Engineers at the European Space Agency will go ahead and give Mars Express the command to deploy its MARSIS radar booms during the first week of May. The agency was holding off on this decision because the manufacturer revealed a risk that the spacecraft could be damaged by a whiplash effect when the booms are deployed. Mission controllers have performed computer simulations, and they can't rule out that the spacecraft will be hit by the booms, but they're pretty sure that any damage will be minimal. The MARSIS radar will study the Martian ionosphere and search for subsurface water.

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered a star speeding out of our galaxy at over 2.4 million kph (1.5 million mph). It's probably moving this quickly because of a close encounter with the supermassive black hole that lurks at the heart of our Milky Way. The star came too close, was captured by the black hole's gravity, and then hurled onto an exit trajectory. The star contains many heavier elements than hydrogen and helium, so astronomers believe it began life in one of the stellar nurseries near the galactic centre.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! This will be a wonderful week as we begin by viewing the spectacular "Kemble's Cascade". Looking for some challenging studies? Then while New Moon is on our side, let's go for some serious hunting in the constellations of Pisces, Lepus, Canis Major, Cetus and Puppis. You can do them in one night if you try! Comet Machholz rounds off the week as the Moon returns. So start with binoculars and break out the "heavy artillery" for the faint stuff. Enjoy a leisurely comet hunt or lunar viewing week end...

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Engineers have outfitted the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Arecibo Observatory telescope with a new instrument that could help it discover galaxies that have no stars - so called "dark galaxies". The instrument is called ALFA (for Arecibo L-Band Feed Array), which is essentially a seven-pixel digital camera, which allows the radio telescope to receive data seven times as fast. Researchers will explore groups of galaxies, and determine how fast they're converting gas into stars. It should be able to discover if there are gas-rich regions, invisible to optical telescopes, which can be detected by their hydrogen signature.

After the fun and excitement of any wild party comes the clean-up. Broken things need fixing, steps get taken to prevent the repeat of problems and plans are made for the next one. The same goes for space missions. After the euphoria of a successful landing ebbs away, the whole operation has to be assessed, anomalies identified and remedies initiated. Robert Godwin dived through the NASA archives and in his book, 'Apollo 12 The NASA Mission Reports Volume Two', he presents an edited collection of the assessment of this lunar landing. Perhaps a bit dryer than most parties, this text gives the skinny on what was shaking when Apollo 12 did its thing.

New research from the University of Michigan has determined that there's definitely an upper limit to the mass that stars can reach - between 120 and 200 times the mass of our own Sun. The team examined a wide range of stellar clusters, and determined the distribution of the mass of stars in those clusters. They couldn't find any stars above this 120-200 stellar mass limit. But this brings up a new mystery. Is this as big as stars get because they run out of material, or is there a fundamental limit in physics that stops them from getting any bigger?

The ringed planet Saturn has some of the most turbulent weather in the Solar System, including a powerful polar vortex at its southern pole. But new observations by the giant Keck 1 telescope in Hawaii have turned up a mystery. Unlike the other planets with polar vortexes, which are generally much colder than the surrounding atmosphere, Saturn's is warmer - in fact, it's the warmest place on the planet. One theory is that particles in Saturn's atmosphere, which could warm the planet through a greenhouse effect, have been concentrated by winds down to the south pole.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this natural colour image of Saturn's moon Rhea. It seems to display bright, wispy terrain, which looks like it's just been painted onto its surface - this is similar to another of Saturn's moons, Dione. Images were taken using Cassini's red, blue and green spectral filters, and then combined to create the natural colour version. They were taken on January 16, 2005, when Cassini was 496,500 kilometers (308,600 miles) from Rhea.

Beagle 2 should never have been approved to go to Mars according to an official report from the ESA/UK Commission of Inquiry. The under funded mission was developed on a shoestring, and lacked adequate time for testing. Mission managers treated it like another scientific instrument on board Mars Express, and this fundamental error led to many subsequent problems. Beagle 2 disappeared after entering the Martian atmosphere in December 2003, and controllers still have no definitive answer for what actually caused its failure.

International Launch Services (ILS) oversaw the launch of two rockets today, in different parts of the world. A Russian-built Proton/Breeze M rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying the AMC-12 satellite for SES AMERICOM, which will provide broadcast service to the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. At Florida's Cape Canaveral, an Atlas III lifted off with a classified payload for the US National Reconnaissance Office. The two launches occurred less than 10 hours apart.

Here's a 1280x1024 desktop wallpaper of V838 Monocerotis taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has been watching this star off and on since it brightened unexpectedly for several weeks in 2002. This light pulse has been moving through a cloud of dust that was probably sloughed off in a previous explosion. V838 Mon is located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros, which puts it at the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy.

Now on the surface of Mars for longer than a year, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are getting pretty dusty. Both rovers have a fine coating of dust 1-10 micrometers thick which is starting to obscure their solar panels. Spirit has gotten more dusty, with about 70% more dust, so it's getting less power. This could be because it's windier around Opportunity's landing site, which is constantly blowing away the dust. It's also cold enough at night that frost forms on the rovers. This could be clumping the dust together, and causing unexplained boosts in electricity coming from their panels.

NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has located two huge clouds of interstellar hot gas that could partially explain where all the matter is in the Universe (we're not talking about Dark Matter here, just regular matter that hasn't been seen yet). Computer simulations predicted that this missing matter could form into a weblike structure of gas clouds, from within which clusters of galaxies formed. These clouds have defied detection until now because of their low density. Astronomers used Chandra to watch a distant galaxy which has been brightening for about 2 years. Their data showed that two separate clouds of gas containing ions of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and neon were absorbing X-rays from this galaxy.

In this article Jeff Barbour explores the origins and development of that "Instrument of Long Seeing" known as the telescope. We trace its roots back to simple hemispheres of crystal and to the first correcting lenses - associated with both near and far-sightedness. We discuss the fundamental image quality problems shown by the earliest telescopes and the steps taken to overcome these limitations over centuries. Despite having explored all this, we still end up with what may ultimately be an unanwerable question: "But where did the telescope really come from?"

Mission controllers used NASA's Swift satellite to capture this image of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) using its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT). This is Swift's third and final telescope to come online, joining the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) and the X-ray Telescope (XRT) which are already capturing scientific data. Swift is now fully operational, and ready to spot gamma-ray bursts wherever they happen in the night sky. The BAT detects bursts when they first happen, and the entire observatory swings around quickly to focus its two additional instruments and study the gamma-ray burst as it happens.

Because of the tremendous distance to Mars, human explorers will probably process local materials to get their air, fuel, and even building supplies. But extracting resources from the Red Planet is going to be hard, especially when the environment is so hostile. Scientists are studying how the dry Martian soil will likely behave in the low gravity and air pressure, to help engineers build equipment that can dig and move dirt. NASA's upcoming Phoenix lander will help put some of this research to the test when it arrives on Mars in 2008; it will be digging trenches about a half-metre deep (20 inches).

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! As the month ends and a new week begins, it's time chase down the "Magnificent Machholz" again as it heads to the far north. Our European friends are in for a treat as the Moon occults Antares on February 4! Feeling "trapped" by winter weather? Then enjoy your captivity as we utilize early dark skies to delve deeper into all the secrets of the Great Orion Nebula complex -- including the holy of holies -- the "Trapezium"! There are plenty of fun astronomy facts as well as some unique things to observe for all skill levels, so turn your eyes to the skies...

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