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The space shuttle may have to work past retirement age, after all.

The US Congress is currently trying to set NASA's future mission and goals by drafting a bill called the NASA Authorization Act. A version of the bill, obtained by New Scientist, has passed a Senate committee that would require the agency to look into the prospect of flying the shuttle past 2010. As this Senate press release states:

The bill includes a number of provisions to ensure the United States has uninterrupted human access...

Ever had a burning desire to hunt for black holes? See how well you score in this black hole hunter game, developed by researchers at Cardiff University, UK, as part of the 2008 Royal Society Summer Exhibition in London.

In the game, you listen to sound files of simulated waveforms that detectors on Earth could record when sensing gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars with various masses. The pitch of the sound rises quickly as the bodies spiral together and merge.

To...

US aerospace giant Boeing made it pretty clear last week that it would be interested in making some megabucks by building some of the European Union's Galileo satellites - those at the heart of Europe's putative 3.4 billion-Euro global positioning network.

That is ironic indeed, given the reason Galileo exists in the first place: to combat American dominance and control of the satellite positioning market. Why 'control'? Because the satellites in the GPS constellation have a function called...

You can sleep easy in the knowledge that the world's most powerful particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, will not gobble us all up in the middle of the night. So says a new safety assessment released by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, based near Geneva, Switzerland .

The lab hopes this will quash relentless rumours that the LHC could create Earth-obliterating particles. Favourite examples are mini black holes and ravenous "killer strangelets" that could swallow our...

The Phoenix lander appears to have fallen down a rabbit hole on Mars. How else to explain why it is exploring, from its stationary spot in the frigid northern plains, nearby sites called Wonderland, Cheshire Cat and Croquet Ground?

"The overarching theme is to name features - rocks, soil, trenches, dump piles - after names from fairy tales," says team member Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, US. But sustaining the Lewis Carroll theme was a little difficult, Arvidson...

Congress and the White House are squabbling over a bill that essentially revises NASA's mission statement. The root issues are money and control, but they have a wide potential impact in areas from phasing out space shuttle operations to international cooperation on space projects.

If passed, the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 [H.R. 6063] would be the first new authorization for NASA since 2005. It sets goals and preferred spending levels for the space agency, but a separate appropriations act...

The short answer is, of course, not long. But your build, age and general level of cardiovascular health could make a small difference in how long you'd get to relish the unique experience.

A new calculator will estimate you how long you'd last. It is unclear exactly how the tool calculates survival times, or whether it's in any way accurate. I tested the survey with a few variations. A person with uber-thin Nicole Richie's build might make it 54 seconds. But a moderately healthy person weighing...

If another advanced civilisation in the Milky Way is the proverbial needle, a group of researchers has suggested how we should narrow our search for it in the galactic haystack.

At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St Louis, Missouri, US, on Wednesday, Richard Conn Henry of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues proposed limiting the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) to the ecliptic - the plane in which our solar system's planets orbit.

SETI begins with the...

A $1.5 billion cosmic ray telescope may meet up with the International Space Station after years of delay.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was mothballed after agency officials realised there weren't enough shuttle missions left to take the experiment to the space station. That's because the shuttles are due to be retired in 2010, and most of the remaining flights are needed to carry up parts to finish building the orbital outpost.

If launched, the telescope, which still awaits final assembly,...

The Mars Odyssey spacecraft has again successfully transmitted data from the Phoenix lander back to Earth, following the newly arrived lander's first full day of operations on Mars. Pictures are now streaming down via NASA's Deep Space Network and can be viewed online in their unprocessed state.

Earlier, mission managers indicated that taking more pictures would be a high priority. "We want to look around and see as much of the surroundings as possible so that we can figure out where we are,"...

Some of the most famous quotes attributed to him suggest he was - namely, "God does not play dice with the universe."

But a handwritten letter that the great physicist wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind in 1954, a year before his death at age 76, suggests he had serious problems with organised religion. "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends, which are nevertheless pretty...

Forget trying to count the number of angels on the head of a pin - there's an even more critical theological question weighing on the minds of Vatican astronomers: did God create little green men?

In an interview published today in the Vatican newspaper L'Obsservatore Romano, Reverend Jose Gabriel Funes, the Vatican's chief astronomer and scientific adviser to Pope Benedict, said that there's no conflict between the Christian faith and the existence of extraterrestrials.

But the idea that there...

A new law expected to be passed by the Japanese parliament will allow the country to have a military presence in space for the first time.

