Jul. 21--Thirty-nine years to the day after Neil Armstrong radioed "The Eagle has landed" from the Sea of Tranquility, NASA on Sunday turned its eyes toward the moon, gazing both forward and backward in time. For the next three days, Silicon Valley will be the base for planning humankind's return to the moon, as more than 400 scientists from around the world assemble at NASA/Ames Research Center for a conference on what type of science should be done when astronauts revisit Earth's nearest neighbor. It could happen in the decade after NASA retires the space shuttle in 2010 and begins flying a new generation of rocket booster.

Mars once was home to lakes, rivers and other wet environments that possibly supported life, a study based on the U.S. space program's Mars venture shows. The big surprise from these new results is how pervasive and long-lasting Mars' water was, and how diverse the wet environments were, said Scott Murchie, CRISM principal investigator at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The minerals, called phyllosilicates, recorded water's interaction with rocks dating back approximately 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, Murchie said.

WASHINGTON - Money problems will likely force NASA to abandon its ambitious internal goal of having a new moon spaceship ready by 2013, a top space agency official told The Associated Press Wednesday. The agency should still be able to meet its public commitment to test launch astronauts in the first Orion capsule by March 2015, the official said, unless national budget stalemates continue. But the agency's own hurry-up plan to get the job done even earlier - with a first crew launch by 2013 - will "very likely" be changed during meetings this week in Houston, said Doug Cooke, NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration.

The Jodrell Bank telescope has been secured for the "medium and long term future", the University of Manchester said yesterday. The Government's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has agreed to contribute towards the running costs of the radio astronomy centre in Cheshire, the university said. The cash will initially provide two years of funding for the e- MERLIN project, which comprises two telescopes at Jodrell Bank, as well as dishes at Pick-mere and Darnhall in Cheshire, Knockin in Shropshire, Defford in Worcestershire and one in Cambridge.

Jul. 10--A North Buffalo manufacturer of science education equipment is looking to the stars for growth, with the purchase of an astronomy-related manufacturing company. Science First bought Massachusettsbased Learning Technologies in late June. Learning Technologies is known for designing and manufacturing the Starlab, a portable planetarium with a 5-or 7-foot diameter that ranges from $7,000 to $48,000 in price depending on if it is customized.

The U.S. space agency says it's selected target launch dates for the remaining eight space shuttle missions for 2009 and 2010. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration missions include one flight to the Hubble Space Telescope, seven assembly flights to the International Space Station and two station contingency flights, planned to be completed before the end of fiscal year 2010. The agency previously selected Oct. 8 and Nov. 10 as launch dates for Atlantis' STS-125 mission to service Hubble and Endeavour's STS-126 mission to supply the space station and service truss supports that hold equipment and solar arrays.

The Earth is pockmarked with the evidence of ancient collisions - huge craters blasted into its surface by asteroids or comets. One such object, striking 65 million years ago in the Yucatan in Mexico, is believed by some experts to be linked to the demise of the dinosaurs. For a decade, NASA has been busy trying to identify what else is headed this way, particularly those potential "civilization killers" of 1 kilometer or more in diameter that have orbits coming within 48 million kilometers, or 30 million miles, of the Earth's - too close for comfort by space standards.

GREENBELT, Md., July 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's sun- focused Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, twin spacecraft unexpectedly detected particles from the edge of the solar system last year. The two STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006 into Earth's orbit around the sun to obtain stereo pictures of the sun's surface and measure magnetic fields and ion fluxes associated with solar explosions. From June to October 2007, sensors aboard both STEREO spacecraft detected energetic neutral atoms originating from the same spot in the sky, where the sun plunges through the interstellar medium.

NASA Goddard is responsible for several aspects of GLAST's mission as it begins transmitting data for the world to see. The GLAST Mission Operations Center (MOC) and the GLAST Science Support Center (GSSC) were provided by and are located at NASA Goddard. The second operation is the Large Area Telescope (LAT) Instrument Science Operations Center (ISOC) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), in Menlo Park, Calif. The ISOC is responsible for maximizing the LAT's science performance in the areas of Flight Operations, Science Operations and the development of Science Analysis Systems.

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., July 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA is considering the development of a university-based, student-led satellite development initiative to begin passing the space exploration torch to a new generation. "It is important to provide meaningful experiences to our next generation of engineers, but we need to do it in a thoughtful way," said Dr. Joyce Winterton, assistant administrator for Education at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Under the ASMO concept, teams would learn directly from NASA mentors as part of a diverse, nationwide, higher education initiative that enables students to design, build, launch, operate and own a small spacecraft and its payload.

Jul. 2--GREENBELT -- In about two weeks, some 24,000 pounds of what may be the most thoroughly tested and closely inspected hardware on Earth will be packed into custom crates, mounted on flatbed trucks and shipped as "wide load" cargo to Cape Canaveral, Fla. When it arrives, the one-of-a kind camera and spectrograph, now being stored at the Goddard Space Flight Center, will be inspected once more, loaded onto the space shuttle Atlantis and launched into orbit 350 miles above Earth. There, astronauts will rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope for a long-delayed 11-day servicing mission.

The Universe is Not the Only Thing Expanding... one of the world's leading designers and manufacturers of telescopes, binoculars, spotting scopes, microscopes and related accessories, has announced a price reduction for their award-winning SkyScout(R) Personal Planetarium(R), making it more affordable than ever. Celestron is also pleased to announce a new version of firmware (1.30) that expands the knowledge of SkyScout beyond 50,000 objects.

MEYRIN, Switzerland - The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August. But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN - some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider .

Excerpt from report by corporate-owned Russian military news agency Interfax-AVN website Barnaul, 26 June: The Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) will invest in the construction of the second line of the Altay optical-laser centre which is a branch of the Scientific Research Institute of Precision Instrument-Making in Moscow, Altay Territory deputy governor Boris Larin said on Thursday [26 June] at the Interfax press centre. According to the head of the Altay Territory directorate for international and interregional ties, Aleksandr Zhilin, the centre is designed for monitoring the course of space debris and finding lost satellites.

The U.S. space agency's Cassini spacecraft is ending its first mission at Saturn and starting a two-year task to focus on Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus. Cassini completed its four-year primary mission Monday, beginning the extended mission, which was approved in April. Among other things, Cassini revealed the Earth-like world of Saturn's moon Titan and showed the potential habitability of another moon, Enceladus, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.

(NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that NASA Ames Research Center has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage for a mission that will send the Kepler Space Telescope into orbit around the Sun to find planets in solar systems outside our own. NASA Ames chose the resilient 3PAR storage system to meet its strict cost and performance requirements while maintaining massive scalability and avoiding the need for a full-time, dedicated storage expert. We simply can't predict our ultimate storage needs at this time, but the agility, resilience, and scalability of 3PAR's technology gives us confidence in our storage infrastructure -- no matter how large our data needs grow."

MOUNT WILSON - Five-thousand feet above Pasadena, a small group of USC researchers and graduate students celebrated a milestone last week: the 100th anniversary of Mount Wilson's solar telescope. In June 1908, just months after the telescope's completion, George Ellery Hale, the astronomer responsible for creating the device, made a critical discovery: The surface of the sun has magnetic fields, just like Earth. "No one had ever thought there were magnetic fields on the sun," astronomer Ed Rhodes said, as he fondly touched a massive bust of Hale in the telescope control room.

U.S. space agency engineers said final testing has started for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that's to be launched later this year. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite, nicknamed LCROSS, is designed to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed lunar crater. NASA said a thermal vacuum test completed earlier this month subjected the spacecraft to 13 1/2 days of heating and cooling cycles, with temperatures ranging from 230 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.