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NASA has cleared the Space Shuttle to Return to Flight. After a two-day Flight Readiness Review meeting at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, senior managers approved a July 13 launch date for Discovery.

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On July 4, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will witness fantastic fireworks when comet Tempel 1 slams into a space probe at 23,000 miles per hour. Brown University professor and NASA mission member Peter Schultz will help analyze collision data to determine what’s inside this primordial ball of ice.

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NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft continues to sail through its final checkout, as it hurtles toward comet Tempel 1. Impact with the comet is scheduled for 1:52 a.m. EDT, July 4 (10:52 p.m. PDT, July 3).

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After 172 days and 431 million kilometers (268 million miles) of deep space stalking, Deep Impact successfully reached out and touched comet Tempel 1. The collision between the coffee table-sized impactor and city-sized comet occurred at 1:52 a.m. EDT.

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The hyper-speed demise of NASA's Deep Impact probe generated an immense flash of light, which provided an excellent light source for the two cameras on the Deep Impact mothership. Deep Impact scientists theorize the 820-pound impactor vaporized deep below the comet's surface when the two collided at 1:52 am July 4, at a speed of about 10 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per second or 23,000 miles per hour).

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An extrasolar planet under three suns has been discovered in the constellation Cygnus by a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology using the 10-meter Keck I telescope in Hawaii. The planet is slightly larger than Jupiter and, given that it has to contend with the gravitational pull of three bodies, promises to seriously challenge our current understanding of how planets are formed.

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Almost nine minutes after lifting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Space Shuttle Discovery successfully reached orbit, marking the Shuttle fleet’s return to space. STS-114 is the first mission to fly since the loss of Shuttle Columbia and the STS-107 crew on Feb. 1, 2003.

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The crewmembers aboard Space Shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station are nearing the end of another successful workday. The STS-114 crew conducted more inspections of Discovery's heat shield today. The crew used the Orbiter Boom Sensor System attached to the Shuttle’s robot arm to take a closer look at areas of interest.

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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory survey of nearby sun-like stars suggests there is nearly three times more neon in the sun and local universe than previously believed. If true, this would solve a critical problem with understanding how the sun works.

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A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system.
The planet was discovered using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The discovery was announced today by planetary scientist Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., whose research is partly funded by NASA.

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A novel suitcase-sized telescope could revolutionise the way we see the Earth and other planets. ESA has supported the work of a group of students in developing the Dobson Space Telescope, being tested this month aboard ESA's parabolic flight campaign aircraft.

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The crater is 35 kilometres wide and has a maximum depth of approximately 2 kilometres beneath the crater rim. The circular patch of bright material located at the centre of the crater is residual water ice.

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NASA gave an update on the work of two engineering teams looking into why a large piece of External Tank insulating foam broke off during Space Shuttle Discovery's liftoff. International Space Station Program Manager Bill Gerstenmaier, who is leading the effort, spoke with the media via teleconference on August 11.

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The Return to Flight crew received a cheering and patriotic welcome during a homecoming ceremony at Ellington Field in Houston on Wednesday, August 10.

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Research published in the journal Space Weather warns that massive gaps in our understanding and monitoring of space weather will effectively block US plans for a manned mars space mission. The study, led by University of Warwick researcher Dr Claire Foullon, draws on work that Dr Foullon and colleagues carried out for the European Space Agency on radiation hazards and space weather.

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It turns out you can’t judge an asteroid by its cover, according to a recent study in the journal Nature. Or at least you can’t accurately date a certain asteroid called 433 Eros by counting the impact craters on its surface -- the traditional method for determining an asteroid’s age.

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A seven-month flight to Mars began this morning for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The mission will inspect the red planet in fine detail and assist future landers.

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NASA is targeting March for the next Space Shuttle mission (STS-121). The mission will be the second test flight to the International Space Station in the Shuttle Return to Flight sequence.

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The Space Shuttle Discovery will be used for the mission, instead of Space Shuttle Atlantis. [...] The switch frees Atlantis to fly the remaining Space Station truss segments, which are too heavy for Discovery, in 2006.

