The European Space Agency's Mars Express took this image of the rim of impact crater Huygens, which is 450 km (280 miles) across. By counting craters in the area, researchers have determined that Huygens was blasted out approximately 4 billion years ago, early on in Mars' history when the planet was being heavily bombarded like the rest of the planets in the Solar System. The rim seems to show a tributary system that could have been water runoff in the ancient Martian past.

What a wonderful week to be out under the stars! The nights are cool and clear, and there will be many enjoyable astronomy things to do. As we lead up to next week's total lunar eclipse, the Moon is a highlight in the night sky. But be on watch all week as Orionid meteor activity will be up. Here's what's up day by day from October 18 to 24!

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and will now be prepared for its launch. If everything goes as planned, Deep Impact will lift off on December 30 atop a Delta rocket and then journey towards Comet Tempel 1. Its "impactor" spacecraft will smash into the comet on July 4, 2005, at a speed of 37,000 kph (23,000 mph), blasting out a crater hundreds of metres across. At the same time, its "flyby" spacecraft will record the event so scientists back on Earth can analyze the excavated material and get a better sense of what's inside a comet.

The European Space Agency's SMART-1 spacecraft fired its ion thruster nearly continuously last week to set itself up to be captured by the Moon's gravity on November 13. The spacecraft launched just over a year ago, and it's been using its ion engine to make larger and larger orbits around the Earth. Once it gets captured, it'll use the thruster to decrease its orbit until January 15, 2005 when it will get as close as 300 km to the Moon. The probe will then spend another six months making a comprehensive survey of chemical elements on the lunar surface.

NASA investigators think they might have a potential reason why the Genesis sample return capsule failed to deploy its parachute as it entered the Earth's atmosphere a few weeks ago. It could be that there was a design error with a switch that was supposed to detect when the capsule was decelerating into the atmosphere. It should have deployed the drogue parachute and parafoil, but it failed to do so. The investigation board hasn't ruled out other causes, though, and will probably release its final report in late November.

This image of the western part of the island of New Guinea was taken by the European Space Agency's Envisat Earth observation satellite from an altitude of 800 km. The photograph was captured on March 20, using its Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS). New Guinea is the second largest island in the world (after Greenland), and contains many unique species of animals. One fifth of the world's distinct languages - 1,100 different tongues - are spoken here by people in different tribes.

A Russian Proton rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome yesterday evening, carrying the AMC-15 broadcast satellite into orbit. The rocket lifted off at 2123 UTC (5:23 pm EDT), and the satellite separated from the Breeze M upper stage about 7 hours later. AMC-15 is a Lockheed Martin A2100 satellite that will transmit from 105-degrees West, and deliver broadcast services to all 50 states.

Researchers from the University of Washington have been funded by NASA to develop a magnetized-beam plasma propulsion system (or mag-beam). Selected as part of NASA's recent Advanced Concepts study, the system would involve a space-based satellite that would fire a stream of magnetized ions at a spacecraft equipped with a magnetic sail. The researchers think they could get a spacecraft going fast enough that it could make a round trip to Mars in 90 days, as long as there was another station at Mars that could slow the spacecraft down again.

When NASA's Cassini spacecraft took off towards Saturn, it brought along a passenger: the ESA's Huygens probe, which is designed study Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The two spacecraft have been orbiting together for a few months now, but on January 14, 2005, Huygens will make the plunge into Titan's thick methane and hydrocarbon atmosphere. And if it's really lucky, the probe will survive the journey down to the moon's surface, and give scientists a unique opportunity to study an environment that might have been similar to our own Earth's early history.

Scientists from the Los Alamos Laboratory are beginning to study the data returned by from the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS); an instrument on board the spacecraft designed to measure the space environment around the Ringed Planet. During its first pass over the rings, the instrument turned up low energy plasma which seems to be trapped on the magnetic field lines between Saturn's Cassini Division, the gap between the planet's A and B rings. Cassini will have another 70 orbits around Saturn so the team will have many more opportunities to make discoveries.

