6 August - Asteroids dedicated to fallen Columbia astronauts
The final crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia was memorialized in the cosmos as seven asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter were named in their honor Wednesday.
31 July - Columbia board: NASA needs better imaging
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board has issued its fifth preliminary finding and recommendation to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in advance of its appearance in the final report.
22 July - Management team hardly discussed foam strike
Transcripts of meetings by senior NASA managers during the shuttle Columbia's ill-fated flight show mission management team chairman Linda Ham and other top officials, despite a dearth of technical data, simply did not believe falling insulation from the ship's external fuel tank could cause a catastrophic breach in the ship's left wing.
15 July - Crew module likely survived shuttle breakup
The astronauts aboard the shuttle Columbia, strapped into a reinforced module built to withstand extreme forces, likely survived a minute or more beyond the commander's final transmission, sources say. Engineers believe the crew died when the module, buffeted by increasingly extreme aerodynamic forces, finally broke open as it plunged steeply into the thickening atmosphere above Texas.
11 July - Detailed failure scenario released by Columbia board
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board has released a definitive scenario detailing the doomed shuttle's countdown, launch and re- entry.
The result is the most complete picture yet showing how a foam strike during launch punched a catastrophic hole in the shuttle's left wing that led to the ship's destruction during re-entry Feb. 1.
A US rover despatched to investigate the surface of Mars has a glitch in one of its instruments. The problem in a spectrometer on the Spirit vehicle was picked up during a routine checkout. But officials at the American space agency's (Nasa) Jet Propulsion Laboratory say they are not unduly concerned at this stage.
4 August - 'Phoenix' lander headed for Martian North Pole
In May 2008, the progeny of two promising U.S. missions to Mars will deploy a lander to the water-ice-rich northern polar region, dig with a robotic arm into arctic terrain for clues on the history of water, and search for environments suitable for microbes.
Mars will make its closest approach to Earth for almost 60,000 years at the end of August. Dr Robin Catchpole, senior astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London, explains how to witness the event.
"Breathtaking" new maps of likely sites of water on Mars showcase their association with geologic features such as Vallis Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system. The maps detail the distribution of water-equivalent hydrogen as revealed by Los Alamos National Laboratory-developed instruments aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
18 July - Mars-bound Opportunity rover adjusts trajectory
NASA's Opportunity spacecraft made its first trajectory correction maneuver Friday, a scheduled operation to fine-tune its Mars-bound flight path. For the trajectory adjustment, flight team members commanded Opportunity to perform a prescribed sequence of thruster firings.
This Mars Global Surveyor image shows a fresh, young meteor impact crater on the martian surface. It is less than 400 yards across. While there is no way to know the exact age of this or any other martian surface feature, the rays are very well preserved.
10 August - Ulysses spacecraft sees galactic dust on the rise
Since early 1992, Ulysses has been monitoring the stream of stardust flowing through our Solar System. The stardust is embedded in the local galactic cloud through which the Sun is moving at a speed of 26 kilometres every second. As a result of this relative motion, a single dust grain takes twenty years to traverse the Solar System.
6 August - Source for major type of supernova explosions found
Astronomers have finally identified the progenitor star system of a Type Ia supernova. The culprit that triggered the stellar explosion is a surprisingly normal star just a few times more massive than the Sun.
6 August - First shape measurement of an exploding white dwarf
Scientists have established that the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar astronomical "standard candles" known as Type Ia supernovae do not explode in a perfectly spherical manner.
2 August - Deeply embedded stellar clusters found in Milky Way
Peering into a giant molecular cloud in the Milky Way galaxy astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have discovered a whole new population of very massive newborn stars.
2 August - Search for life could include planets, stars unlike ours
The search for life on other planets could soon extend to solar systems that are very different from our own, according to a new study by an Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues.
"Not since Galileo turned his telescope towards the heavens in 1610 has any event so changed our understanding of the Universe as the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope." So says Nasa's official introduction to the Hubble, but officials at the US space agency are now planning its demise and that is upsetting many scientists.
30 July - Ion engine records nearly five years of firing time
The future is here for spacecraft propulsion and the trouble-free engine performance that every vehicle operator would like, achieved by an ion engine running for a record 30,352 hours at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The engine is a spare of the Deep Space 1 ion engine used during a successful technology demonstration mission.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has confirmed that close encounters between stars form X-ray emitting, double-star systems in dense globular star clusters. These X-ray binaries have a different birth process than their cousins outside globular clusters, and should have a profound influence on the cluster's evolution.
30 July - Antarctic telescope delivers first neutrino sky map
A novel telescope that uses the Antarctic ice sheet as its window to the cosmos has produced the first map of the high-energy neutrino sky. The map provides astronomers with their first tantalizing glimpse of very high-energy neutrinos, ghostly particles that are believed to emanate from some of the most violent events in the universe -- crashing black holes, gamma ray bursts, and the violent cores of distant galaxies.
