The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has captured its first photograph of Comet 9P/Tempel 1, Deep Impact's target. Rosetta is quite distant, so Tempel 1 is at the very limits of its detection abilities. The spacecraft will help analyze the gas, ice and debris that spew off of Comet Tempel 1 when Deep Impact smashes into it on July 4. This is just a job on the side, though, as Rosetta has a date with its own comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in 10 years from now.

How many times have I been to space? Well, I lost count at, oh, none. So I, and nearly every other human being on Earth can't compare with Story Musgrave, a legendary NASA astronaut who flew on the space shuttle six times, including leading the team that fixed the Hubble Space Telescope's vision in 1993. He's the subject of a recent biography called Story: the Way of Water, and has a new CD called Cosmic Fireflies, which sets his space inspired poetry to music. Story speaks to me from his home in Florida.

Our Sun is in the middle age of life, and that's a good thing for us here on Earth. But in a few billion years, when the Sun runs out of hydrogen to fuel its massive fusion furnace, it will balloon into a massive red giant, engulfing the inner planets, including the Earth, before it shrinks again into a white dwarf. Is that the end of our solar system? Maybe not. Although they might get a little (okay... a lot) scorched, the outer planets might actually survive the experience in one piece. German researchers have found the first planet orbiting a white dwarf star, so there appears there's a future for planets when their star becomes a red giant.

A key instrument for the search of life on Mars has discovered it in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. The instrument, called the Mars Organic Analyzer, will be installed into the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission due for launch in 2011. It was able to see evidence of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in soil at Chile's Atacama desert. The next step will be to build an instrument that can fit in the allowed space of the ExoMars spacecraft.

NASA's Deep Impact spotted an outburst of ice and gas from the surface of Comet Tempel 1, which has been turned into a short animation of several frames. This is the second outburst astronomers have seen from the comet this month, and gives astronomers a great opportunity to fine tune instruments in space and here on Earth to get the most science out of the July 4 "encounter".

Planetary scientists have speculated that there could be lakes of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and now they've found an intriguing dark patch on the moon's surface that could be an open body of liquid. This photograph is a view of Titan's southern pole, a region that often has storm clouds, so it's an ideal candidate for an open lake. If it isn't a lake, the region could be a large hole that filled with solid, dark hydrocarbon "snow". The red cross in this image marks Titan's south pole.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this photograph of Janus, one of Saturn's many moons. The 181 km (113 mile) moon is covered with craters and patches of dark material exposed by numerous impacts. Astronomers think that Janus may be a porous object, largely composed of water ice. This image was taken when Cassini was approximately 357,000 km (222,000 miles) away from Janus.

Even in X-rays, Saturn is beautiful. The latest image taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory shows how the rings sparkle in this wavelength. These X-rays are created by solar X-rays striking the ice particles in Saturn's rings, and being refracted towards the Earth. Astronomers aren't exactly sure why these flashes are happening, but one theory is that they're caused by micrometeorites striking through Saturn's rings and causing a brief puff of ice particles which can cause a more irregular scattering of X-rays from the Sun.

The Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) has been asleep for the past 11 months, but now it's being woken up for a very important task: to watch the collision between Deep Impact and Comet Tempel 1. SWAS completed 5.5 years of service to the astronomical community, and it was put into hibernation for just something like this. The spacecraft is especially good at measuring the abundance of water molecules in ice and dust, so it should be able to help analyze the ejected material when the spacecraft slams into the comet on July 4.

If you're an astronomer and you want to escape the Earth's hazy atmosphere, you need a space telescope... right? Not necessarily, sometimes all you need is a balloon, and some clear arctic skies. An international team of researchers traveled to Sweden and deployed a 33-storey tall balloon carrying the BLAST telescope, designed to study the birth of stars and planets. Gaelen Marsden is a member of the team, and researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

The dance of the planets continues as we watch Mercury, Venus and Saturn shuttle around the twilight sky. Mars and the Moon are going to join the show in the morning hours, and the time for viewing Comet 9/P Tempel 1 is now! We'll explore the "Cocoon Galaxy", Eta Carinae, and enjoy two meteor showers as well. So open your eyes to the skies, because...

Here's what's up!

Now that NASA has committed itself to returning humans to the Moon, they're looking to overcome one of the major risks to anyone staying in space for a lengthy amount of time: radiation. In deep space, and on the Moon, astronauts would be bombarded by radiation from the Sun, and cosmic rays from space. NASA is considering an electromagnetic shield of highly charged inflatable spheres. These could be erected above a potential lunar base to attract the radiation and channel it safely away.

The Hubble Space Telescope was lucky to watch a jet of dust streaming off of Comet Tempel 1; a prelude to next week's smashup between the comet and NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. These observations show that Hubble will be a good instrument to observe the collision, as it was able to see many details on the comet and jet. The image was taken on June 14, and the jet extends 2,200 km (1,400 miles) long, and points towards the Sun. Astronomers aren't sure why jets like this occur.

Workers at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab have begun pre-firing one of the 8.4 metre mirror segments as part of the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). When it's finally completed in 2016, the GMT will be the largest telescope in the world, consisting of 7 of these 8.4 metre mirrors aligned to work as a single mirror 25.6 metres across - with 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.

This satellite view of Istanbul, taken by the ESA's Envisat satellite, was taken using its Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). Radar doesn't actually build up images in colour, it just measures different textures. So the colour in this image represents different times that the radar images were acquired. It's possible to see the bridges that span the narrow Bosporus channel, dividing Europe and Asia. You can even see a few ships sailing up the channel as little points of light.

The European Space Agency's new powerful 35-metre radio antenna in Cebreros, Spain came online earlier this month, to assist communications with the agency's growing fleet of spacecraft. Construction of the dish went very quickly; workers only broke ground a little more than a year ago. The dish has already received signals from the ESA's Rosetta and SMART-1 spacecraft as well as several radio-emitting stars. The Cebreros dish will also support the Venus Express spacecraft, due for launch in October 2005.

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered a massive planetary zone forming around the star system TW Hydrae. By probing this vast disk of material with the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array in the radio spectrum, they have detected that rocks and pebbles extend outward for at least 1.6 billion km (1 billion miles). These chunks of rock will slowly clump together, eventually forming larger and larger planets over millions of years. This is the first time astronomers have seen this intermediate stage, after pure dust, but before planets.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this photograph of Saturn's moon Pan, embedded in the Encke Gap in Saturn's A ring. In the first picture, you can see the ripples in the ring due to Pan's gravity, and then another image without this wake. Pan is only 20 km (12 miles) across, but the effect of its gravity is quite impressive on the fragile rings.