* Earth is overdue a solar storm as the sun enters its most active period
The world is overdue a ferocious 'space storm' that could knock out communications satellites, ground aircraft and trigger blackouts - causing hundreds of billions of pounds of damage, scientists say.
Astronomers today warned that mankind is now more vulnerable to a major solar storm than at any time in history - and that the planet should prepare for a global Katrina-style disaster.
A massive eruption of the sun would save waves of radiation and charged particles to Earth, damaging the satellite systems used for synchronising computers, airline navigation and phone networks.
Communications satellites would be knocked out by a solar storm, causing widespread chaos on Earth and hundreds of billions of pounds of damage
Imminent: The world got a taster of the sun's explosive power last week with the strongest solar eruption in five years (white flash, centre) sent a torrent of charged plasma hurtling towards the world. Scientists believe we are overdue a ferocious solar storm
* The European / Chinese project is measuring the effects confinement and stress have on interplanetary travel
After 257 days in a locked steel capsule, six researchers on a 520-day mock flight to Mars have finally ‘landed’ on the Red Planet.
The all-male crew - three Russians, a Chinese, a Frenchman and an Italian-Colombian - has been inside a windowless capsule at a Moscow research centre since June.
Today their simulated flight arrived at Mars and two crew members, Italian Diego Urbina and Russian Alexander Smoleyevsky, emerged from their spacecraft to walk on the 'surface' of Mars.
It was a big step for the six-man team locked up for two-thirds of a year, but a relatively small step
Launch: The volunteers prepare to enter the Mars500 simulation spacecraft in June
* Seeing the whole Sun front and back simultaneously will enable significant advances in space weather forecasting for Earth
The first-ever view of the Sun in 3-D has been captured by Nasa spacecrafts.
Two Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft, on diametrically opposite sides of the Sun, 180 degrees apart have produced the most complete view of the Sun.
One is ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind.
Impressive: Two aircraft, 180 degrees apart, have photographed the two sides of the Sun giving scientists the most compete image of the star to date
Shedding light: Seeing the whole Sun front and back simultaneously will enable significant advances in space weather forecasting for Earth
Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket SpaceShipTwo achieved its first solo glide flight yesterday, marking another step in the company's eventual plans to fly paying passengers.
SpaceShipTwo was carried aloft by its mothership to an altitude of 45,000ft and released over the Mojave Desert.
After the separation, SpaceShipTwo, manned by two pilots, flew freely for 11 minutes before landing at an airport runway followed by the mothership.
* Six-passenger aircraft glides smoothly to Earth after disconnection from mothership at 45,000ft
* Virgin Galactic boss delighted with 25-minute 'flight'
Success: Manned by two pilots, the craft flew freely for 11 minutes before landing at an airport runway followed by the mothership.
First solo glide flight: Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket SpaceShipTwo was released over the Mojave Desert in California yesterday
Moment of truth: SpaceShipTwo detaches from the wing of its special jet-powered mothership, dubbed WhiteKnightTwo
It was once a pursuit reserved for astronauts and top-secret government officials.
But now backyard inventors are hoping to land their own weird and wonderful spacecrafts on the moon after Google launched a £20million competition.
Nasa had previously estimated that such voyages would cost more than £1billion - with some skeptics suggesting that it is almost impossible to even fly to the moon.
But since the Isle of Man government has lifted tax restrictions of space exploration a flurry of do-it-yourself voyages throughout the cosmos are expected.
Internet search giant Google became one of the first to take advantage of the tax break when it announced the Lunar X prize in September 2007.
Twenty two teams who have worked tirelessly on their strange machines will meet in the Isle of Man tomorrow to thrash out the final details of the missions.
Representing Britain in the competition is the crew behind Astrobotic, a four-wheeled silver machine that resembles a moving road sign.
Julian Ranger, the UK financier who is raising cash for Astrobotic, said: 'We believe we can get the cost [of reaching the moon] down to $50m, a price tag that will transform lunar exploration and make the moon a target for for all sorts of commercial operations.
'Part of our business plan will be to get our rover to move round the site and take a 3D high-definition film of it.
'If nothing else, it should prove to the doubters that the Apollo missions really took place.
'We hope to use SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to get to the moon.The cost would normally be around $100m, but we hope we can negotiate a special deal for this high-profile project.'
Other hopefuls in the competition include Team Italia whose craft is a green dome supported by six spider-like legs.
America's entry, Jurban, looks like a large worm designed to negotiate the moon's rough terrain of craters with several small capsules joined together in the same way as a train.