But don't panic. Japan isn't gearing up to make space into a shooting gallery. The country wants to bolster its space operations so it can keep a wary eye on North Korea and China, and so it can develop its own space industry.

Japan has been feeling uneasy and bolstering its defenses in recent years - in December, for example, it launched a sea-based...

Faux news anchor Stephen Colbert took one giant leap for comedy yesterday when he spoke with Garrett Reisman, an astronaut currently living on the International Space Station.

Reisman held his own against Colbert, who asked him whether his duties on the station essentially made him "a janitor with a PhD". I was particularly delighted with Reisman's test of whether it's true that in space, no one can hear you scream.

Watch the full interview below, and if you want even more space-related...

The US could quickly regain its ability to launch astronauts into space after the 2010 retirement of the space shuttles by flying them up on rockets normally used to carry satellites, a Senate committee was told on Wednesday.

The space shuttle fleet is scheduled to retire in 2010, and the Ares rocket and Orion crew capsule meant to replace it are not expected to be online until 2015, leaving the US with a gap in its ability to send humans into space.

NASA's current plan is to buy more Soyuz...

Remember the astronaut who recently tested whether boomerangs return to their throwers in the absence of gravity? Well, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has released video of astronaut Takao Doi showing that the objects do, in fact, come back - even in the microgravity environment of the space station.

Aerodynamics expert David Caughey of Cornell says that is just what is expected - the looping paths are the result of uneven forces on the curved devices by the air they travel through - not...

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson has painted a dramatic picture of her return journey to Earth from the International Space Station on 19 April, when her crew's Soyuz capsule took an unexpected trajectory that gave the astronauts a very rough ride.

During re-entry, the capsule switched to "ballistic re-entry mode". This set the craft on a much steeper, more direct trajectory to Earth than intended and it landed 475 kilometres away from the intended site.

Whitson described the ordeal today during...

Just four months after the Messenger spacecraft flew by Mercury for the first time, the International Astronomical Union has approved names for the first batch of new features photographed by the instrument (see a map with the named features here). The IAU even approved new rules for naming fossae, sunken valleys with faults on both sides, since these were not seen by Mariner 10 when it flew by Mercury three times between 1973 and 1975.

That quick response is a welcome relief after IAU's lengthy...

A $1.5 billion experiment to study speeding particles called cosmic rays is still stuck on the ground, with no way to get to the International Space Station, where it was intended to operate.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was designed to study the composition and origins of the charged cosmic rays, which are thought to originate in high-energy events such as supernova remnants and the magnetic cocoons around violent galaxies. It will also look for particles of antimatter and for indirect...

Jazz musician and composer Jeff Oster has incorporated the eerie sounds of Saturn's auroras into a jazz piece called "Saturn Calling", which won a 2008 Independent Music Award in the New Age category.

Oster, a space enthusiast, got the idea for the song while listening to the ethereal sounds of Saturn's auroras. You can listen to the piece here, and check out sound files made from Cassini spacecraft measurements of things like magnetic fields and radio waves in Saturn's environment.

The sounds...

Read our story about these Hubble images.

Hundreds of cherry seeds will travel to the International Space Station in October as part of a project by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Once returned to the ground, the seeds will be studied for changes due to microgravity, and some will be planted, according to an Agence France-Presse story.

Cherry blossom mania sweeps Japan each spring, where it is a popular tradition to hold picnics beneath the trees when they flower. One beloved tree, called Takizakura, or "cascade cherry...

The challenge: put a tiny satellite that weighs less than 19.99 grams - the weight of about two British pound coins or four US quarters - into orbit on a budget of only 999.99 pounds (about $2000). The satellite must complete nine orbits around the Earth, and this must somehow be verifiable from the ground.

The prize: 9,999.99 pounds (about $20,000).

Your chance of success: close to zero.

That pretty much sums up a new challenge put forth by Paul Dear, a biologist at the Medical Research Council...

Space tourism company Virgin Galactic plans to perform the world's first marriage in space, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

"We have had two bookings involving marriage, one to get married in space and the other for the couple to have their honeymoon in space," a Virgin Galactic spokesperson said, according to the article.

The two couples have booked seats on the company's first commercial flight into space, to take place in 2009.

The couple to be married was not identified, but the...

What is life? According to Sohan Jheeta, an astrobiologist from the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, biologists have spent far too long dithering about how to define what a living organism actually is. As a result there are more than 280 definitions of life on record, and none of them really hits the mark, Jheeta says.

He sparked some lively debate about the issue at an astrobiology conference this week in Santa Clara, California, US. Jheeta says one of the most widely accepted definitions...