Astronomy

Sir Richard Branson is a British billionaire who is working with Burt Rutan an American aerospace engineer. Together they built the WhiteKnightTwo Mothership - which was officially revealed this week and will be used to launch tourists into space.

The mothership was not designed to leave the atmosphere and enter into space - but it will have the ability to launch the Spaceship Two - which is not yet finished. When completed the SpaceShipTwo will be able to reach an altitue of 50,000 feet and will be able to launch six passengers on a 2 ½ hour ride into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Those who love to watch the Eclipse need to circle August 1st on their calendars. At this time there will be a total solar eclipse. It will be the first one that we have seen in two and a half years. The eclipse will start over the northwest passage of Canada, over Greenland, and then shift through southeast Siberia, and western Mongolia where it will finish in the Silk Route of China.

Scientists believe that Mars was once full of benign seas that could have been suitable for living creatures. “There was apparently pervasive water present during the first 600 to 700 million years,” said geologist John Mustard from Brown University.

Mustard’s team studied data returned by the Compact Reconnaisance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, an instrument designed to find traces of minerals that interact with water. Earlier studies have found evidence of ancient gushers, and the Mars Phoenix Lander recently found ice. But Mustard’s analysis provides the clearest picture yet of planet-wide hydrological impacts - and, most tantalizingly, CRISM showed widespread deposits of clay-like minerals that form only at relatively low temperatures.

NASA set the final space shuttle mission for May 31st, 2010. This is exactly four months before the shuttle’s fleet is set to retire. According to NASA the fleet has exactly 10 more missions left.

President Bush ordered that this missions be retired by September 30th, 2010. Five more flights this year have been scheduled, five more in 2009, and three in 2010. At this time the space agency is working on creating a new spacecraft that will be able to take astronauts back to the moon.