have given the other planets the orbital kick they needed to explain their current eccentricities. If a similar planet had passed through our own Solar System early on, all our planets could be in wildly different orbits around the Sun.

While Spirit and Opportunity could still be scouring the Red Planet in a few years, they'll be joined by a new partner: the Mars Science Laboratory. Schedule for launch in 2009, this mission will deliver a rover three times as large as the current rovers to the surface of Mars. It will have a suite of scientific instruments including the ChemCam: a powerful laser that will allow it to vapourize and analyze rock from 10 metres (33 feet away). And since it'll be powered by a radioactive powerplant, it won't need to rely on feeble solar power for energy.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is scheduled to make its closest ever flyby of Titan on April 16. The spacecraft will get within 1,025 km (640 miles) of the moon's surface, and will get some extremely high resolution images. This image shows the regions that Cassini will photograph and analyze with its instruments.

Astronomers from the Australian National University think they've found one of the earliest stars to have formed in the Universe. It's called HE 1327-2326, and it has the lowest levels of iron ever found in any star. Heavier elements like iron only form inside stars, so HE 1327-2326 could have formed before successive generations of stars had seeded the Universe. This star was observed using the Japanese Subaru 8-m telescope, and found to be twice as iron poor as the previous record holder.

When it comes to using advanced technology, NASA sometimes faces a self-defeating loop: they can't take the risk of flying new technology in space unless it's already flown successfully in space. The New Millennium Program circumvents that loop by testing and validating the performance of leading-edge technologies in space so that they can be used in future operational science missions. Examples of upcoming New Millennium missions include advanced solar arrays, fault-tolerant high speed computers, a Nanosat (microsatellite) constellation, and perhaps, a solar sail.

Astronomers searching for potentially destructive Earth-crossing asteroids have revised the scale they use to communicate the risk of impact to the public. The Torino scale, which still goes from 0 (no chance of impact) to 10 (collision is certain) has the same classifications, but it's been rewritten to give the public a better idea of the risks associated with different space rocks. Instead of "meriting concern", lower risk objects now "merit attention by astronomers", explaining that astronomers will be making further observations.

Most objects in the Solar System have been resurfaced by collisions with asteroids, smaller rocks and comets. But Sedna, on the other hand, has spent its lifetime in the remote reaches of the Solar System, and probably hasn't had many impacts at all. It's only been weathered by cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet radiation. Astronomers think that Sedna started out icy, like Pluto and Charon, but was then baked for millennia, until the ice was transformed into a complex hydrocarbon similar to asphalt.

Are you liking astronomy but feeling unsure about how to take that first step? Have a friend showing a spark of interest in stars and you want to get them a small present? Look no further than Robin Scagell's book, Stargazing with a Telescope. In a concise, well pictured presentation, he describes the myriad of optical aids that bring our night time visage much closer and provides ready tricks for sizing up the relative benefits. Reading this book makes that first step less likely to be a mis-step.

The Milky Way - like all spiral galaxies - swings gracefully around a central super-massive black hole (SMBH). Astronomers have known for some time that a "fairy ring" of youthful blue-hot stars dance within a few light-years of its event horizon, but such stars should be very old and display expansive low-temperature red giant envelopes. Could there be a "fountain of youth" in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy?

Today NASA has 55 active mission control teams monitoring ongoing spacecraft and station missions - 13 associated with missions extended beyond original planning. Soon there may be seven less. By October of this year, we could be turning a deaf ear to data collected by one of the most successful NASA programs of all times. For even as Voyager 1 and 2 are poised to enter the interstellar realm, budget-minders in our nation's capital may have already sealed the fate on a pair of craft that could provide important information about our solar system - and beyond - for the next 15 years.

It's back. Yes, the Moon will figure prominently in this week's night sky, but it will put on a grand show as we have several occultations and a grazing event in store. We'll have plenty of opportunities to view new lunar features and catch a "shooting star" as we enter a very unusual meteoroid stream. So grab your telescopes and binoculars, because...

Here's what's up!

Since the beginning of astronomical observation, science has been viewing light on a curve. In a galaxy filled with thousands of eclipsing binary stars, we've refined our skills by measuring the brightness or intensity of so-called variable star as a function of time. The result is known as a "light curve". Through this type of study, we've discovered size, distance and orbital speed of stellar bodies and refined our ability to detect planetary bodies orbiting distant suns. Here on Earth, most of the time it's impossible for us to resolve such small objects even with the most powerful of telescopes, because their size is less than one pixel in the detector. But new research should let us determine the shape of an object... like a ringed planet, or an orbiting alien space station.

