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.