It will probe the dark ages before the era of re-ionization, and perhaps before the birth of the first stars. It will observe the formation of the first galaxies. It will map the web of neutral Hydrogen that is spread across our universe, near and far. In 2015, an array of 4400 twelve meter fully steerable paraboloid radio dishes, called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is scheduled to be complete and operational.

Two, uh... people without clothes. That's what comes to mind when people think about the Pioneer space probes. From a series of some of the most advanced and original missions brought forward by NASA, people's subsequent memory is a sketch of a nude man and women that was used as a greeting card to alien life forms. Luckily, if you want some refreshing insight into the science and the politics of the Pioneer space probes, then you can read Mark Wolverton's book, The Depths of Space, to easily augment some half-forgotten image of people in their natural form.

British scientists are working on a project that would link up robotic telescopes around the world so they could get the jump on events in the night sky, and keep watching regardless of day or night, or local weather conditions. It's always nighttime somewhere, so the network would connect the telescopes so they can transfer their targets to one another continuously, essentially watching an object around the clock. It's currently planned for three telescopes, but a future version would connect six telescopes.

NASA operators were so concerned about the safety of the fragile capsule from Genesis and its precious cargo of solar wind samples that they'd arranged an elaborate airborne capture with helicopter stunt pilots. So when the capsule's parachute failed to open, and it slammed into the Utah desert at hundreds of km per hour, you'd think it was a total writeoff. Well, apparently not. NASA scientists have been analyzing the wreckage, and found enough is intact that they should be able to achieve most of their scientific objectives - enough samples of the Sun's solar wind have survived to keep the scientific community busy for a long time.

The crew on board the International Space Station restarted the malfunctioning Elektron oxygen system on Friday, but shut it down about an hour later. Russian engineers are trying to figure out why the system is automatically commanding itself to shut down. Commander Gennady Padalka used spare parts that were on hand to get a backup system ready if necessary. There's still plenty of oxygen available to the two men on board the station, including full tanks on the docked Progress cargo ship, and 84 solid fuel oxygen canisters which can last them 42 days.

NASA's Terra satellite took this photograph of Hurricane Ivan as it roared past the island of Jamaica on Saturday. The US space agency is gearing itself up for another potential encounter with a hurricane; just a week after Hurricane Frances damaged the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Forecasters are expecting that KSC will receive winds of 75 kph (45 mph) and more rain on Tuesday. 1,500 employees have been working to get the space centre back online, and managers are still planning to reopen to its full 14,000 employees on Monday.

Astronomers from the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) in Cambridge, England have watched a bundle of matter at the heart of a galaxy 100 million light-years away as it orbited a supermassive black hole four times on its way to being destroyed. The material was approximately the same distance as our Earth is from the Sun, but instead of taking a year, it only took a quarter of a day, because of the massive gravity of the black hole. By tracking the matter's doomed orbit, astronomers were then able to calculate the mass of the black hole: between 10 and 50 million solar masses.

Scientists working with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) have demonstrated that they can track changes in the Earth's environment by measuring its gravity field. Launched in 2002, Grace is actually two identical spacecraft that keep track of their precise distance from each other. As they pass over the lumpy gravity field of the Earth, their distance changes, which they can measure and turn into a gravity map of the planet. The mission demonstrated that it could measure 10 cm (4 in) of rainfall in the Amazon, just from the effect of its gravity.

This perspective image of an eroded crater on Mars was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft in May 2004. It's at Solis Planum, in the Thaumasia region of Mars. The larger eroded impact crater is about 53 km (32 miles) across, and the crater rim is nearly a kilometre high. The blue-white areas at the upper left have light clouds, changing the colour.

A team of European and US astronomers think they've taken the first direct image of a planet orbiting another star about 230 light-years away. Until now, planets have been discovered because of the effect they have on their parent star - they haven't been "seen" directly. Using the European Southern Observatory's 8.2-m telescope in Chile, the team found a faint, red object nearby a brown dwarf star called 2M1207. By analyzing the object with various instruments, they believe the object is approximately 5 times the mass of Jupiter. There's still some uncertainty, though, so the team will make regular observations over the next 2 years to see how its position and composition changes.

Brian Hynek, an associate researcher from the University of Colorado at Boulder thinks he's found evidence for a vast ocean or lake that once covered the region around NASA's Opportunity rover landing site. The data comes from the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey spacecraft, which have extensively mapped the area. He estimates that the ocean must have been 330,000 square km (127,000 square miles), which is more than all the Great Lakes combined. Hynek used several pieces of evidence to make this prediction, including gray hematite scattered around the whole region, and outcrops of sedimentary rock.