Flying spider: Italy's entry into Google's $20million Lunar X competition is a green ball supported by six spider-like legs
Out of this world: The British Astrobotic is one of 22 teams hoping to win Google's $20million prize for the first ship to land on the moon and drive 500 metres
At first these Chinese villagers thought the two large explosions in the middle of the night were an earthquake.
But they awoke the next morning to see their village in Suichuan County in Jiangxi dotted with huge pieces of metal.
These images show the scene in their rural village after the rocket from China's second lunar mission crashed to Earth, narrowly missing crushing their homes.
Huge chunks of metal rained out of the sky after the lunar probe Chang'e II jettisoned its Long March 3C rocket on Friday night.
No one is believed to have been hurt in the incident.
China launched an unmanned lunar probe on Friday, the latest milestone for an ambitious space programme that aims to put a man on the moon later this decade.
Villagers in the remote rural village inspect the debris that landed in their village overnight
No one was hurt when huge pieces of metal rained down on the small community after the rocket was jettisoned
Tourists could soon be eating food designed by celebrity chefs while orbiting the earth in a space hotel if plans by a Russian firm go ahead.
Moscow-based Orbital Technologies yesterday said it hoped to fill the vacuum in the space tourism market by stationing an orbiting hotel in the cosmos.
The company has sky-high hopes that its planned Commercial Space Station can serve as a tourism hub for well-heeled travellers and offer overspill accommodation for the International Space Station and workspace for science projects.
But it's unlikely to come anytime soon - the company wants to launch a seven-room station by 2016 but may increase or decrease that capacity based on customer demand.
Moscow-based Orbital Technologies says it hopes to check the first guests into its space hotel by 2016
Out of this world views: Guests would sleep on pull-out beds and enjoy a window on the world
It looks like satellite footage taken by a state-of-the-art NASA camera with a telescopic lens.
But this remarkable video was in fact filmed by an innovative father-and-son team equipped with just an iPhone and a high-definition video camera.
Luke Geissbuhler, 40, and his seven-year-old son Max, designed a 'craft' made from a takeaway box attached to a weather balloon and sent it, and the two electronic devices, into space.
Following months of research and testing, the amateur science enthusiasts launched their innovative weather balloon in Newburgh, New York, in August.
During a 102-minute flight it managed to reach an altitude of 19 miles above the ground in the upper stratosphere before the balloon burst and parachuted the craft back down to earth.
Mr Geissbuhler tracked the module, which was caught in a tree, by using the GPS system set up on the iPhone and spotted its flashing LED light.
The cinematographer and director said he got the idea for the project because he is always looking for fun ideas to share with his son.
Amateur footage: During a 102-minute flight, a weather balloon craft assembled by a father-and-son team managed to reach an altitude of 100,000ft
Humble beginnings: The main body of the craft was made from a takeaway food box
Back to basics: Amazingly, Luke Geissbuhler, 40, and his seven-year-old son Max equipped the craft with just an iPhone and a high-definition video camera
It looks like a filmmaker's apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.
But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.
Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet's Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists.
The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater's wall terraces.The sheer depth of the crater - about 1.6 miles - demonstrates that Mojave has experienced little infilling or erosion.
The result offers scientists a tantalising glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like on Mars because it remains so fresh while most others - especially this size - have been affected by erosion, sedimentary infilling and overprinting by other geologic processes.
Such a fresh crater provides an insight into the impact process.
This view, in which the vertical dimension is exaggerated three-fold compared with horizontal dimensions, shows the ponding of material backed up behind massive wall-terrace blocks of bedrock.
Hundreds of impact craters on Mars have similarly ponded features with pitted surfaces. These 'pitted ponds' are thought to result when material melted by the crater-causing impacts is captured behind the wall terraces.
The portion of the Mojave Crater's north-western edge shown here spans about 2.5 miles in width halfway between the bottom and top of the image. The view is toward the north.
Mojave is one of the freshest large craters on Mars. A survey of its features indicates very few overprinting craters on them, and an analysis of that infrequency suggests the crater may be as young as about ten million years, very young for a crater of this size.
The fans and channels hint that impacts such as Mojave's may have unleashed water or water-ice from the subsurface to flow across the surface and, perhaps, condense as rain or snow for a brief period of Martian time.
This further suggests that early climate on Mars could have been heavily influenced by the intense bombardment about 3.9billion years ago when impacts creating craters Mojave's size and far larger were more common.
Colossal: This ice formation is a portion of the wall terraces of the Mojave Crater on Mars. It has barely suffered any erosion so offers scientists a tantalising glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, the world's first commercial passenger spaceship, made its inaugural test flight over the California desert yesterday.
