The United States shuttle Endeavour prepared to dock with the International Space Station on Friday after sustaining minor damage to its external fuel tank during lift-off, Nasa said. Altogether, nine pieces of insulation flaked off during the initial minutes of ascent, but only three may have struck the shuttle itself.
United States space shuttle Endeavour was blasting through space on Thursday, taking the first teacher there 21 years after the Challenger explosion ended the dream of another pioneering teacher. Teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan (55) has become the star of the second shuttle mission to the International Space Station this year.
Nasa on Saturday is to launch space probe Phoenix on a nine-month journey to Mars’ arctic region, where it will dig through ice for clues to past or present microbial life on the red planet. The Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled for blast-off from Cape Canaveral on August 4, with a first attempt at 9.36am GMT.
United States astronomers on Tuesday presented the most solid proof yet of the existence of dark matter, a mysterious substance believed to make up more than a quarter of the universe. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a ring of dark matter in a galaxy cluster about five billion light years away from Earth.
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/ 17 December 2006
Astronauts failed late on Saturday to dislodge a stuck solar array on the International Space Station, setting the stage for a likely fourth space walk just to solve the problem. Robert Curbeam and Sunita Williams ended their space walk at 2.56am GMT on Sunday, after seven-and-a-half hours of working as electricians in space.
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/ 31 October 2006
Nasa chief Michael Griffin is expected to announce on Tuesday whether there will be a final space shuttle mission to keep the aging Hubble Space Telescope in orbit an additional five years. Griffin is expected to announce his decision at 3pm GMT, after meeting on Friday with top National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials to discuss the issue.
Most adolescents in the United States are sleep deprived, jeopardising their mental, emotional and physical growth and damaging their performance in the classrom, said a study published on Tuesday. The problem could even be fatal, as adolescents learn to drive often without enough sleep, the study said.
Space tourism has caught the imagination of United States business leaders, some of whom already have plans to serve what they say may be a multibillion-dollar industry in a couple of decades. ”Space tourism will be a significant portion of the overall travel and tourism industry over the next 20 to 25 years,” said Eric Anderson, chief executive of Space Adventures.
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/ 22 February 2006
Life expectancy may balloon to 100 years old in rich nations thanks to scientific advances, but such progress could widen the gap between wealthy and poor nations, according to researchers. Within the next 10 years, state-of-the-art, anti-ageing technologies could — if they come into widespread use — radically start altering global demographics.
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/ 20 February 2006
United States astronomers have come up with a short list of five stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are most likely to support extraterrestrial life. The stars were chosen based on criteria including size, composition, age and colour, that would make them similar to the Sun and enable planets resembling Earth to orbit them.