Scientists have theorized that the inside of a neutron star - the remnant from a star that has collapsed under its own gravity - is a special place where the laws of physics begin to break down; atoms are squeezed so tightly by gravity that all protons and electrons are crushed into neutrons which swirl around like a liquid, but without friction (called a superfluid). This theory has gotten some confirmation according to new research from NASA which observed neutron star EXO 0748-676, located 30,000 light years away. Using various instruments, NASA scientists determined that it's approximately 11.5 km (7 miles) in diameter, and contains 1.75 solar masses. With this much mass packed into a small area, the observations match the theory that neutron stars exist in this superfluidic state, but without being crushed further.

NASA specialists have begun cleaning up after the sample capsule from its Genesis capsule slammed into the ground at high speed in the Utah desert. The ground crew took their time picking up the capsule because there could have been live explosives, which failed to eject the capsule's parachute as it entered the atmosphere. Even though it was going 311 kph (193 mph) when it smashed into the ground, scientists were surprised at how little damage was actually done. Some of the wafers that had collected particles of the Sun's solar wind were actually unharmed, so scientists will be able to extract some useful particles; although, they could be contaminated with air, water and dirt after the rough landing.

Scientists from the United Kingdom have uncovered a new object and a new ring orbiting Saturn. While Cassini images, scientists at the University of London noticed a tiny object skirt around the outer part of the F-ring - it's probably 4-5 km (3 miles) in diameter. They also discovered a new ring in the same area, which is associated with Saturn's moon Atlas. This ring was only seen as Cassini was approaching Saturn, so scientists aren't sure if it goes all the way around the planet. While attempting to pin down the orbit of the new moon, scientists from the Space Science Institute in Boulder turned up another potential object in a similar orbit.

Bought a digital camera recently? It's probably got anywhere from 3.1 to 6 megapixels of resolution. Well, the European Space Agency is building a 1 gigapixel (a gigapixel is 1024 megapixels) digital camera for its upcoming Gaia space telescope, due for launch in 2010. It's actually not a single camera, but an array of 170. Gaia will be positioned 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) away from Earth, and will be designed to simultaneously photograph 1 billion stars and plenty of other celestial objects like asteroids, comets, galaxies, and nebulae. The goal will be to map the entire Universe down to a resolution one million times fainter than the human eye can see.

NASA workers are continuing to assess the damage that Hurricane Frances wreaked on the Kennedy Space Center when it tore through Cape Canaveral over the weekend. Many buildings suffered wind and rain damage, including the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the space shuttles are attached to the external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters - it had 820 panels blown off. The Thermal Protection System Facility, where heat tiles and blankets are manufactured suffered significant damage. It's still unknown if the effects of the hurricane will push back the shuttle's return to flight.

Astronomers theorize that most of the mass in the Universe is dark matter; it's invisible and detectable only by the pull of its gravity on objects. This dark matter is in long filaments, and galaxy clusters form where these filaments intersect. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has found a hot gas cloud hundreds of thousands of light-years across in the the Fornax galaxy cluster is collapsing towards an invisible centre of gravity. Computer simulations have accurately predicted this kind of interaction between galaxy clusters and filaments of dark matter, so this discovery will give astronomers a chance to understand the process better.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has taken this image of two galaxies colliding, creating destruction and a wave of new star formation. The image of the Antennae galaxies in infrared shows how they're churning into each other, and throwing off massive streamers of stars and clouds of dust. Spitzer can "see" through the dark dust, and has found large nurseries of young stars in the center of the galaxies, where they overlap. This cloud of buried stars appears red in this image, and the blue indicates older stars which can be seen in visible light.

The latest image released by the Gemini Observatory shows a group of galaxies tearing each other apart 300 million light-years away. The galaxies are members of Stephan's Quintet, and their shapes are completely warped by gravitational interactions that have been going on for millions of years. This ongoing chaos has spawned huge stellar nurseries - hotspots of furious star formation. They'll keep on interacting for a few more million years before merging into larger objects; the smaller galaxies will be completely torn apart.

It's bad, but it could have been much worse. Hurricane Frances devastated Florida over the weekend, with the eye sweeping close to NASA's Kennedy Space Center - the region sustained winds as high as 110 kph (70 mph). There were no injuries, and the worst damage was to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which lost more than 1,000 panels, leaving huge holes in its sides. None of the space shuttles or the Swift mission were damaged. The center is closed Tuesday for most employees, and a more detailed damage assessment should be released later today.

The board inquiring into the loss of the remotely-operated Helios aircraft released its final report on Friday. Helios was a solar-powered aircraft, capable of flying higher than any conventional plane. During a test flight in June, 2003, the aircraft took off from the island of Kauai and flew out over the Pacific Ocean. About 30 minutes into its flight, turbulence caused Helios to become unstable, with its wings bending more than it was designed for. Shortly after that, the upper surface of the wing ripped off, and it plunged into the ocean. The board determined that NASA lacked the analysis tools to predict how turbulence could affect the plane in all conditions.