28 July - Wind and reflections from supermassive black hole
This composite image of the active galaxy, NGC 1068, shows gas blowing away in a high-speed wind from the vicinity of a central supermassive black hole. The elongated shape of the gas cloud is thought to be due to the funneling effect of a torus, or doughnut-shaped cloud, of cool gas and dust that surrounds the black hole.
26 July - Next International Space Station crew named
Veteran NASA astronaut Michael Foale and seasoned Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri are set to be the eighth crew to live aboard the International Space Station. They're scheduled to begin their mission in October, when they launch into space aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
25 July - Giant gas cloud made of atoms formed in first stars
Astronomers studying the most distant quasar yet found in the Universe have discovered a massive reservoir of gas containing atoms made in the cores of some of the first stars ever formed.
25 July - Canadian team maps halos around galaxies
Two University of Toronto astronomers and a U.S. colleague have made the first measurements of the size and shape of massive dark matter halos that surround galaxies.
24 July - China could begin manned spaceflight soon
China's clandestine manned space program could be just a few months away from its first human journey into orbit, a feat the nation has been striving toward for over a decade.
23 July - Two options emerge for NASA's Orbital Space Plane
Advocates for two differing generic designs for NASA's proposed Orbital Space Plane, a winged vehicle versus a capsule, made their cases for their preferred concepts during a Washington forum this week, debating the merits of advanced technology versus low-cost designs.
23 July - Pluto explorer to launch atop Atlas 5 rocket
NASA has tapped Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 rocket to launch the
world's first robotic expedition to the planet Pluto. The New Horizons mission is scheduled for launch in January 2006.
22 July - A pancake shapes distant galactic center
While a person's shape can be affected by pancakes, especially if you eat too many, you may not expect the same to be true on a cosmic scale. As it turns out, at least for the Circinus spiral galaxy, a pancake can shape an entire galactic nucleus.
The first stars to form in the Universe had no planets. Only later generations of stars, that contained more metal, were able to have planetary companions, according to new research.
20 July - One step closer to next-generation spaceflight
The kerosene-fueled RS-84 engine, one of several technologies competing to power NASA's next generation of launch vehicles, has successfully completed its preliminary design review. The RS-84 engine development is part of NASA's Next Generation Launch Technology program.
19 July - Cosmic mirage: Discovery of quasar with Einstein ring
Using the ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile, an international team of astronomers has discovered a complex cosmic mirage in the southern constellation Crater. This "gravitational lens" system consists of at least four images of the same quasar as well as a ring-shaped image of the galaxy in which the quasar reside - known as an "Einstein ring".
18 July - Detailed maps reveal early Universe galaxy distribution
Peering back in time more than 7 billion years, a team of astronomers using a powerful new spectrograph at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii has obtained the first maps showing the distribution of galaxies in the early universe. The maps show the clustering of galaxies into a variety of large-scale structures, including long filaments, empty voids, and dense groups and clusters.
Astronomers have made a 'mass map' of one of the most massive structures in the Universe, showing how much more there is to it than glowing stars and gas. The object is a distant cluster of galaxies that contains 'dark matter,' the unknown component that comprises most of the mass of the Universe.
16 July - Link between black holes, galaxies discovered nearby
By studying more than 120,000 nearby galaxies observed as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a team of astronomers from Germany and the United States has been able to show that the growth of supermassive black holes is closely linked with the birth of new stars in their host galaxies.
16 July - NASA seeks to discover if comets seeded life
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will lead the effort to discover if comets supplied the raw material for the origin of life on Earth, and if they could do so for alien worlds, as part of its participation in NASA Astrobiology Institute research.
UK astronomers say they have unlocked one of the Universe's oldest secrets - the origin of cosmic dust. Cardiff University and Royal Observatory Edinburgh scientists found that some stars throw out huge quantities of this dust when they explode.
The first ever map of the neutrino sky has been produced by a novel telescope encased in ice at the South Pole. From beneath the Antarctic ice, astronomers have been able to detect neutrinos - particles that trace the most violent events in the cosmos - many of them yet to be explained.
The Universe may be teeming with starless galaxies inhabiting its most isolated regions, says an Australian scientist. Graduate researcher Brad Warren, of the Australian National University, has identified galaxies in our local region of space that are mostly gas with very few stars.
11 July - Catching a comet's tail in Earth's upper atmosphere
For more than 20 years, NASA has flown high-altitude research aircraft to collect cosmic dust -- debris of comets and asteroids that fills the inner solar system. In late April though, they made the first attempt to collect dust particles from a very specific target -- comet Grigg-Skjellerup.
