NASA has given Opportunity the "thumbs up" to drive into Endurance crater; even though it might not be able to get back out again. There's just so much science in there that it's worth the risk. Opportunity has been investigating the rim of the crater since late May to find the best possible place to go in to avoid rolling over. The earliest chance to enter the crater will be next week, when it will drive to the southern edge of the crater and make a final check of the steepness of the slope.

So you're at this cocktail party and your eye is totally captured by this vivacious and charming individual circling the room. You get your chance and approach. You start talking and when asked what you do, before your brain kicks in, your mouth says, "theoretical physicist". You're doomed. You're a charlatan and you will be exposed in no time. But wait, there is hope. Before your next party, read Brian Greene's book on The Fabric of the Cosmos and though you won't be able to impress graduate students, you will certainly add life to a party's conversation.

A new photo of spiral galaxy NGC 4402 shows how it's being stripped of its star forming material as it falls towards the Virgo super cluster - and experiences a wind from the hot cluster gas which can reach millions of degrees. The photo was taken using the WIYN 3.5-metre telescope at Kitt Peak, and it shows how the galaxy is actually being bowed upward from the galactic "wind" blowing from the lower left of the image. Once the cold gas is fully blown out of the galaxy, it will be essentially dead, and incapable of forming new stars like regular galaxies.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is now less than a month away from its close encounter with Saturn and its moons. It's been traveling for almost seven years and on July 1, 2004 at 0230 UTC (10:30 pm EDT, June 30), the spacecraft will officially enter orbit around the Ringed Planet. On board Cassini are 12 instruments which will be used to analyze Saturn and its moons over the course of 4 years to understand their chemistry, magnetic fields, and interactions. Cassini is carrying a passenger; the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which will be deployed on December 25, 2004 to land on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

We're only a few days away from an event that no person alive has ever seen: a transit of Venus across the surface of the Sun. On June 8, 2004, approximately 75% of people on Earth will be able to watch as the tiny black dot marches across the Sun over the course of about six hours. NASA and several observatories around the world have joined forces to broadcast the event live on the Internet for the benefit of those on the wrong side of the planet, or without the right equipment to watch it. If you don't see it this time, don't worry, it'll happen again on June 6, 2012 and then again in another 105 years.

NASA has announced the guest speakers who will help set the tone for the upcoming Centennial Challenges workshop on June 15/16. The purpose of this workshop will be to define space-related goals which individuals and groups could complete to win prizes - similar to the Ansari X-Prize, which awards $10 million for the first private suborbital spacecraft. The featured speakers are Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., Chairman, Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, Dr. John H. Marburger III, Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge, Chairman, President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond and Elon Musk, CEO and CTO, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.

A new photo released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a new close-up view of the heart of the Trifid Nebula, also known as M20 and NGC 6514. One part features a region of the nebula that contains a group of young, hot stars which are blasting the surrounding area with ultraviolet radiation, and clearing out gas and dust. Another part of the nebula contains a low mass star which is ejecting a long jet of material. Previous images of the jet taken in 1997 show small but noticeable changes in its shape.

The latest full colour image of Saturn was taken on May 21, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft was only 15.7 million kilometres (9.8 million miles) from the Ringed Planet. Cassini took images through its blue, green, and red filters using its narrow angle camera, which were combined to create this natural colour view. The photo shows subtle, multi-hued atmospheric bands across the face of the planet, and the rings show slight colour differences. The chemicals the cause these colour differences are still unknown to scientists - that's part of the mystery Cassini is here to solve.

Well into their extra exploration time, NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are continuing to make discoveries on the Red Planet. Spirit has nearly completed the journey to Columbia Hills, several kilometres from the landing spot, and it can already see what might be layered rock in an outcropping. On the other side of the planet, Opportunity is still on the rim of "Endurance Crater", searching for a potential entrance into the crater, and examining the texture of rocks.

Combined data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Palomar 200-inch telescope have uncovered the remnant of a gamma-ray burst - one of the most powerful known explosions in the Universe - in our galactic neighborhood. W49B is a barrel-shaped nebula located 35,000 light-years from Earth. In the cosmic wreckage of the explosion, astronomers have found chemicals consistent with the collapsar model of a gamma-ray burst. In this model, a massive star forms inside a cloud of dust and gas and then becomes a black hole, creating a powerful explosion.

Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have embarked on a decade-long study of some of the largest structures, galaxy clusters, to try and understand the nature of the earliest Universe. According to the widely accepted "inflationary theory" of the cosmos, tiny fluctuations in the initial state of the Universe were magnified by the Big Bang. Microscopic differences at the beginning have become super-clusters of galaxies. A previous survey used X-ray observatories to identify 447 of the brightest clusters of galaxies, which will now be studied further to map out their shape.

The first privately built manned spacecraft will rocket into space on June 21 according to a recent announcement from Scaled Composites. The company's SpaceShipOne will fly to an altitude of 100 km (62 miles), and whoever pilots it will be the first private citizen to receive astronaut wings for heading into space. Although SpaceShipOne is aiming for the Ansari X-Prize, it won't be on this attempt, since the spacecraft will only be carrying the pilot. To win the prize, SpaceShipOne will need to carry the equivalent weight for two more passengers and complete the journey to space twice within two weeks.

NASA announced on Tuesday that it was officially considering sending a robotic mission to save the Hubble Space Telescope, instead of de-orbiting it in a few years. The agency has called for proposals from the aerospace community to come up with a robot that can be controlled from the ground, and perform the complex upgrades and repairs that previously required astronauts. They need to hurry, though, since the observatory is expected to begin failing around 2007.

The latest image released from the Spitzer Space Telescope is of galaxy M33, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. It's a very familiar object to visible astronomy, but in Spitzer's infrared gaze, the galaxy reveals some of its "coolest" features; clouds of dust created in novae and supernovae, and then blown around the galaxy in winds from giant stars. M33 is 50,000 light years across and nearly perfectly face on, so you can see right to its centre - a place obscured by gas and dust in our own Milky Way.

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found what they believe is an intermediate sized black hole at the heart of a nebula in a nearby galaxy. Since black holes themselves are invisible, they located it because a spot inside the nebula is emitting a tremendous amount of X-rays, and illuminating a 100 light-year swath. By calculating the amount of X-rays pouring out, astronomers estimate that the black hole has about 25-40 solar masses. It's unknown how these intermediate-sized black holes form, since so few of them have ever been seen.

Most research seems to indicate that planets form around stars in only the first few million years. Many stars have protoplanetary disks at one million years, but they're all gone by 10 million years. The trick for astronomers is to find stars in that in-between age, and catch planets in the act of forming around the parent stars. One star, Trumpler 37, seems to be at that middle age and is actively accreting material at the equivalent of 10 Jupiter masses in a million years.

A team of European astronomers has used a virtual observatory to find 30 previously undiscovered black holes. The team combined images from several observatories (Hubble, Chandra, ESO) in many wavelengths of light (from infrared to X-ray) into a comprehensive computer catalog of the night sky. They uncovered these new black holes by looking at galaxies which are edge on, so the supermassive black holes at their centre are obscured by a cloud of gas and dust. By comparing between the different wavelengths of light, they were able to spot the new black holes.

In this latest image of Saturn taken by Cassini, you can see several of the storms that rage across the planet's atmosphere. The largest of these storms is 3,000 km across (1,800 miles). There are also light-coloured, lacy cloud patterns that show atmospheric turbulence. This photo was taken on May 7, when Cassini was 28.2 million km (17.5 million miles) away.

A Russian cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Thursday, bringing much needed supplies to the astronauts. On board the Progress 14P spacecraft are 2.5 metric tonnes (2.76 tons) of water, food, air, propellant, as well as scientific equipment. The ship also carries a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit, which will replace a malfunctioning US-built one. It will be needed when the astronauts make a spacewalk in June to fix a power control and circuit breaker box for one of the station's four gyroscopes.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has peered through the dusty haze into the construction zones for new planets and found organic molecules. A team from the University of Rochester surveyed five very young stars in the constellation of Taurus and found these icy organic molecules around all of them. They also found a gap in the planetary disc around a million-year old star, which indicates that a young planet is already forming. This is much earlier than predicted by previous models of planet formation.