The crew of Expedition 9, Gennady Padalka and Mike Fincke, completed their fourth and final walk outside the International Space Station on Friday. The spacewalkers spent a total of 5 hours and 21 minutes in space installing equipment to prepare for the arrival of the new European cargo ship next year, including three communication antennas. Three more antennas will be installed by the next station crew, and Expedition 11 will upgrade equipment inside the Zvezda module to prepare for the new cargo ships as well.

The Hubble Space Telescope took this image of the Stingray Nebula, known to astronomers as Henize 1357. The dim star is surrounded by a halo of gas that was shed when the star became a red giant - a final stage in its life. As the nebula expanded away from the star, the remaining core got hotter and hotter, heating the gas up until it glowed. The Stingray Nebula is the youngest known planetary nebula; it wasn't visible in the sky just 25 years ago, when the gas around the central star hadn't heated up enough to glow.

According to NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the temperature of Saturn's rings range from cold to really really cold. In this false-colour image, the red signifies 110 Kelvin (-261 degrees F), and the blue is 70 Kelvin (-333 degrees F). Cassini has shown that opaque regions of the rings are cooler, while transparent sections are warmer; this was predicted by scientists before the spacecraft arrived. The data was gathered using one of Cassini's 12 scientific instruments, the composite infrared spectrometer.

After four months in orbit, NASA's Gravity Probe B is finally ready to begin its scientific mission - to find out if two predictions by Einstein about relativity are correct. It wasn't easy, though. Controllers expected to get the spacecraft orienting on its target star within a few days, but it took weeks because sunlight reflecting off of dust particles confused its tracking system. Engineers also had to tweak the spacecraft's software to compensate for cosmic rays that flashed into its telescope. Everything's working fine now, and in a year or so, we should have some answers.

The European Space Agency's Envisat Earth has a whole suite of tools to analyze Hurricane Frances with, and that's just what it's done. The Earth observation satellite has both optical and radar instruments, and it can observe high-atmosphere cloud structure in both the visible and infrared spectrum, and use radar backscatter to look at the roughness of the water underneath to calculate wind speeds. Frances is expected to make landfall in Florida on Saturday and cause a significant amount of damage.

A mystery that has puzzled astronomers for years is: why does the Sun's temperature rise as you get further away from it? While the surface of the Sun might only be 6000 degrees Celsius, the corona which surrounds it can be 2 million degrees. The "wave heating" theory proposes that the Sun's magnetic field carries waves of heat from the surface of the Sun and dumps them into the corona. Another theory proposes that lines in the Sun's magnetic field get twisted up and eventually snap, releasing a tremendous amount of energy into the corona.

NASA's Opportunity rover has gone back to work after a two week delay because a pebble was jamming its rock abrasion tool. The pebble fell out of the tool on its own just before engineers tried reversing its motor to kick it out. Opportunity demonstrated that everything was working fine by cleaning off a rock inside "Endurance Crater" with its wire brush. Mars and Earth are approaching "conjunction", where the Sun lies directly in between our planets, so controllers will be unable to communicate with the rovers for several days.

NASA has awarded the first contracts for aerospace firms to begin preliminary concept studies for returning humans to the Moon, and then onto Mars. A total of $27 million USD was awarded to eleven companies to work on concepts for human lunar exploration and the crew exploration vehicle; there is also an option for an additional $27 million. The contracts will give the companies six months to work on their ideas, and then the additional six-month options may be exercised depending on the quality of the work.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of a supernova exploding in a relatively nearby galaxy. The star that became supernova SN 2004dj was probably 15 times the mass of our own Sun, but only 14 million years old - the larger the star, the shorter and more violent its life is. The star was located in a galaxy called NGC 2403, which is only 11 million light-years from Earth, so this makes it the closest supernova seen in more than a decade. Astronomers will continue to study SN 2004dj for years to understand how certain kinds of stars explode, and what chemicals they're made up of.

Hurricane Frances has swept past Puerto Rico and is now on a path that could strike the Bahamas, and eventually even hit Florida. NASA workers at the Kennedy Space Center are powering down the space shuttles, closing their payload doors, and stowing away their landing gear to prepare for the storm. Frances is now a dangerous category 4 hurricane, with winds as high as 225 kph (140 mph), and it will reach the coastal US later this week. This photograph of the hurricane was taken by NASA's Terra satellite on August 31.

Despite a series of delays, a Lockheed-Martin Atlas IIAS rocket lifted off Tuesday night, carrying a secret payload for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The rocket lifted off at 2317 UTC (7:17 pm EDT) from Cape Canaveral's Pad 36A; payload separation of the satellite into its transfer orbit happened 73 minutes later. This was the last Atlas 2 rocket that will fly. After this launch, both the class of rocket, and Pad 36A will be retired.

