The Santa Ana winds, which blow across Southern California, are known to cause dry, fire-hazard conditions inland. But new data gathered by NASA's Quiksat satellite and its SeaWinds instrument shows that these same winds can help stimulate the marine environment. The strong winds blow from the land out to the ocean and cause cold water to rise up from the bottom of the ocean, bringing nutrients to the surface. Quiksat was able to measure the winds, a drop in ocean temperature, and a rise in chlorophyll offshore.

After being on the road for several weeks, NASA's Spirit rover has finally reached the edge of the crater "Bonneville". The rover made a total journey of 335 metres to reach the crater, but it did stop to analyze a few rocks along the way. This crater doesn't have exposed rocks on its edge, like the one that Opportunity landed in, but there are some interesting rock features on the far side that scientists would like to analyze. During night, Spirit took images of the sky, including the constellation Orion.

Even through NASA has begun moving to implement US President Bush's new space initiative; the plan hasn't gotten full support from Washington lawmakers yet. Two members of the House Science Committee, Sherwood Boehlert and Bart Gordon, expressed their concerns about the plan during a hearing on Wednesday, with all the unanswered questions about budget, affordability, and its impact on other science and astronautics programs.

With all this attention on Spirit and Opportunity, it's easy to forget that robotic exploration of Mars is just getting started. NASA has plans for several more missions in the works, taking advantage of the launch windows that happen every two years. Next up: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is due to launch in 2005. It will take images of the Martian surface at a resolution small enough to see a beach ball. 2007 will see the launch of Phoenix, which will put a lander on the surface to search for organic molecules and water in the Martian soil. And then the Mars Science Laboratory is due to launch in 2009, which will be a rover the size of a minivan, designed to crawl the surface for up to two years.

The European Space Agency announced its decision today for the two asteroids that Rosetta will fly past on its way to meet up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The first target is Steins, which is fairly small; only a few kilometres across - Rosetta will pass it by 1,700 km on Sept. 5, 2008. The second asteroid is Lutetia; a 100 km asteroid which Rosetta will pass within 3,000 km on July 10, 2010. Rosetta will then reach Comet 67P/CG in 2014.

The Earth's early oceans looked much different than today's, according to researchers from the University of Rochester; they were probably devoid of oxygen for a billion years longer than previously thought. Most geologists believe that the oceans had no oxygen for the first two billion years, and have been oxygen-rich for the last 500 million, but the time in between was a mystery. The team studied rocks that were on the floor of an ancient ocean, one billion years ago, and found that it was still oxygen poor at that time.

One long term goal to help the expansion of humans into space would be to terraform the planet Mars to make it more Earthlike. This would be planetary engineering on the largest scale, taking hundreds of years and requiring an immense amount of resources. Researcher Omar Pensado Diaz believes the best way to terraform Mars would be to do it piece-by-piece, creating Earthlike regions instead of trying to do the whole planet at once.

Caltech and Cornell have begun a $2 million study to build a 25-metre telescope in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. The telescope will observe the sky in the submillimeter spectrum, which will allow it to see objects which don't emit much visible or infrared light. This would be a significant improvement over the 10.4-metre instrument that Caltech already operates, giving up to 12 times the light gathering power. If construction of the instrument goes ahead, it should be completed by 2012.

New NASA-funded research has revealed how bone loss from long-duration spaceflight can increase the risk of injury to astronauts. A research team used three-dimensional X-ray scans to study the bones in 14 US and Russian crewmembers of the International Space Station. They found that the astronauts lost up to 2.7% of their bone mass every month, and additional exercise would be necessary to decrease the loss. This research will also help study the loss of bone density in the elderly.

When Opportunity sent back the first images from the surface of Mars, there was a strange object that puzzled amateurs and scientists alike - it looked like a bunny. After some analysis, scientists agreed that the object was probably about 4-5 cm long. Later images showed that the object had moved with the wind, ending up underneath the rover. This has led observers to believe that it's a piece of the rover's airbag that tore off and has been drifting around the crater, pushed by the wind.

NASA's Mars rovers stopped looking down for a bit to watch the Sun. Specifically, they were looking to see Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, make transits across the face of the Sun. Opportunity watched the smaller moon Deimos (14 km) pass in front of the Sun on March 4, and then larger Phobos (27 km long) make a transit on March 7 - in both cases, the transits lasted less than a minute. These images will help scientists better calculate the orbits and shape of the Martian moons.

Last week, NASA announced with much fanfare that Opportunity had found evidence that the region of Mars was once drenched with water. But it turns out, NASA's other rover, Spirit, has found quietly evidence as well, but using completely different clues. The rover found cracks inside a rock dubbed "Humphrey", which look like they are minerals crystallized out of water. The amount of water that could create this is far less than the amount that acted on Opportunity's landing site, demonstrating that Mars probably had a diverse climate in the past.

The newly-launched Spitzer Space Telescope revealed the Henize 206 nebula, located 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The nebula was created when a supermassive star exploded as a supernova millions of years ago. The star had shed layers of material over a long period, and with the force of the explosion, the material collected together to create new stars - the nebula has hundreds and possibly even thousands of young stars, which range in age from two to ten million years old.

New images of Saturn taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory show that X-ray emissions, which are reflected radiation from the Sun, come mainly from its equator. This is unusual, because existing theories predict that they should come from the planet's poles, as has been observed with Jupiter. Another unusual discovery is that the planet's rings aren't visible at all in the X-ray spectrum.

A group of scientists from Washington University in St. Louis found nine specks of silicate stardust inside a primitive meteorite, after examining more than 159,000 particles. This is an important discovery, because it tells researchers that the early solar system formed from gas and dust, and not in a hot solar nebula - until now, these silicate particles had only been found in interplanetary dust. The team used a special mass spectrometer to analyze the composition of individual grains in the meteorite, searching for particles which had to be formed in stars.

Tom Hanks' production company, Playtone, is set to create a new IMAX film based on the Apollo missions. The film will be called "Magnificent Desolation", and is supported by NASA and sponsored by Lockheed Martin. It will take audiences to the Ocean of Storms, the Fra Mauro Highlands, the Sea of Tranquility and the Taurus Littrow Valley. The previous space-based IMAX film, "Space Station", grossed over $70 million at the box office and it still playing in theatres.

The US House of Representatives today approved bill H.R. 3752, The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004. This bill gives the FAA authority to license commercial suborbital launches, such as the vehicles being developed by groups competing to win the X-Prize. This should make it easier for companies to test new kinds of reusable suborbital vehicles. The bill will now go to Senate for consideration before it becomes law.

Using data from NASA's Aqua satellite, scientists have found that the smoke from burning vegetation can inhibit the formation of clouds. Until now, scientists thought that smoke particles could serve to cool the planet by shading the surface and reflecting light back into space, but this effect seems less than estimated. In fact, wherever there's smoke, cloud cover is significantly reduced, so light reaches the surface and is absorbed by the Earth, creating a warming effect.