It was a nailbiter this morning at the Mojave spaceport in California when SpaceShipOne successfully returned to space; half way to winning the $10 million X-Prize.

It's been said that an army travels on its stomach. Well, that's true with astronauts too. Especially when they're headed to Mars, and might need to stay a few years; or maybe even build a colony. The question is, how much space, soil, water, energy and air does it take to keep astronauts alive on another planet if they're growing all their own food? Ray Collins has locked himself inside a greenhouse in Alaska, and he's working towards discovering the answer.

Early rocketeers had a vision. They wanted to enable human beings to safely travel from Earth to any destination in the solar system. Wernher von Braun in the USA and Vladimir Chelomey of the Soviet Union both believed that a space station was a necessary first step to achieving this destination. Robert Zimmerman shares this vision and belief and in his book, Leaving Earth - Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel he shows how humankind, especially the old Soviet Union, has made substantial progress in achieving it. He also shows that, sadly, the rational for this progress was predominantly for disparate political benefits rather than for satisfying any vision.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has delivered a series of new photographs of the Red Planet taken in new high detail, including images of the Mars Exploration rovers. By rolling the spacecraft as it travels to match the movement of Mars underneath, NASA engineers have figured out a clever way to increase the resolution of images taken by the spacecraft. It's now capable of resolving images as detailed as half as 1.5 metres across (4.9 feet) - a threefold improvement. Mars Global Surveyor has been systematically mapping Mars since it arrived in 1999, and its latest mission extension beginning October 1 will keep it running into September 2006.

When it comes to astronomy, size is everything. The biggest telescope on the planet is the 11-metre Hobby-Eberly on Mount Fowlkes in Texas. And the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes perched atop Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii can work in tandem to act as an even larger telescope. But there are new observatories in the works, with telescopes that will be 30-metres across and larger. Once these turn their gaze into the heavens, astronomers will have some amazingly powerful tools at their disposal.

Asteroid Toutatis, a frequent visitor in our neighborhood, will pass as close as 1.5 million km (960,000) miles to the Earth on Wednesday. As spacerocks go, Toutatis is pretty big; it's 5 km (3.1 miles) long and weighs 2.5 billion kg (5.5 billion pounds) - an asteroid this size was thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although there are plenty of doomsayers predicting the Earth's demise, Toutatis will keep its distance, passing four times as far as the Moon. The spacerock isn't visible without a telescope, and its position depends where on Earth you're looking at it. This makes it a very challenging object for amateur astronomers to spot.

Data accumulated by the ASPERA-3 instrument on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft seems to indicate how Mars got so dry. Scientists believe that water used to cover Mars, but over the course of 3.8 billion years, it was stripped away from the planet by the Sun's solar wind. ASPERA-3 tracks the inflow of particles from the solar wind, and then tracks the outflow of particles escaping from the Martian atmosphere. It found that the solar wind penetrates deeply into the atmosphere to an altitude of 270 km, energizes particles, and causes about 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of material to trail away from Mars every second. Over the years it added up to make the planet bone dry.

The da Vinci Project, a Canadian team of amateur rocket scientists, has pushed back the launch date of its Wildfire rocket. The Wildfire was originally scheduled to launch on October 2, which would put it only a few days after Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne makes its launch attempt to win the $10 million X-Prize. The delay was required because the team was still waiting on some key components that they needed to install in the suborbital rocket. It's not known when they'll make their launch attempt.

NASA scientists picking through the wreckage of Genesis' capsule have shipped off the first sample to the University of California, Berkeley for further analysis. These samples were attached to the interior lid of the capsule - its "lid foils" - and the scientists think they'll be able to recover 75-80% of this material. The next challenge are the four collector arrays which were fairly damaged, but some large pieces have been recovered.

An international team of scientists have discovered one of the most powerful events since the Big Bang: a collision between two galaxy clusters, which is smashing millions of stars into each other. The galaxy clusters are colliding like hurricanes, tossing individual galaxies out into interstellar space, and creating shockwaves more than 100-million degrees hot. Although the cluster, Abell 754, has been known for a long time, the astronomers used the ESA's XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory to trace back the interactions and collisions with great detail, and get a much deeper understanding about how the Universe's largest structures are still forming.

