Spare a kind and grateful thought for little Spirit, the Mars rover That defined pluck but is now stuck and will rove no more

Where did today's spiral galaxies come from?

Endeavour is in Orbit


About two minutes into flight, the external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters propelling Endeavour into space successfully separated and fell away. The shuttle and its crew have safely attained low-Earth orbit.

NASA Television will broadcast a post-launch news conference from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at no earlier than 5:30 a.m. EST on www.nasa.gov/ntv.,

Uh, Houston, another problem

AN INTERNATIONAL air traffic control system for outer space should be set up to prevent damage to satellites and spacecraft orbiting the Earth, according to a proposal to be discussed at the UN next week.

Space experts from around the world will discuss ways of tackling the growing problem of space debris in orbit around the Earth. It comes just a year after an American satellite collided with a Russian satellite.

There are thought to be more than 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimetres across racing around the Earth at high speeds, while there are more than 500,000 bigger than a postage stamp. Most are travelling at more than 25,000km/h. At such speed a fleck of paint could do as much damage as a .22-calibre rifle bullet....

Buenas noticias , good news : )

---------

Audio: DIY Recordings of Awakening Sun

As the sun emerges from a long lull in activity, the star’s emissions in the radio band of the spectrum have also picked up. And from a shed on three acres of land outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft is making recordings of them available for download.


The Sun has become hyper-dynamic the past few days Ashcraft wrote on his website Sunday, along with links to four “specimens” of radio bursts, as he calls them.

The sun is crackling with solar flares now as a very large sunspot continues to circle our star. The recent solar activity almost assuredly signals the end of the solar minimum. Only 5 percent of the days in 2010 have seen a blank sun. In 2008 and 2009, more than 70 percent of the days had no sunspot activity.