The U.S. space agency is planning the first liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A since it was damaged during a May launch. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said space shuttle Atlantis will be moved early Saturday from the space center's Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad during a six-hour period. Atlantis is targeted to liftoff Oct. 8 on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

The U.S. space agency's rover Opportunity will soon be back on Mars' plains after nearly a year in a large Martian crater studying ancient rock layers. "We've done everything we entered Victoria Crater to do and more," said Bruce Banerdt, of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Banerdt is project scientist for Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit. Opportunity entered Victoria Crater Sept. 11, 2007, and the data it has returned about the layers in Victoria suggest the sediments were deposited by wind and then altered by groundwater.

A team of astronomers in Switzerland says it has witnessed galaxies in the process of joining together. The project used ground and space telescopes in gathering evidence supporting theories about how galaxies form, they announced Tuesday. "Whether the brightest galaxies in clusters grew substantially in the last few billion years is intensely debated.

Aug. 26--ROCKWOOD -- Alex Waldron and Lazar LaLone are looking to the night sky. The two Rockwood Area School District students have finished training at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., to help astronomers search for new pulsars. Pulsars are dense neutron stars, the corpses of massive stars that have exploded, the observatory said.

AN AUSTRALASIAN bid to build the world's largest radio telescope could be worth tens of millions of dollars to the Southland economy. Venture Southland enterprise projects manager Robin McNeill said the region was ideally placed to take advantage of the project, following news the Government would formally support Australia's push to host the giant next generation Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope. The project had the potential for exciting new discoveries on the origins of the universe and could revolutionise astronomy, physics and many other areas of science, Mr McNeill said.

A new image from the U.S. space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope was released Monday as part of the telescope's fifth anniversary celebration. The new infrared picture shows a colorful cosmic cloud, called W5, filled with multiple generations of stars. "Triggered star formation continues to be very hard to prove," said Xavier Koenig of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "But our preliminary analysis shows that the phenomenon can explain the multiple generations of stars seen in the W5 region."

The European Space Agency says it is preparing for its Rosetta spacecraft to make an historic encounter with asteroid Steins. The fly-by is to occur Sept. 5, marking Rosetta's first contact with one of its three scientific targets. The ESA said the spacecraft will rendezvous with the asteroid in the course of its first incursion into the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The European Space Agency says it is about to launch its most sophisticated mission ever to investigate the Earth's gravitational field. The ESA said its "Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation explorer," or GOCE, will map the reference shape of the planet -- the geoid -- with unprecedented resolution and accuracy. GOCE is the first in the Core Mission of the Earth Explorer program, undertaken by ESA in 1999 to foster research on the Earth's atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and interior.

The European Space Agency says the Hubble Space Telescope has detailed giant, but delicate, filaments shaped by a strong magnetic field in galaxy NGC 1275. The scientists said the filaments provide important clues about how giant black holes affect their surrounding environment. A study detailing Hubble's observations, led by Andy Fabian from the University of Cambridge, appears in the current issue of the journal Nature

Hoping to understand why the universe seems to be coming apart at its seams, a young astronomer and his colleagues have embarked on one of the oldest quests in cosmology, to measure how fast the universe is growing, how big it is and how old it is. That information is encoded in the value of an elusive number known as the Hubble constant that has led astronomers on a merry chase for three-quarters of a century. "It is the most fundamental number in cosmology," said Adam Riess, 38, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, and one of the discoverers 10 years ago that some kind of "dark energy" is speeding up the expansion of the universe.

Aug. 21--RALEIGH -- Call them space geeks, stargazers, gizmo wizards or robot freaks. They all accepted a simple but tantalizing invitation: "Are you interested in participating in a real mission to the moon?" More than 100 volunteers filled a lecture hall Tuesday night at N.C. State University, hoping for a part -- any part -- in the $30 million contest to put a robot rover on Earth's satellite.

U.S. space agency astronomers say a new study suggests black holes, for the most part, are either very large or very small, but seldom medium in size. But now, in a new study, astronomers say they've thoroughly examined a globular cluster called RZ2109 and determined it cannot possess a medium black hole. The findings, say the scientists, suggest the elusive objects do not lurk in globular clusters, and perhaps are very rare.

