Space
It's been a long year with a presidential election campaign that never seemed to end and a stock market that exploded with volatility, mostly on the down side.
So why are the powers that be adding more than the usual one day to this leap year, and why should you care?
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will launch two years later than previously planned, in the fall of 2011. The mission will send a next-generation rover with unprecedented research tools to study the early environmental history of Mars.
In the hit 1998 movie Armageddon, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck blew up an asteroid to save the world. While the film was science fiction, the chances of an asteroid hitting the Earth one day are very real ? and blowing up an asteroid in real life, says a Tel Aviv University researcher, will be more complicated than in the movies.
Warning: Contains adult language (and laughs).
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star.
Imagine sunglasses that can withstand the severe cold and heat of space, a barrage of radiation and high-speed impacts from small space debris. They don't exist, but Northrop Grumman engineers have created a Sunshield for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope that can withstand all of those elements.
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments.
A team of theoretical and experimental physicists, with participants from Case Western Reserve University, have designed a new black hole simulator called BlackMax to search for evidence that extra dimensions might exist in the universe.
Anyone who has wondered what it might be like to dive into a pool of millions of distant galaxies of different shapes and colours, will enjoy the latest image released by ESO.
Space
In my first blog, I drew the attention of the scientific community to find a solution to the vexing problems of cosmic origin, raised questions concerning the reason for our existence, the mysterious mechanisms that keep us alive and finally, why it is all so hard to know the truth about our role here and does God really play the dice with us? (See Modern Cosmology http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/blog/6797-modern-cosmology-17241.html - http://rsridharan.blogspot.com/ )-
once we know how to unlock the cosmic order, most of our daunting problems are solved.
According to the international space agencies, "Space Weather" is the single greatest obstacle to deep space travel. Radiation from the sun and cosmic rays pose a deadly threat to astronauts in space.
Scientists are on the hunt for evidence of antimatter -- matter's arch nemesis -- left over from the very early Universe. New results using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory suggest the search may have just become even more difficult.
The Hubble Space Telescope is back in business with a snapshot of the fascinating galaxy pair Arp 147.
Palin takes on basic science research as an example of government waste.