Wolf Rayat stars are some of the most massive and dangerous stars in the Universe, living out the final days before they explode as supernovae. And astronomers have found two of them orbiting one another at distances varying as close as the Sun is to Mars and as far as the Sun to Neptune. One star is 20 times the mass of the Sun, and the other 50 times the mass of the Sun, and they only take 7.9 years to complete their orbital cycle.

On its recent Titan flyby, Cassini took a series of detailed images of the Eastern edge of the bright Xanadu region. Cassini had only viewed this region with its synthetic aperture radar on a previous flyby, so this was an opportunity to image the area in infrared. In the centre of the image is a bright "island" completely surrounded by a dark "sea" of material. There is also an 80 km-wide (50 mile) impact crater, which has also filled up with this dark material.

If you think current telescopes are powerful, just you wait. A new class of observatories are in the works that could sport mirrors as large as 100 metres (328 feet) across, and have 40 times the observing power of the Hubble Space Telescope. A new study developed by a commission of European astronomers proposes that instruments this large could be built for approximately 1 billion Euros and take 10-15 years to construct.

"Sakurai's Object" is a white dwarf star that surprised astronomers when if flared brightly in 1996. They originally thought it was a common nova explosion, but further observations have uncovered that the star has actually reignited its stellar furnace. Computer simulations predicted that it could be possible for leftover hydrogen to sink into the star and drive a new flash of hydrogen fusion. If the simulation is correct, the star will stay bright until around the year 2200.

A vast looping structure 20 light-years across has been discovered near the heart of the Milky Way. The loop was found near a star forming region of our galaxy in the X-ray spectrum using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space telescope. Very high energy particles, usually only seen coming from pulsars or supernovae remnants, are streaming out of the object, so it could be working as a kind of natural particle accelerator.

Astronomers have discovered more than 150 planets orbiting distant stars, but only indirectly. Now an international team of researchers think they might have the first direct photograph of a planet orbiting another star. The image is of GQ Lupi, a young star located 400-500 light-years away. A dimmer object, potentially a planet, is located to the right of the star separated by 100 astronomical units (2.5 times the distance of the Sun to Pluto). Unfortunately, the astronomers haven't been able to determine the mass of the object, so they can't rule out that it might be a brown dwarf.

Scientists from the European Space Agency have strongly recommended that that the next scientific mission to Mars should be a rover. The ESA's EXOMARS rover would have a similar design to NASA's Spirit and Opportunity, but it would have a suite of instruments designed to search for evidence of past or present life. The rover would arrive on Mars in 2013 to begin the search for life. The ESA is also planning a mission for 2016 that would return samples from the Martian surface to Earth.

Gamma ray busts are the most powerful known explosions in the Universe, so if one went off in our galactic back yard, it could be bad for life on Earth. Researchers working with NASA think that a massive extinction hundreds of millions of years ago could have been started by such an explosion. If a GRB went off only 6,000 light-years away, it would strip away much of the Earth's ozone layer, and expose all surface life to deadly levels of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.

When you look at a galaxy, you can only see a fraction of its total mass. The rest is made up of mysterious dark matter, which only interacts through its gravity. This dark matter usually extends as a giant halo around the galaxy, extending much further than the visible stars. But researchers in the UK have found ancient fossil galaxies concentrating dark matter at their centres. These fossil galaxies are the result of an entire galaxy cluster collapsing into a single enormous galaxy. Why the dark matter is concentrated is still a mystery.

In preparation for its return to flight, the space shuttle Discovery made the long slow journey atop its Crawler Transporter out to the launch pad yesterday. A small crack was discovered in the fuel tank insulation, but engineers didn't feel it was enough of a risk to delay Discovery from moving out to the launch pad. If everything goes well, Discovery will lift off on May 15, but a final report from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board could demand additional changes that would push the launch back.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has detected distant galaxies going through a period of tremendous star formation, at the same time the supermassive black holes at their centres are packing on material. These extremely luminous galaxies (and their black holes) went on this growth spurt more than 10 billion years ago, and they could be getting ready to turn into quasars - distant galaxies that contain the largest and most active black holes in the Universe.

