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.

European researchers discovered what looked to be three ‘super-Earths’ orbiting around a star and two other solar systems that contained small planets. They believe that these large Earth-like planets are more common then we think.

“Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?” asked Michel Mayor of Switzerland’s Geneva Observatory. “We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it,” Mayor said in a statement.

The Mars Phoenix Lander was able to deliver a detailed view of the soil on Mars back to NASA. It took pictures of clumps of dirt that consisted of what looked like minerals and fine grains.

Scientists stated that the dirt that was picked up and placed on the microscope and was described as having a orange-reddish hue. When zooming in, scientists noticed green particles that could be olivine, a mineral usually associated with volcanic eruptions. The soil also contained round, black glassy specks that could be volcanic glass, said mission scientist Tom Pike of the Imperial College in London.

Shuttle Discovery has finally made it home after their 14 day mission – which was very successful. The crew landed at the Kennedy Space Center Saturday morning. Mission Control was happy to see the shuttle and radioed them congratulations to the Commander Mary Kelly and its crew, “Beautiful landing, Mark, and congratulations on a great mission.”

The crew aboard the Discovery space shuttle was confused and a little worried when they spotted an object floating from their ship and into space. They are scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center sin a week – but are now wondering if the object was something of importance. The object could mean that something is broken or it could simply be a piece of ice or a plastic bag that was floating out of the payload bay.

The U.S. space shuttle Discovery has undocked from the International Space Station Wednesday morning and will be leaving the brand new Japanese science lab that they came to install. It took the crew nine days to install the Kibo lab.

They are taking back with them the U.S. astronaut Garrett Reisman to be a new member of their crew. For three months he was a part of the three person crew on the space station. Gregory Chamitoff will be replacing him.

Sergey Brin – Google’s co-founder – has made plans to do something that many people can only dream about. He is going into the wide vastness of space. Brin is an investor in Space Adventures – which is a space tourist outfit in Virginia. He will most likely be taking a ride on a Russian Soyuz on the way to the International Space Station in 2011.