The viewcam's gone on to reach the stars, folks. And the best part is it's taking you along for the ride. ESA's Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera is now up for public viewing and now you can quite literally see the red planet within your reach.

Scientists have reason to believe that solar flares may be somehow linked with the "starquake" solar phenomena occasionally experienced by our solar system's sun. Images taken from the ESA-NASA SOHO spacecraft may give some clue to the long-standing mystery behind the sun's interior make-up. You can read more about the details of this study in our full article.

Humans are making large developments toward the realization of their outer space dreams. There is one thing that stands in the way, however: cosmic rays. Created from many elements including hydrogen and uranium, there's a possibility that cosmic rays may pose a great health risk to astronauts. More in the full article.

Data gleaned from satellite Metop revealed that the ozone hole over Antarctica was twice as big as Europe at its worst. This observation was made in late September. Scientists who analyzed data from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment 2 (GOME-2) on board Metop said that some unusual meteorological conditions this year caused the extensive thinning of the ozone layer.

Europe's Metop is one of three identical weather and climate observer spacecrafts that will be flying in a polar orbit over the next few years to gather data. This is a joint project between Eumetsat and the ESA">European Space Agency (ESA).

Metop's newest observation - though significant and alarming - pales in comparison to last year's recorded size of the Arctic ozone hole. Last year's hole was said to have been twice the size of North America. Even with the Montreal Protocol which places an international ban on substances responsible for ozone depletion, scientists still find ozone thinning over different regions such as the South Atlantic, South America, and Australia. Because of these recent findings, almost 200 governments have agreed to speed up the timetable on phasing out chemicals that have negative effects on the ozone layer.

The ESA">European Space Agency (ESA) has plans to launch Automated Transfer Vehicles or ATVs to the International Space Station. These vehicles will bring supplies to the station such as food, water and fuel as well as equipment and additional experiments.

The first one of these ATVs is named Jules Verne. The other day, the ATV finally began the journey to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana after a thorough final testing at the European Space and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Jules Verne is expected to launch around early 2008. Aside from the above-mentioned supplies, Jules Verne will also be carrying an MP3 player for the space station crew loaded by songs from the winner of a recent ESA contest.

The ATV is not just a normal transport vehicle, too. It's also capable of boosting the space station's orbit through its engines. When it leaves the International Space Station six months after, it will be carrying a cargo of waste and will finally burn up in the atmosphere.

On February 25, yet another landmark Mars mission operation was achieved. The ESA">European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta probe finally completed what was deemed to be a "key maneuver" in its 10-year mission to land on a distant comet. This "swing-by" is the second of four gravity-assisted moves before finally settling on its target in 2014.

And this momentuous event has got some really cool pictures to show for. Using the Rosetta's Optical Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS), they were able to capture spectacular images of Mars in the so-called "pre-close-approach phase."

Back to the sling shot mission (cos the images are just here for your viewing pleasure, anyway), in order to successfully reach the distant comet, Rosetta must gain the perfect speed and reach the perfect trajectory, "accelerated and assisted by the four swing-bys which use the gravitational pull of planets as a boost."

2007 and 2009 will see the other two sling shot trips around Earth before Rosetta can finally reach its destination.

Images courtesy of ESA News.

  

This just goes to show that no matter how high and mighty we view astronauts, at the end of the day, they are human too. This image was taken from NASA and yup, it is the inside of the International Space Station. European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, Thomas Reiter (who'll be heading home soon), is going about with his work. Seems like a pretty ordinary picture, right?

So what do you do for fun while you're in space? You could listen to your favorite music tracks. This photo is getting popular over at Digg because of a fifth generation iPod sighting. The Apple creation is neatly attached to a Belkin external battery pack on the equipment rack in front of Thomas Reiter. (Reminds me of a scene in the movie Apollo 13 wherein Lovell and his crew brought a transistor radio on board, times have really changed).

Heck if I get sent to space, I would bring my mp3 player too. And a couple of other gaming thingamajigs of course.

They're already up in space, and we can only wish this new group of astronauts well. On Saturday evening, NASA's space shuttle Discovery began its mission for the International Space Station (ISS): upgrading the ISS' power generation capabilities.

The 12-day mission, known as STS-116, tasks the crew with installing a new truss to the station that will allow future solar panels to rotate. Doing so will allow the ISS to make the most out of sunlight by allowing the panels to track the sun and keep picking up energy from it.

The mission will also be doing some work on the wiring of the ISS. The astronauts will be reconfiguring the power system, which will make the solar arrays delivered during the last mission fully operational. The rewiring will also allow for a permanent cooling system to be put in place on the station.

Lastly, they'll be doing a shift change in space. Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency (ESA) will finally get to go home, as his shift in space is taken over by Sunita Williams, who'll be staying there for six months. Let's wish them all luck in this venture, shall we? That way, we can get hyperdrive before the 25th century and see some exotic alien people, like we were supposed to.

The next time you start asking about how life on Earth started out, don't be surprised if researchers don't talk about their most recent archaeological dig, but instead say something in the lines of looking to the heavens. Naah, they haven't turned to Astrology.

We've already mentioned in an earlier article that it's been recently discovered that Titan, one of Saturn's moons, has large methane deposits circulating in a very similar manner as the winds and rivers on Earth. It turns out that organic particles, created by sunlight interacting with the Titan's methane-laden atmosphere, may provide clues to what earth was like 3.6 billion years ago, when primitive life was only beginning to exist.

Taking a cure from this recent observation by the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission, scientist Margaret Tolbert and her colleagues over at the University of Colorado pulled off this experiment to replicate the conditions that occur on Titan. They irradiated a methane cloud with UV rays, and then injected it with CO2 gas to see what would happen. Sure enough, the resulting reaction created a haze of organic molecules very similar to that on Titan - molecules that were digestible for early life on earth.

"That would have been a food source for any budding life," Tolbert said regarding the results. "And it would have been, importantly, a global food source. And so life, instead of being confined to certain very special environments, could have thrived in every puddle."

Peek-a-boo. We see you. Mr. Martian's face has gotten quite a buzz in the astronomical society, and just a month ago, the European Space Agency (ESA) had come up with some 3D images of what the face looks like from different angles. But now, we have a full, high-res video that sweeps around the mountain in one continuous motion.

This video is actually based on the combination of images that were taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) and the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC). The video looks amazing (duh, it's in high-res) and it starts with the camera looking towards the east, and ends with a southerly point-of-view.

With this almost-360 vid, we see clearly how non-face-like the so-called face of Mars really is. There's no nose, the eyes are missing, the mouth seems to be gone. In fact, we can't quite understand how some people actually thought it really was a massive artificial structure of a face. As what NASA has always said (since 1976, when the face was discovered): it's just a mountain and there's no sign of alien technology that "built" it.

Download: [Cydonia "Face of Mars" 360 vid]