http://www.spacedaily.com/index.html Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST en-us The European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday that the first launch of a long-awaited light rocket, Vega, which had been pencilled for February 9, would take place on February 13. Vega is being deployed at a new pad at ESA's space base at Kourou, French Guiana, to complement ESA's heavyweight Ariane 5 and the Russian-made medium launcher Soyuz. An ESA spokesman told AFP that the new dat]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST An international team of scientists has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. With an orbital period of about 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times that of the Earth, the planet orbits within the star's "habitable zone," where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface. The researchers found evidence of at]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST NASA says crew replacement on the International Space Station will be delayed following the failure of a Russian Soyuz capsule in a ground test. Russian technicians overpressurized the Soyuz vehicle causing a split in welds on the descent module that brings the space crew back to Earth, Michael Suffredini, NASA's program manager for the space station, told The Washington Post Thursday. ]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Life could not exist on the surface of Mars because the planet has been in a "super-drought" lasting 600 million years, British researchers say. Scientists at Imperial College London said they based that assertion on analysis of Martian soil brought back to Earth from the 2008 NASA Phoenix mission. Their three-year analysis suggests the Martian surface has been dry for such a lon]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Following detailed analysis of the downlinked telemetry and audio/video recordings from both ground based cameras and a camera that was recovered from the rocket, Armadillo Aerospace has determined that the maximum altitude attained by the STIG-A rocket in the January 28th mission was approximately 82-km MSL (~50 miles). A failure of the ballute (balloon-parachute) recovery system meant th]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST New Horizons' flight to explore the Pluto system in July 2015 will be a historic accomplishment for the U.S. space program, for planetary science, and indeed for all humankind. Plans for the flyby are well under way - and now, so is an effort to petition the U.S. Postal Service to commemorate the historic achievements of New Horizons on a stamp. The mission team launches that petition toda]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST NASA has received the National Research Council (NRC) report "NASA Space Technology Roadmaps and Priorities," which provides the agency with findings and recommendations on where best to invest in technologies needed to enable NASA's future missions in space. The NRC report will help define NASA's technology development priorities in the years to come. One year ago, NASA provided 14 draft ]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Using models similar to those used in weapons research, scientists may soon know more about exoplanets, those objects beyond the realm of our solar system. In a new study, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and collaborators came up with new methods for deriving and testing the equation of state (EOS) of matter in exoplanets and figured out the mass-radius and mass-pressure relati]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Russian astronomers are planning to start their own search for planets outside the Solar System using ground-based telescopes, head of the Institute for Space Research Lev Zelyony said on Wednesday. "Scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory are planning to use ground-based instruments to study the transit of planets around their parent stars," Zelyony said at a roundtable meeting at RIA Nov]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST ESA has signed a contract to build a further eight Galileo satellites, alongside other agreements to modify Europe's Ariane 5 launcher to carry four navigation satellites at a time. The signing took place at the European Commission's centre in London, Europe House, in the presence of European Commission Vice President Antonio Tajani and UK Universities and Science Minister David Willetts M]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Space radiation triggered a glitch in the on-board computer system causing the recent crash of Russia's Mars probe, Federal Space Agency head Vladimir Popovkin said on Tuesday. "Two components of the onboard computer system were spontaneously rebooted and it switched into a standby mode," he said. "The most likely reason [for the glitch] is the impact of heavy charged space particles]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST XCOR Aerospace and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) announce the final week to register and become eligible to win a suborbital research flight on XCOR's Lynx I vehicle at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC-2012) in Palo Alto, CA on February 27-29. The deadline for early conference registration and for entering the drawing is the 10th of February at nsrc.swri.org.]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Opportunity is positioned on the north end of Cape York on the rim of Endeavour Crater with an approximate 15-degree northerly tilt for favorable solar energy production. While positioned for the winter, Opportunity is conducting regular radio Doppler tracking measurements to support geo-dynamic investigations of the planet, in-situ (contact) science investigations of the rock target, "Amb]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Amateur astronomers who on occasion observe Mars through the eyepiece of their telescopes are quite familiar with the region of Syrtis Major; when observing conditions are good, it can be easily identified as a dark spot on Mars. This large volcanic region just north of Mars' equator covers an area of roughly 1300 by 1500 kilometres - about half the size of Europe. The High Resolution Ster]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST Russia may repeat the Mars-500 experiment simulating a crewed flight to the Red Planet on the International Space Station (ISS), the head of the Russian Space Federal Agency Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin said on Thursday "Mars-500 was a very useful thing in terms of studying people's psychology...We are now seriously considering the possibility of repeating this experiment in space," Popovk]]> Sat, 04 FEB 2012 07:51:04 AEST