Daniel Handley is determined to prevent Allegheny Observatory from being forgotten. So he's making a documentary film about the North Side stargazing center where astronomers of yore discovered that Venus is shrouded with clouds and present-day scientists search for clues to planets outside Earth's solar system. "When I asked people why (the neighborhood) was called Observatory Hill, no one could tell me," said Handley, 36, who lives near the 96-year-old, three-dome observatory that crowns Pittsburgh's Riverview Park.

The Very Large Array's telescopic "vision" is about to get a whole lot better. The iconic New Mexico observatory, with its giant radio dishes scooping up images of distant stars and galaxies, is getting new electronic guts. On Aug. 7, the telescope's operators pointed two of its antennas at an object known as "3C273," a bright beacon at the heart of a distant galaxy.

Foundation laid for China's largest astronomical station KUNMING, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- China on Monday broke ground on construction of its largest astronomical observation station in Yao'an County in the southwest Yunnan Province. Funding for the 340 million yuan (about 49.5 million U.S. dollars) facility was jointly provided by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO).

Aug. 17--CAPE CANAVERAL Sen. Barack Obama released a comprehensive space policy Saturday that endorsed sending astronauts back to the moon by 2020 as a possible precursor for going to Mars -- the first time he has committed to that goal -- and said the reach for the stars should be a U.S.-led international effort. "Human exploration beyond low-earth orbit should be a long-term goal and investment for all space-faring countries, with America in the lead," the policy paper said.

Chang'e 1, China's first lunar probe satellite, will be tested Sunday when the moon creates a partial eclipse of the sun, officials say. Zijinshan (Purple Mountain) Astronomical Observatory research fellow Wang Sichao said when the eclipse blocks most sunlight from reaching the solar-powered satellite for more than three hours, Chang'e 1 will be forced to operate entirely off its battery supply, China's official state-run news agency, Xinhua, reported Saturday. "The moon's shadow, also a signal blind area, could cause a power shortage in freezing temperatures," Wang said.

Prototypes for the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover are being tested in Britain, the BBC said. The mission is set to launch in 2013, with the rovers landing on Mars in 2015. Chris Draper of UK Astrium said the goal is to build a rover that can surpass previous Mars vehicles.

Aug. 15--It was billed as a debate over the 2006 decision by the International Astronomical Union that kicked Pluto out of the family of planets, leaving just eight. But in the end, after a jocular and noisy tussle before scientists and educators gathered at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, both debaters agreed that the IAU's definition only muddied the waters, and that more time is needed for science to sort out the increasingly complex range of objects circling our sun and other stars. The two debaters also expressed delight that a scientific debate has captured so much public attention.

LOS ANGELES -- NASA has delayed the launch of an unmanned spacecraft to the moon to scout for potential landing sites for astronauts. The moon craft is the first step in NASA's program to send astronauts back to the moon and beyond. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was supposed to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in early December aboard an Atlas V rocket.

The U.S. space agency says its Phoenix Mars Lander has used an atomic force microscope to take the first-ever image of a single particle of Mars' dust. National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists said the rounded particle has a diameter of about one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, and is a speck of the dust that colors the Martian sky pink and its soil a distinctive red. "This is the first picture of a clay-sized particle on Mars, and the size agrees with predictions from the colors seen in sunsets on the Red Planet," said Phoenix Lander co-investigator Urs Staufer of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, who leads a Swiss consortium that made the microscope.

HOUSTON, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Flying 220 miles above the Earth aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff is ready to take your questions. Mission Control will transmit the questions to Chamitoff weekly. For more on Chamitoff's mission and the International Space Station, visit:

The Hubble space telescope's 100,000th orbit Monday was marked by U.S. astronomers who took a picture of a "dazzling" region of the universe. National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists aimed Hubble, now in its 18th year of exploration, at the Tarantula nebula, located about 170,000 light years from Earth. "The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion," NASA said, noting the nebula is "one of the most active star-forming regions in our local group of galaxies."

A Dutch schoolteacher taking part in an online research project has discovered a gaseous object that astronomers say is of unknown origin. Yale astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and colleagues at Oxford University say van Arkel might have found a new class of astronomical object that's become known as Hanny's Voorwerp -- Dutch for "object." Schawinski asked astronomers around the world to examine the Voorwerp with ground- and satellite-based telescopes.