Researchers from Caltech have looked deep into space to a time when early material in the Universe was swirling towards the creation of galaxy clusters and superclusters. They did their measurements using an instrument in the Chilean Andes called the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), which looks at the Universe when it was only 400,000 years old - a time before galaxies, stars, and planets had formed. By watching the motion of this material as it began forming larger structures, the researchers were able to confirm that dark matter and dark energy were having an effect even then.

With all this talk of global warming, it may come as a surprise that Antarctica has actually been mostly getting colder over the last 30 years. But new research from NASA indicates that this trend is about to reverse, and the continent will warm over the next 50 years. Researchers found, ironically, that low ozone levels actually made the continent colder, but with restrictions on ozone-destroying chemicals around the planet, this cooling effect is going to go away as the ozone layer returns. If temperatures rise too high, the continent's ice sheets will melt and slide into the ocean, raising water levels around the world.

Researchers from Indiana University have found that under Mars-like conditions, Epsom-like salts can contain a significant amount of water. This could help explain why NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft discovered a large amount of water near the surface of Mars, but it's not visible. To get to the bottom of this possibility, the researchers have been funded by NASA to help build an X-ray diffractometer, which a future rover would use to analyze crystals on Mars to see if they're the right kind of salt that could contain water.

The closest stars to our Solar System probably haven't been discovered because it's likely they're of a cool, dim class of failed stars called brown dwarfs. But a new mission from NASA called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has recently been approved for development, and it should be able to locate them. Scheduled for launch in 2008, and costing $208 million, WISE will scan the entire sky in infrared, looking for brown dwarfs, planet-forming disks around nearby stars, and colliding galaxies. Eventually it will build up a database of more than one million images, containing hundreds of millions of objects.

Astronomers using the Gemini observatories have got themselves a bit of a mystery. They've found a binary system at EF Eridanus, located 300 light-years away from Earth, where one of the objects defies classification. It's about the size of Jupiter but it's way too massive to be a planet. It's the temperature of a brown dwarf, but its light doesn't match a brown dwarf's characteristics. The researchers believe that the object was once a regular star, but then it had most of its material stripped away by the gravity of the larger star over the course of 5 billions years. Eventually it just couldn't give any more.

A problem with the wheels on NASA's Spirit rover has stopped it dead in its tracks on the surface of Mars. For some reason, the rover's right-front and left-rear wheels stopped operating as commanded on Oct. 1. NASA engineers have performed a series of diagnostic tests to understand which systems could be affected, and they're still analyzing the results. One fix would be to permanently disable the brakes on those wheels, but it could put the rover at an increased risk. Spirit has now traveled 3.6 km (2.2 miles) across the surface of Mars; much further than it was designed for, so it's no surprise it's starting to have some mechanical problems.

On October 9, 1604, a new star appeared in the sky as bright as any of the planets. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, was one of the astronomers at the time who tried to study this supernova, before telescopes were even invented. Now NASA has turned its Great Observatories (Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer) on the supernova remnant, and produced an image that shows it in many different wavelengths of light. The combined image shows a bubble-shaped shroud of gas and dust 14 light-years wide expanding at 6 million kph (4 million mph).

Arianespace has announced that they will be launching a cluster of 50 nanosatellites in 2007 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first satellite launch of Sputnik in 1957. Each tiny satellite will weigh only 1 kg (2.2 lbs), and contain a scientific package developed by a single country - all 50 will be launched at the same time, on one rocket. The nanosats will last in orbit for about 2 years.

NASA has had two momentous changes in the last few years. One is the loss of the Columbia shuttle. Two is the replacement of administrator Daniel Goldin by Sean O'Keefe. In their book New Moon Rising, Frank Sietzen and Keith Cowing claim that the consequence of these changes is that NASA finally has things right and will accomplish their new vision; to send humans to live in space. This is a very bold claim and though there is not much factual content to support this, the book does provide good detail on the process by which NASA obtained this vision.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who piloted missions in both the Mercury and Gemini programs, died on Monday at his home in Ventura, California; he was 77. Cooper was the youngest of the original 7 Mercury astronauts, and his mission on May 15, 1963 - the final one in the Mercury program - lasted more than 34 hours and 22 orbits. Cooper and Pete Conrad flew the third flight of the Gemini program in 1965, and stayed in space for 191 hours, establishing a new space endurance record.

