Below The Beltway

The Phoenix Lander has, apparently, found evidence of frozen water on Mars:
Now, scientists will be able to tackle the main question they hope to answer: Did the ice ever melt and turn Mars into a habitable place?
In a photograph released Thursday evening of a trench that the Phoenix Mars lander has dug into the Martian [...]

The Space Shuttle Discovery will be launched today with a very important delivery for the International Space Station:
May 30 (Bloomberg) — A scheduled NASA shuttle launch tomorrow has taken on new urgency as the crew of the International Space Station awaits delivery of a part to repair the outpost’s only toilet.
The shuttle Discovery will take [...]

The Vatican talks about the issue of extraterrestrial life:
VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican’s chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God.
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of [...]

Forty-Seven years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first American in space

Google Sky

We’re less than three years away from the end of America’s manned space flight program:
In 2 1/2 years, just as the [international space] station gets fully assembled, the United States will no longer have any spacecraft of its own capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to the station, in which roughly $100 billion is being [...]

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
At the time the [...]

A rare sight, a total lunar eclipse, will be visible in most of North America Wednesday night:
Feb. 13, 2008: On Wednesday evening, February 20th, the full Moon over the Americas will turn a delightful shade of red and possibly turquoise, too. It’s a total lunar eclipse—the last one until Dec. 2010.
The Sun goes down. The [...]

The United States will make it’s first attempt to shoot down an errant satellite on Thursday:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. Navy likely will make its first attempt to shoot down a faulty spy satellite Wednesday night.
The U.S. government issued a formal notice warning ships and planes to stay clear of a large area of the [...]

Scientists have discovered a smaller version of our Solar System about 5,000 light years away:
Astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light-years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets.
“It [...]