The European Space Agency's Envisat earth observation satellite is getting ready for the arrival of an annual event - the opening of the hole in the Earth's ozone layer. Since a hole first opened up in the mid-1980s, satellites have been tracking its arrival and shape for years, and scientists have gotten quite good at predicting the conditions that will create the gap. The ozone hole should open up in about a week's time, and then close up again in November or December when higher temperatures around the South Pole will mix ozone-rich air into the region.

Famed astronomer, Dr. Fred Whipple, passed away on Monday at the age of 97 after a prolonged battle with illness. He was Phillips Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at Harvard University and a Senior Physicist at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Perhaps best known for his research into comets, Whipple discovered six, and one of the first to suggest that they were icy conglomerates (aka "dirty snowballs"). He went on to direct the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1955 to 1973, and the Mt. Hopkins Observatory was renamed the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in 1981.

Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a new class of extrasolar planets which are between 10 and 20 times the mass of the Earth - roughly the same size as Neptune. Two planets were discovered orbiting smaller stars: one around Gliese 436 and another around 55 Cancri. Both planets orbit their parent stars in about 3 days. They were discovered using the radial velocity method, which finds planets because of how they wobble their parent star. Because these planets are much smaller than Jupiter, they're probably made of rock and ice, rather than gas.

The view from the International Space Station is great, but the window is a little small. But a new observation module - or "cupola" - under development by the European Space Agency will change all that. It's an observation and control tower that will give astronauts a panoramic view for observing and guiding operations outside the station. The 1.8 tonne module has been completed in Italy, and now it'll be transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida to launch to the station in 2009.

NASA's X-43A prototype has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's fastest air-breathing aircraft. The unpiloted aircraft made an experimental flight earlier this year, and reached Mach 6.83, or 8,000 kph (5,000 mph) over the Pacific Ocean. The record will go into the 2006 edition of the book; however, NASA expects to have broken this record by the time the book goes to print. The X-43A is expected to make another flight this October, and if all goes well, it'll reach Mach 10.

Scientists have figured out how they can use special instruments on board two NASA satellites to detect the early stages of plankton "blooms". These blooms are caused by excessive runoff of industrial fertilizer which makes marine algae grow - sometimes so thickly that water looks black. Bacteria consume the algae and use up oxygen in the water. This can kill fish in large quantities. The MODIS instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites can detect the glow in plankton's chlorophyll from orbit, and pinpoint exactly where large blooms are forming.

When a huge asteroid slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago, it began a catastrophic chain of events that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and 75% of the species on Earth. One devastating aspect of the event was when hot debris rained down, starting enormous wildfires across the entire planet. Scientists from the Southwest Research Institute have come up with a model that calculates how large an impact had to be to cause massive fires. A crater 85 km (52 miles) across probably caused continent-wide fires, and a crater 135 km (83 miles) across could ignite fires around the whole world.

This image, taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express, is of a region on Mars called Eos Chasma; it's on the southern end of the Valles Marineris. The highest point of the plateau is 5,000 metres (3.1 miles) above the valley floor. Scientists know the higher plains are a much older feature because they have a number of ancient large impact craters that have remained for billions of years.

Here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of Hurricane Frances, which was taken by astronaut Mike Fincke aboard the International Space Station. He took this photo on the morning of August 27, 2004 from an altitude of 370 km (230 miles). Frances is currently east of the Lesser Antilles in the Atlantic Ocean, and slowly moving west-northwest. Fincke and Commander Gennady Padalka are in the fifth month of their six-month stay aboard the station.

Although they were designed to track the height of the world's oceans, a few NASA satellites are working surprisingly well at measuring the height of inland lakes and reservoirs as well. This additional tracking ability allows scientists to monitor water levels in out-of-the-way places. For example, TOPEX/Poseidon satellite can measure water height to within 4-5 cm (2 inches), and surveys the entire Earth together with the Jason-1 satellite. By knowing water levels, scientists can predict if there will be water shortages or problems with crops long in advance.

Two radars installed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center tracked the recent launch of the Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft, and demonstrated they can be of assistance when the space shuttle returns to flight next year. During the launch, the radars "saw" the rocket's nine solid rocket boosters separate, as well as the jettison of its first stage and payload fairing - they could even see pieces of ice falling away. This means that the radars will be able to track the space shuttle as it launches, and spot any debris that falls off, regardless of visibility, darkness or cloud cover.

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has now completed all of its assigned scientific duties, so controllers are letting it get some extra credit. The spacecraft was originally tasked with mapping the surface of Mars, and searching for various substances, including water - it found huge deposits of water ice just a few metres under the surface. Odyssey will now be continued to at least September 2006, giving controllers another Martian year (686 Earth days) to watch how the planet changes through the seasons. The spacecraft will also be able to assist the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, due to reach the planet in March, 2006.