NASA has given Spirit and Opportunity up to another 18 months to continue rolling around the surface of Mars in search of evidence of past water. The rovers have already completed their primary 3-month missions, and then an additional 11 months of extensions. Both rovers are still in surprisingly good shape, and are approaching targets that would have initially been considered out of reach. Opportunity set a new driving record on March 20, completing 220 meters (722 feet) in a single day's drive.

When the planetoid Sedna was discovered last year, astronomers noticed that it had a very slow rotation speed, only turning once every 20 days. One way to slow the rotation of a planet is through the interaction of a moon, but detailed observations of Sedna with Hubble failed to turn up any evidence of a satellite. New observations by astronomers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have revised Sedna's rotation speed to once every 10 hours, which is what you'd expect for an object this size. No moon is necessary.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft made another close pass of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, on March 31, delivering new images and data from this mysterious moon. Although Titan's northern hemisphere had been imaged by Cassini's radar instrument on a previous flyby, this time it was able to take optical and infrared pictures that pierced through the moon's thick methane atmosphere. This composite image of four photographs was taken when Cassini was approximately 130,000 km (81,000 miles) away from Titan.

Astronomers have used the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes to see some of the first stars that formed in the most distant galaxies ever seen. These stars, located in galaxies in the Fornax cluster, are about 13 billion light-years away - they emitted this light only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Even though they didn't have much time to form, these galaxies already look quite old, which means that star formation must have got going very early on.

Since its launch late last year, NASA's Swift space telescope has already spotted 24 gamma-ray bursts - the most powerful known explosions in the Universe. Now Swift has measured the distance to two of these explosions which occurred on March 18/19; both are more than 9 billion light-years away. Swift should become even more accurate in the next few months as more of its instruments are enabled.

When he developed his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein predicted that the motion of large masses should create ripples in spacetime called gravity waves. Now 100 years after his theory, a precise instrument is being prepared that should be able to find out if he was right or not. A joint ESA/NASA mission called LISA (Laser Interferometric Space Antenna) will launch in 2012. It will consist of three spacecraft flying 5 million km apart, which measure their distances from each other precisely. LISA should be able to detect black holes and neutron stars as well as echos from the Big Bang.

Starburst galaxies get their name from the enormous amount of star formation going on inside them; on average, they create 50 times as many stars as regular galaxies like our own Milky Way in vast regions of furious star formation. Astronomers from the UK think these regions could also be the home to black holes. The team looked at Hubble images of these star-forming regions, and compared them to X-ray images of the same locations and found the telltale signs for both star formation and black holes.

The chances of finding life somewhere else in the Universe depends on how many planets are capable of supporting life. Well, according to new calculations by astronomers at Open University, as many as half of all star systems could contain habitable planets. The team created mathematical models of known exoplanetary systems, and then added Earth-sized planets into the mix. They found that in half of all planetary systems they simulated, the gravity of the gas giants won't catastrophically affect the orbits of these smaller planets, giving life a chance to evolve.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! This week's dark sky will give us the opportunity to wander into the galactic realm as we study the M81 and M82 and many other bright galaxy collections. April 8 provides an opportunity to witness a hybrid solar eclipse - with many portions of it viewable to the southern United States. We'll visit with the "Owl" and don the "Sombrero", so get out those binoculars and telescopes...

Because here's what's up!

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this image of Pandora, orbiting just beyond Saturn's F ring. Pandora is only 84 km (52 miles) across. This image was taken on February 18, 2005, when the spacecraft was 1.2 million km (746,000 miles) away from Pandora. Cassini will make a much closer to approach to Pandora on September 5, when it comes within 31,600 km of the small moon.

A NASA-funded researcher has created an image of the Earth as it would look if you had gamma ray detectors for eyes. Gamma rays are the most energetic radiation known in the Universe - billions to trillions more energetic than visible light - and people usually associate it with extreme environments like black holes and supernovae. The radiation in this image was captured over the course of seven years by the Compton Observatory, which orbited the Earth from 1991 to 2000.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this picture of Mimas, Saturn's "Death Star" moon on February 18, 2005 at a distance of 938,000 km (583,000 miles). The image was taken using Cassini's ultraviolet filter, which helps to reveal better contrast of the moon's craters than would be possible in visible light. Mimas' large crater Herschel dominates the upper right of the picture.