David Hardy illustrates and Patrick Moore writes to make their book Futures - 50 Years in Space, The Challenge of the Stars a portable art gallery of near and far space phenomena. With imagination to spare and drawing upon a universe of subject matter, they conjure up views and perspectives of planets and skies that are all, literally and figuratively, out of this world. But their incantations and apparitions aren't complete speculation. Each author brings over fifty years of relevant work experience which results in apparitions that are likely more prescient than most.

The European-built Cupola module has arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and is now being prepared for an upcoming shuttle launch. When it's finally installed on the International Space Station, it will give astronauts a panoramic view of the station and the Earth below. They won't just be gazing dreamily at our planet, though, the Cupola will let crewmembers monitor spacewalks, docking operations and exterior equipment surveys. If all goes well, the Cupola will launch on STS-133, which is now due to lift off in 2009.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has turned up a relatively close globular star cluster that was obscured by dust and invisible to most instruments. Andrew Monson from the University of Wyoming first discovered the cluster while scanning for objects in the dusty mid-plane of the Milky Way. Follow up observations determined that the cluster is only 9,000 light-years away from the Earth in the constellation of Aquila, making it one of the closest clusters to our planet.

Dr. Maxime Faget, one of the most prolific of NASA's spacecraft designers, passed away on Saturday at the age of 83. Faget contributed to designs to every single NASA spacecraft, from the Mercury capsule to the space shuttle. He started working with for the US space effort in 1946, when he joined the staff of the Langley Research Center as a research scientist. He was later selected as one of the original 35 designers for the Mercury project. Faget retired from NASA in 1981, and went on to work for a private space firm called Space Industries Inc.

This image of a Martian landscape was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft in May 2004. It shows an area in the Promethei Terra region, which is relatively smooth, but covered with a layer of dust or volcanic ash several tens of metres thick. This layer has covered everything, and obscures fine details; that's why the picture looks a little fuzzy. The crisscrossing lines across the picture are the tracks left by dust devils.

European and US astronomers have linked up their radio telescopes for the first time in real-time, through the Internet. The researchers have created the world's biggest virtual radio telescope by merging observations from instruments in the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, and Puerto Rico. The virtual instrument has a resolution which is 5 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope. The team imaged an object called IRC+10420, a star nearing the end of its life; at some point in the near future it'll explode as a supernova.

Now operating three times longer than originally expected, NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are still turning up fresh evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars. Opportunity has found a rock, dubbed "Escher", which has a network of cracks similar to cracked mud when the water has dried up. On the other side of Mars, Spirit is still climbing up the "Columbia Hills", and it seems that every rock it looks at shows evidence that it was altered by water. "We haven't seen a single unaltered volcanic rock, since we crossed the boundary from the plains into the hills, and I'm beginning to suspect we never will," said principal investigator Dr. Steve Squyres.

Researchers from Caltech have looked deep into space to a time when early material in the Universe was swirling towards the creation of galaxy clusters and superclusters. They did their measurements using an instrument in the Chilean Andes called the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), which looks at the Universe when it was only 400,000 years old - a time before galaxies, stars, and planets had formed. By watching the motion of this material as it began forming larger structures, the researchers were able to confirm that dark matter and dark energy were having an effect even then.

With all this talk of global warming, it may come as a surprise that Antarctica has actually been mostly getting colder over the last 30 years. But new research from NASA indicates that this trend is about to reverse, and the continent will warm over the next 50 years. Researchers found, ironically, that low ozone levels actually made the continent colder, but with restrictions on ozone-destroying chemicals around the planet, this cooling effect is going to go away as the ozone layer returns. If temperatures rise too high, the continent's ice sheets will melt and slide into the ocean, raising water levels around the world.

Researchers from Indiana University have found that under Mars-like conditions, Epsom-like salts can contain a significant amount of water. This could help explain why NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft discovered a large amount of water near the surface of Mars, but it's not visible. To get to the bottom of this possibility, the researchers have been funded by NASA to help build an X-ray diffractometer, which a future rover would use to analyze crystals on Mars to see if they're the right kind of salt that could contain water.