NASA is considering a new space-based telescope that would be the equivalent of a 40-metre (120 ft) observatory. The proposed Space Infrared Interferometric Telescope (SPIRIT) mission would consist of two infrared telescopes at opposite sides of a rail that could be positioned perfectly to combine their images into a single, giant telescope. SPIRIT is being considered as part of NASA's Origins program, which is looking to answer fundamental questions about the beginning of the universe. If selected, it would launch in 2014.

A NASA-funded study has predicted 15 of California's 16 largest earthquakes this decade, demonstrating that scientists are finally getting a handle on the warning signs that lead to big quakes. The team looked at historical earthquake data back to 1932, and then used this to build a model that predicts earthquake hotspots in California. One warning sign that a big quake is going to happen is when there's a series of small earthquakes above magnitude 3 which indicate that pressure is building up; another is when the fault appears to stop entirely.

NASA scientists flew a small aircraft equipped with a special infrared camera above Mount Saint Helens last week to see if this perspective would give any insights into what's happening underneath the surface. Shortly after they took this image, the volcano spewed out a large blast of steam. The team had actually been planning this mission for quite a while, so it was a complete coincidence that they arrived when the volcano was about to erupt.

This image was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft on June 4, and it shows a series of parallel fault lines in the western part of Solis Planum. These fault lines can be traced for several hundred kilometres to the northern Tharsis shield volcanoes.

Living at the centre of the Milky Way would be beautiful, but dangerous, according to research from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Every 20 million years or so, a ring of gas and dust 500 light-years away from the middle of the galaxy collapses, beginning a furious period of star formation, which then sets off a series of supernovae. A planet in the area would be completely sterilized of life as star after star explodes. The next starburst period in the Milky Way is likely to happen in about 10 million years, but don't worry, we're far enough away that nothing would happen to the Earth.

A common science experiment for young kids is to build a pinhole camera. Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder think NASA should build a gigantic one in space and use it to find planets orbiting other stars. The "New Worlds Imager" would be a football field-sized opaque light shade with a small opening right at the centre to let light through. A detector spacecraft would sit thousands of kilometres back and collect the light that comes through the opening. The shade would block the light from the star and let astronomers detect planets orbiting it. The proposal was one of 12 advanced concepts recently selected for further study by NASA.

Supernovae are easy to see - after they've gone off. But it's impossible to find the stars beforehand, so you can study their final moments. Astronomers think they've found a warning sign that a star is about to explode: X-ray flashes. NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE-2) has spotted three different powerful blasts of x-ray radiation over the last few weeks, and if astronomers' models hold true, these are precursors to much more powerful gamma-ray bursts, which have been linked with supernovae. Many telescopes around the world will be studying the regions that these x-ray flashes happened, hoping to catch a supernova in the act of exploding.

Traveling in space could be hard on your immune system, according to a new study funded by NASA. Researchers tested 25 astronauts before and after various space shuttle missions of varying lengths, and found that white blood cells increased after the astronauts returned from space. The increased number of white blood cells meant that the astronauts bodies were working overtime to fight off various microbes and diseases. And it appears that these effects probably increase as missions get longer and more difficult.

This photo, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows the tiny moon Prometheus, which serves as a shepherd to the inside edge of Saturn's knotted F ring. It's only 102 km (63 miles) long, so Cassini had to take several images of it, which were then stitched together on computer to enhance resolution and reduce noise. It was first discovered during the Voyager mission, and scientists saw a hint of the ridges, valleys and craters that marred its irregular surface. Cassini is expected to make a much closer flyby of the tiny moon later in its mission.

Here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper from a deep field image taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to celebrate its 25th anniversary. This part is actually just a fraction of the full image that contains more than half a million galaxies in just a one-degree square field of the sky. Once one of the larger telescopes in the world, the 3.6-metre instrument has been updated regularly with state of the art technology including adaptive optics and a 340 mega pixel digital camera.

NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts has selected 12 proposals for further study as part of its goal of finding revolutionary ideas that could help the agency's plans for human space exploration. Proposals selected as part of Phase 1 will receive $75,000 for a six-month study. Those selected for Phase 2 will have two years and $400,000 to further develop their concept. Some of the Phase 1 winners include an infrared observatory on the Moon, lunar space elevators, electrostatic radiation shields and a plasma propulsion system.

As predicted, Asteroid Toutatis made its closest approach to the Earth today, passing a mere 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) away from our planet - 4 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The 4.6 km (2.9 mile) long asteroid hasn't made an approach this close since 1353. Since it was first discovered in 1989, Toutatis has been closely studied by astronomers because it has an orbit that brings it close to the Earth every 4 years. Unfortunately, it's still too dim to see with the unaided eye, but skilled amateur astronomers with telescopes watching the southern skies have spotted it. Toutatis won't get this close again until 2562.

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.

After its crash landing, NASA scientists weren't too hopeful that they'd turn up much science in the wreckage of Genesis' sample capsule, but the results so far have been a pleasant surprise. Even though the capsule smashed into the ground at nearly 320 km (200 miles) per hour, the samples aren't smashed up too badly, and scientists are able to extract fairly large pieces for further analysis. Genesis' purpose was to gather particles from the Sun's solar wind, which would be returned to Earth and then distributed to scientists around the world.

This is a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of a beautiful image of Saturn's rings, taken by Cassini on July 30. This image shows a view looking through the planet's C ring, which is closest to Saturn. It also shows the Cassini division, which separates the A and B rings by a 4,800 km (2,980 mile) gap.

Mira stars are a special class of variable red giants which pulsate. Over the course of 80-1,000 days, a Mira star can vary in brightness by a factor of 10 times or more during the cycle. An international team of astronomers has observed the environments of five Mira stars, and found that they're surrounded by a shell of water vapour and carbon monoxide; this makes them seem larger than they actually are. These new observations bring the size of Mira stars in line with mathematical models that predict their size and composition. By observing Mira stars, astronomers will get a preview of the fate that could befall our own Sun when it bloats up to become a red giant in a few billion years.

Although Hurricane Ivan spared NASA's Kennedy Space Center, several of the agencies other facilities weren't so lucky. The Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans were much closer to the point where the enormous storm came ashore on the US Gulf Coast. Stennis is where the space shuttle's engines are tested, so they were secured for the storm; one was returned to its container, another was wrapped in plastic, and two development engines were secured on their test stands. Michoud is where the shuttle's external fuel tanks are manufactured and assembled; these were secured, and assembly equipment was moved inside. NASA will get an idea of the damage later today or tomorrow, when its employees begin returning to work.

Researchers from Australia have demonstrated that an observatory in Antarctica can produce images of the sky several times better than telescopes at mid latitudes. A team of astronomers from the University of New South Wales made observations using a robotic telescope in an observatory called "Dome C" on the Antarctic Plateau, 3250 metres (10,600 feet) above sea level. They found that the sharpness of images was three times better than the best sites used by astronomers in other locations. An 8m telescope here would function like a 25m telescope anywhere else - at a fraction of the cost of a space-based observatory.

Even as it's battening down the hatches for another rough ride at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA is getting as much science as it can out of Hurricane Ivan. The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer aboard NASA's Terra satellite has provided a wealth of data about its formation and structure that will help improve future hurricane forecasts. Scientists need to learn what elements make hurricanes strengthen or weaken, and sometimes make last minute swerves as they approach land - the more they know, the more accurately they can predict hurricane paths to lead evacuation efforts.

Jupiter's moon Io is peppered with volcanoes spewing gas and dust up to 400 km (284 miles) high. You'd think that this material would all settle down again onto the moon, but something very unusual is happening: it's being accelerated to a velocity second only to the Sun's solar wind. This new space hazard came as a complete surprise when it was first discovered pelting the NASA/ESA Ulysses spacecraft. The dust came in a tight stream, moving at 300 km per second (200 mps), and it was detected again when Galileo visited the Jovian system. It turns out that Jupiter's powerful magnetic field picks up the material from Io and accelerates it.