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NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, headed toward the first study of Mercury from orbit, has swung by Earth for a gravity assist that propelled it deeper into the inner solar system.

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Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus is "absolutely a highlight" of the Cassini mission and should be targeted in future searches for life, Robert H. Brown of The University of Arizona, leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team, said last week.

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Its south pole is a hotspot, hovering at a relatively balmy minus -183 degrees Celsius compared to the expected temperature of -203 degrees Celsius.

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Observations of 1 Ceres, the largest known asteroid, have revealed that the object may be a "mini planet," and may contain large amounts of pure water ice beneath its surface.

The observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope also show that Ceres shares characteristics of the rocky, terrestrial planets like Earth. Ceres' shape is almost round like Earth's, suggesting that the asteroid may have a "differentiated interior," with a rocky inner core and a thin, dusty outer crust.

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Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by the University of Rochester has detected gaps ringing the dusty disks around two very young stars, which suggests that gas-giant planets have formed there. A year ago, these same researchers found evidence of the first "baby planet" around a young star, challenging most astrophysicists's models of giant-planet formation.

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Astronomers looking for earth-like planets in other solar systems — exoplanets — now have a new field guide thanks to earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.

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As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans for the next launch of the space shuttle, a critical aspect of the program's safety is being assured by 5 million pieces of data collected recently by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

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The detection of a super massive black hole without a massive host galaxy is the surprising result from a large Hubble and VLT study of quasars. This is the first convincing discovery of such an object. One intriguing explanation is that the host galaxy may be made almost exclusively of dark matter.

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Images returned during Cassini's recent flyby of Titan show captivating evidence of what appears to be a large shoreline cutting across the smoggy moon's southern hemisphere. Hints that this area was once wet, or currently has liquid present, are evident.

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Before the end of the next decade, NASA astronauts will again explore the surface of the moon. And this time, we're going to stay, building outposts and paving the way for eventual journeys to Mars and beyond. There are echoes of the iconic images of the past, but it won't be your grandfather's moon shot.

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ESA’s Mars Express mission has been extended by one Martian year, or about 23 months, from the beginning of December 2005.

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Mars Express has also detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. This, together with the possible detection of formaldehyde,

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A new analysis that refutes challenges to the existence of dark matter in certain galaxies appears in an article published this week in the journal Nature. Leading author of the article is Avishai Dekel, professor of physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Observations of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 made by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft after the Deep Impact collision suggest that comets are ‘icy dirtballs’, rather than ‘dirty snowballs’ as previously believed.

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a stunning infrared view of Messier 31, the famous spiral galaxy also known as Andromeda.
Andromeda is the most-studied galaxy outside our own Milky Way, yet Spitzer's sensitive infrared eyes have detected captivating new features, including bright, aging stars and a spiral arc in the center of the galaxy.

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New high-resolution images of mid-latitude Mars are revealing glacier-formed landscapes far from the Martian poles, says a leading Mars researcher.

Conspicuous trains of debris in valleys, arcs of debris on steep slopes and other features far from the polar ice caps bear striking similarities to glacial landscapes of Earth, says Brown University's James Head III.

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When NASA shot a projectile into the comet Tempel 1 to hurl the comet’s material into space, scientists followed the event with the help of OSIRIS cameras, on board the ESA comet probe Rosetta, [...] Researchers have now concluded, based on the OSIRIS measurements of the material spouted out, that the comet contains more dust than water.

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UA Civil Engineering Professor Tribikam Kundu now is part of a team that's designing a way to test thermal protection tiles both on the ground and in flight to prevent similar accidents.

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Hubble's resolution and sensitivity to ultraviolet light have allowed the telescope to search for important oxygen-bearing minerals on the moon. Since the moon does not have a breathable atmosphere, minerals, such as ilmenite (titanium and iron oxide), may be critical for a sustained human lunar presence. Ilmenite is a potential source of oxygen for breathing or to power rockets.

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Astronomers from German, American, and Italian research institutes have used NASA´s SPITZER space telescope to discover that there is at least the beginnings of planet formation around brown dwarfs, sometimes called ‛failed stars’.

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Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to view the ninth planet in our solar system, astronomers discovered Pluto may have not one, but three moons.