Astronomers have been studying the deepest optical view of the Universe - the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) - and they think they've found some of the first star forming galaxies. These galaxies began forming 0.5 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The team analyzed the HUDF, and found dozens of red, dim dwarf galaxies, which appear to be the first basic galactic building blocks. These would merge with other galaxies to eventually form the complex spiral formations like our own Milky Way. The also found regions which were more dense than others, which supports the theory that dense regions of space where the first places galaxies formed.

Something is radiating high-energy gamma rays at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, and astronomers aren't sure what it is. The object was discovered using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of four telescopes, in Namibia, South-West Africa. One theory is that it's the remnant from a supernova that exploded 10,000 years ago; this has enough energy to accelerate gamma rays so strongly. The object is also very near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, so this radiation could be somehow associated with it.

When the Larsen B ice shelf broke away from the coast of Antarctica two years ago, nearby glaciers surged, flowing eight times faster. This is according to a new study by NASA-funded researchers who used several Earth observing satellites to track the movements of Antarctic glaciers. It appears that the ice shelves hold glaciers back, like a dam. Once the shelf breaks up, the glacier is free to flow quickly. These glaciers aren't that large, but this research gives scientists an understanding of what will happen as rising temperatures continue breaking up Antarctica's ice shelves.

NASA has approved a six month extension for the Mars Exploration Rovers, giving them more time to continue exploring the surface of Mars for evidence of past water. Both Spirit and Opportunity have completed their original three-month mission, and an additional five-month extension. Even though the rovers are well past their expected operational life, neither one is showing much sign of wear, so NASA scientists plan to keep them running. The rovers took a 12-day break earlier this month as Mars passed behind the Sun, disrupting all communication to and from the Red Planet.

NASA has chosen Northrop Grumman Space Technology to build its upcoming Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) spacecraft, and awarded them a $400 million contract to cover costs up to 2008. JIMO will use a nuclear-powered ion engine to go into orbit around each of Jupiter's icy moons: Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa. Once in orbit, the spacecraft would be able to examine each of the moons in great detail with a suite of instruments to try and understand their composition, history, and if there could be conditions for life.

SpaceDev, the company that designed and built the hybrid rocket engine for Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne, announced that they've entered discussions with NASA to design a low-cost suborbital spaceship. The SpaceDev Dream Chaser would take off vertically, and carry up to three people to an altitude of 160 km (100 miles). If everything goes well, the spacecraft would be built by 2008, and would demonstrate a set of launch and flight technologies. Further versions of the spacecraft would eventually be able to go into orbit and transfer crew to and from the International Space Station.

This is an image of Saturn's tiny moon Prometheus, which shepherds the inner edge of Saturn's F ring. The irregular moon is only 102 km (63 miles) across but its gravity defines the edge of the ring, essentially keeping it in line. The image was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on August 5, when it was 8.2 million km (5.1 million miles) from the planet.

The Sun Observer's Guide by Pam Spence is a practical reference for how and why to view our nearest star. Though the uninitiated consider our sun to be a steady source of light and heat, nothing could be further from the truth. Using the proper equipment with appropriate safeguards, viewers can watch a seething tempest. Changes can occur in a few short minutes or, with appropriate record keeping, changes can be seen to vary over decades. This book can start you making worthwhile observations.

European scientists recently announced that they had discovered the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars using the Mars Express spacecraft. They've had a chance to perform further research on the data now, and produced a map of methane concentrations around the planet. This map surprisingly overlaps a similar map of Mars that shows where its water is located. It could be that geothermal processes are feeding the water table, and venting out methane at the same time. A more exciting possibility is that bacterial life survives wherever there's water, and it's producing methane as a byproduct.

You always hear that the early Universe was a violent chaotic time, with galaxies smashing into each other. Maybe it wasn't quite that crazy early on. Alister Graham from the Australian National University has analyzed images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and found that there were 1/10th the collisions that earlier studies had suggested. It was thought that it took multiple collisions for galaxies to clear away the stars at their cores - this is how astronomers built up the earlier model - but Dr. Graham calculated that it could actually happen with just one collision.