The latest image of Saturn released from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the Ringed Planet in four wavelengths: ultraviolet, visible blue, far red, and near infrared. The images were taken over the course of 20 minutes, and each one reveals a different aspect of Saturn's cloud cover and rings; probing the planet's atmosphere at different depths. When this photo was taken, Cassini was 44.5 million kilometres from Saturn and closing. It will reach the planet in July.

We do live. We age. We move. Time is how we refer to the transfer of ourselves from our beginning to end. Space is how we scale things through our primary sense of vision. Using the scientific method we can define iota that are so incredibly abstract as to be partly in our universe and partly somewhere else. We are also pretty sure that as we have a beginning and end so does the universe in which we live. Much of the basis from which we draw this understanding is directly attributable to Albert Einstein. In Michio Kaku's book, Einstein's Cosmos, How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time we are taken on a wonderful brief journey through Einstein's life and the development of his theories that establish this basis.

To celebrate the 14th anniversary of its launch, the operators of the Hubble Space Telescope have released this image of a ring of star clusters wrapped around the core of a spiral galaxy - and I've turned it into a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper. The galaxy is called AM 0644-741, and it's located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Dorado. The galaxy's unusual shape was caused by a collision between two galaxies, which threw out stars and dust like ripples in a pond. The shockwaves heated up this material, which began an intense period of star formation.

Jupiter's stormy surface could be settling down, according to calculations by UC Berkeley physicist Philip Marcus. According to Marcus, Jupiter's temperature and the number of storms on its surface are directly connected. As the number of vortices decrease, its temperature should go up by about 10-degrees Celsius - warmer near the equator and cooler near the poles. This cycle seems to repeat itself about every 70 years. But don't worry; the Great Red Spot isn't going anywhere.

NASA satellites have been used to create an 18-year record of temperatures on the Earth's surface, and not surprisingly, they're going up. So far, the data shows that global average temperatures are going up approximately 0.43 Celsius/decade; by comparison, ground station data only shows a rise of 0.34 C. This is an average, though, so different regions of the Earth are seeing greater or lesser temperature increases. These new readings should help scientists make better predictions about the future of the Earth's environment.

A special NASA spacecraft designed to test two aspects of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, Gravity Probe B, lifted off Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base on board a Boeing Delta II rocket. The spacecraft was inserted into a perfectly circular polar orbit, and operators will begin calibrating its instruments over the next 60-days. If everything checks out, the spacecraft will begin making precise measurements about the effect of the Earth's gravity for 12 months - analysis of the data will take a further year.

The latest image released from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows the monstrous power of a supernova. The image is of SNR 0540-69.3, a remnant of a supernova that blew up 160,000 light-years away. The centre of the image is the rapidly rotating neutron star, which spins 20 times/second, and generates the same amount of energy as 30,000 Suns. The supernova is believed to have exploded within a cloud of gas, so this created a super hot shell of material that surrounds the object, which blazes in the X-ray spectrum.

By chasing dust devils across the desert with a specially equipped truck, scientists have discovered that on Earth at least, they can generate a high-voltage electric field. This has implications for future exploration on Mars since much larger dust devils crisscross the surface of the Red Planet. This situation happens because the dust particles in the mini-twister rub together and become charged; the negative particles are carried high into the air while the positive particles stay lower down. Future robotic missions to Mars will hope to measure the strength and danger these electric devils might pose down the road.

"It figures that if there was only one rock for what seems like miles in every direction, we'd find a way to hit it," said Steven Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover mission. He was describing an unusual object, later called "Bounce Rock" that Spirit bounced off of during its airbag landing. Scientists were split over whether this unusual object was a rock at all - they thought it could have been a piece of Spirit's landing equipment, or maybe even a meteorite. But when Spirit finally analyzed it up close, the case was closed: it's a rock that was probably blasted out of an impact crater 50 km away.

Astronomers have used the enormous Keck telescope to capture several images of the hydrocarbon haze of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and piece them together into a short movie. These observations will help scientists make sense of the data that the Huygens probe sends back as it descends through Titan's unusual atmosphere in early 2005 and hopefully survives to land on its surface. Titan is interesting because its atmosphere is very similar to conditions that probably existed early on Earth.

NASA has reported this week that a rock analyzed by Spirit bears a resemblance to a meteorite found in Antarctica. The meteorite is called EETA79001, and it's known to be from Mars because of gases preserved in glassy material match the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere. The basalt lava rock "Bounce", recently analyzed by Spirit, has a very similar composition to EETA79001. They have different amounts of a chemical called pyroxene, so they didn't come from the same impact event, but probably formed in a similar fashion on Mars.

Astronomers have watched how the gravity of a star bends the light from a more distant star to discover a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting it. The technique is called gravitational microlensing, and in this case, the astronomers carefully measured the brightness of a star 17,000 light-years away which was focusing the light from a star located 24,000 light-years away. They realized that there was a regular pattern of brightening and dimming which meant there were two objects working together to focus the light. Further calculations indicated that it was a planet with approximately the mass of Jupiter making the fluctuations.

An Atlas 2AS rocket launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral on Friday morning, carrying a Japanese Superbird-6 communications satellite into orbit. The rocket lifted off at 0045 UTC (8:45 pm EDT, April 15), and the satellite was released into its transfer orbit 30 minutes later. Superbird-6 will provide video and data services across much of the Asia-Pacific region. Atlas 2AS rockets will only launch two more times before the vehicle is retired.

Researchers from the University of Chicago are analyzing hundreds of meteorite fragments that struck Park Forest, Ill. in the evening of March 26, 2003. Witnesses in several states saw the tremendous fireball when it struck last year, and volunteers eventually collected 30 kg of fragments; some that crashed through the roofs of their houses. It's believed that the original meteor weighed 900 kg when it exploded in the sky. The heavier pieces fell nearly straight down, and the lighter pieces were carried downwind a bit to create a huge swath of fragments.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is now close enough to Saturn that it's able to resolve the two F-ring-shepherding moons: Prometheus and Pandora. Prometheus is 102 km across, and Pandora is 84 km across, and they interact with Saturn's outermost ring causing clumps and other unusual formations. They have very chaotic orbits, which can change unpredictably when they get close to each other. The moons were originally discovered by Voyager 1 in 1980, and follow-up observations have been made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers will have a powerful new tool for finding extrasolar planets on Friday, when SuperWASP, a new observatory in the Canary Islands, begins operations. SuperWASP has an extremely wide field of view (2000 times larger than a regular telescope) and is able to measure the brightness of hundreds of thousands of stars. It will take enormous surveys of the sky every night, which astronomers will process with a computer. They'll be looking for stars which dim slightly on a regular basis, which would indicate planets passing in front.

One of the problems of sending humans to Mars will be how to let them explore the surface of the planet without having to carry tons of fuel from Earth. Fortunately, there's a potential source of fuel right on the surface of the planet: magnesium. Researchers from the University of Michigan have performed zero-gravity experiments that demonstrated that magnesium will burn perfectly well in a carbon dioxide atmosphere as long as you use iodine catalyst. It works even better in microgravity - Mars has 1/3rd the gravity of Earth.