The Canadian da Vinci Project has informed the Ansari X Prize of its plans to launch its Wild Fire rocket on October 2, 2004. This is the second team to announce a launch attempt, after Scaled Composite revealed they'll be launching SpaceShipOne on September 29. Wild Fire will be carried to altitude in Saskatchewan on board a giant balloon; it will detach and then fly up to 100 km (62.5 miles). The team announced a new sponsor, Internet casino GoldenPalace.com, which has provided cash in exchange for advertising.

Okay, time to update your desktop wallpaper. This time, it's a beautiful image of galaxy NGC 3949 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. We're embedded inside the Milky Way, so it's impossible to study many of our galaxy's large scale features. NGC 3949 is located 50 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Ursa Major (aka the Big Dipper), and astronomers believe its very similar to the Milky Way in terms of shape and structure - it's like we're looking in a galactic mirror.

This perspective image is of the flanks of Olympus Mons; located on Mars, this volcano is the tallest mountain in the Solar System. It was taken by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. The escarpment in the image rises 7,000 metres from the surface of Mars, and you can see the deposits around the base of the escarpment, which scientists have dubbed "aureole"; latin for "circle of light". These aureole deposits are a mystery, but one popular theory is that they're landslides of material shed from the sides of the volcano; perhaps connected with glacial activity.

The European Space Agency's Integral probe detected a gamma ray burst in December 2003, which has now been studied by a host of telescopes and instruments for several months. Researchers now believe that the event, called GRB 031203, was the closest burst on record; it went off in a galaxy only 1.3 billion light-years away. Even though it was much closer, it wasn't much brighter than other bursts, and astronomers believe this could be the first discovery of a whole new class of gamma ray bursts which aren't as energetic, but could be much more common.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft took this picture of the Earth and Moon from a distance of 70 million km (43 million miles); the furthest distance for a spacecraft this year. But this distance is just a fraction of the 800 million km (500 million mile) journey that Rosetta will make by the time it reaches Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 10 years time. The image was taken using the spacecraft's Navigation Camera System (NAVCAM).

NASA's Terra satellite took this true-colour photograph of Hurricane Alex, the first Atlantic storm of the season, as it grazed the side of North America. At Noon on Tuesday, August 3, the Category 2 Hurricane had wind speeds of 100 km/h (62 mph), and was disrupting North Carolina's Outer Banks; thousands are without power, and Hatteras Island's only link to the mainland has been flooded. It's currently moving east-northeast out to sea, and so far there haven't been any injuries reported.

Researchers from the UK believe that our Solar System could have formed differently from many other star systems, making places like our home much more rare in the Universe. After examining the 100 or so known extrasolar planetary systems, they found that they probably formed in a manner different from our own Solar System - in a way that's hostile to the formation of life. Planets could form in several different ways, and how the Earth formed is actually quite rare. It will still be 5 more years or so before astronomers have equipment with the resolution to confirm this.

This photo of Saturn's southern pole was taken by Cassini on July 13, when the spacecraft was 5 million km (3.1 million miles) away. It was taken with the spacecraft's narrow angle camera using a filter sensitive to infrared light, and shows the concentric rings of clouds which circle a dark spot at the planet's south pole. As you move north, the clouds have wavy edges of turbulence as the edges of the bands interact with each other.

Astronaut Mike Fincke and Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka spent 4.5 hours outside the International Space Station on Tuesday, preparing for the arrival of the European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), which will start delivering cargo to the station next year. They installed two antennas and replaced six laser reflectors with four new advanced versions which the ATV will use to guide itself in to dock. They ended up back in the station with 40 minutes to spare from their original mission plan - there were no problems with the Russian-built spacesuits which shortened a previous spacewalk.

Particle physicists believe they have uncovered the reason why our Universe favours matter, instead of being made up of equal parts matter and antimatter. Their experiment was done with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the USA, which collides electrons and antimatter positrons together to produce a spray of exotic particles. Although complete opposites, the various particles and anti-particles should have similar decay times, but the experimenters found that the anti-particles seem to decay much quicker.

NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral on Tuesday, to begin its mission to become the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. The spacecraft was designed and built by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), and will make a roundabout trip before reaching its final destination. It'll make 15 orbits of the Sun, and fly once past the Earth, twice past Venus and three times past Mercury before easing into its final orbit in 2011. The first and only spacecraft sent to Mercury was Mariner 10, which made three flybys in 1974-75, and only mapped less than half its surface.

This image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the strange twisted cloud structures at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (M8). The nebula is being driven by the central hot star, O Herschel 36, and several others, which are ionizing the outer visible parts of the nebula - making it visible. Similar to tornadoes on Earth, temperature differences between different clouds of gas create a horizontal "windshear", which twists the clouds into funnel shapes.

This is what it would look like if you were flying over a region of Mars' Valles Marineris at an altitude of 5,000 metres (3.1 miles). The photo was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft on May 2, using its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) at a resolution of approximately 30 metres/pixel. Scientists have constructed this perspective view of the region, which makes it easier to understand how the different surface features relate to each other.

Here's an image of Saturn's moon Tethys, taken by Cassini on July 13, when the spacecraft was 4.8 million km (3 million miles) away. Tethys is only 1060 km (659 miles) across, and in this visible light image, you can only see a few details of its surface, including a large crater in its southern hemisphere. Cassini will make a close flyby of the moon in September 2005.

NASA has picked 9 ideas out of 26 proposals for further study as part of its Astronomical Search for Origins Program. Among the ideas are: a mission that would survey a billion stars in the galaxy; an infrared observatory to examine some of the most distant galaxies in the Universe; an optical-UV replacement to the Hubble Space Telescope; and a mission that would measure the shape of cosmic inflation. Each program will have another 8 months to further develop and refine their concepts, and demonstrate how they can answer the questions: "how did we get here", and "are we alone?"

NASA scientists are inviting the public to help them inspect images of Mars and find important geologic features hidden in the thousands of photographs in the agency's archives. NASA will be adding a set of surveying tools to their Marsoweb website which allows anyone to navigate around the surface of Mars, and then zoom into any region they like. NASA is hoping people can help them find interesting targets for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) which will fly on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2005.

This image of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, was taken on July 3, one day after NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its closest approach. The image shows two thin layers of atmospheric haze that enshroud the moon (they've been brightened and made purple to enhance their visibility). Cassini used its ultraviolet light filter to take this photograph, as it's sensitive to the small haze particles that make up the atmosphere.

Scientists from Lockheed Martin and the University of Sheffield believe they've solved the mystery of supersonic jets that dart across the low atmosphere of the Sun. The team used computer modeling and high-resolution images taken with the Swedish 1-metre Solar Telescope to understand how these jets - called "spicules" - are formed. They noticed that the spicules formed in certain spots quite regularly, usually every five minutes or so. This matched sound waves on the Sun's surface that had the same five minute period. The sound waves are usually dampened before they reach the Sun's atmosphere, but wherever they aren't dampened, spicules are formed, propelling matter upward.

NASA's Swift satellite is due to arrive at Florida's Cape Canaveral today, to prepare for its launch in October. Named after the fast-moving bird, Swift will track down the fastest and most powerful known explosions in the Universe: gamma ray bursts. Swift has one instrument to detect bursts in the sky, and then it can swing around two high-resolution telescopes in less than a minute for a closer look. It'll also inform the astronomical community of a blast so that anyone watching the sky can tune in as well and watch the explosion unfold. Swift should help turn up more than 100 bursts a year.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has taken this image of a mysterious group of stars called the Quintuplet Cluster. This dense cluster of stars is located near the centre of our Milky Way, and actually contains hundreds of young stars, but they're obscured by thick dust. In fact it wasn't even discovered until 1990 when it was located with an infrared telescope that can peer through the dust. The bright concentrations in the image aren't stars, but points where powerful winds from the young, hot stars are colliding and being superheated to 50 million degrees Celsius.