The flight marked the start of a test programme that will progress to flights as a glider and then under rocket power.
Throughout the two hour, 54 minute test, the space tourism rocket remained slung beneath the middle of the wing of its 'mothership' WhiteKnightTwo, a twin-fuselage carrier aircraft.
The pair achieved an altitude of 45,000ft before returning to the Mojave Air and Space Port, which is 70 miles north of Los Angeles.
'This is a momentous day,' designer Burt Rutan said.Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, has collected about £30million in deposits and fares from more than 330 aspiring amateur astronauts, each of whom will be charged £133,000 to experience a few minutes of suborbital spaceflight.
By suborbital means its trajectory will not complete a full orbit of Earth.
Test flights are scheduled to continue through 2011, with commercial operations set to begin in 2012.
The rocket and mothership are the second generation of the Burt Rutan-designed system that sent the first privately developed, manned rocket into space in 2004.
SpaceShipOne went on that year to make two more suborbital flights, winning the £6.7million prize Ansari X Prize. It is now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.Sir Richard is in a deal with the Rutan-founded Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, to develop passenger-carrying spacecraft and launchers.
SpaceShipTwo has been dubbed Virgin Spaceship Enterprise and the four-engine carrier jet is called Virgin Mothership Eve, after Sir Richard's mother.
'Seeing the finished spaceship in December was a major day for us but watching VSS Enterprise fly for the first time really brings home what beautiful, groundbreaking vehicles Burt and his team have developed for us,' said Sir Richard.
Virgin Galactic said the flight test program will run through 2011 before passenger travel is scheduled to begin in 2012.
SpaceShipTwo will be carried to an altitude of about 50,000ft and then released by the mothership.
Powered by a single rocket motor, the spaceship will be flown by a crew of two and carry six passengers on a Mach 3 thrill ride through the edge of the atmosphere for a brief zero-gravity experience and views of the Earth far below before gliding to a landing.Such suborbital flights are similar to the 1961 flights of Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom - up into space and then back down without circling the Earth.
But by launching SpaceShipTwo from a high-flying carrier aircraft, there's no need for the massive rockets that propelled the Mercury capsules.
Motherships have been used for decades by Nasa and the military for 'captive-carry' tests and launches of such craft as the X-15 rocket planes.
The novel part of Rutan's design is his 'carefree re-entry' system.
SpaceShipTwo has tailbooms extending rearward from its wings. In space, the booms pivot upward to a 65-degree angle. The position causes drag and slows the descent in the upper atmosphere before the booms pivot back to horizontal.
Commercial development has been slower than expected.
When Virgin Group licensed the technology from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who funded about £17million for SpaceShipOne, Sir Richard envisioned operating flights by 2007.
A major setback was an explosion during a 2007 ground test involving the flow of a rocket oxidizer.
Three workers were killed and three others suffered serious injuries.
Approximately 600 people are now employed on activities relating to the Virgin Galactic project.
This figure is estimated to rise to over 1,100 jobs during the peak of the construction phase at the space port and when the commercial space vehicles begin their flights.
Speaking in December, Sir Richard said: 'The team has created not only a world first but also a work of art.
'It's incredible to think only 450 people have ever been into space; that's including all the Russians, all the Chinese and all the Americans put together.'
In honour of a long tradition of using the word Enterprise in the naming of Royal Navy, U.S. Navy, Nasa vehicles and even science fiction spacecraft, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson in December christened SS2 with the name Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise.
December launch: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger with Sir Richard Branson and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, break wines bottles at the christening ceremony of SpaceShipTwo (left). Sir Richard poses with aircraft designer Burt Rutan (right)
It is one small step for British science. And one giant leap for Swindon.
Yesterday, the Wiltshire town known for its steam railway museum was named as the home of the nation's first space agency.
Ministers say the UK Space Agency, which launches on April 1, will guarantee Britain's place among the stars and inspire a generation of children to become astronauts.
Nasa, however, is unlikely to be too concerned at the threat.
UKSA will have an annual budget of £270million, or just one 50th the size of the American agency's, just one astronaut called Tim and a Union Flag logo that resembles the titles to Dad's Army.
Its creation brings together the budgets and work of a host of government departments and funding councils under one roof, and replaces the British National Space Centre.
Rather than launch its own missions, UKSA will promote Britain's interests in the European Space Agency.Most of its work will involve Earth observation satellites, planetary probes and telecommunications.
It will also help co- ordinate space science research in universities.
The announcement - which followed months of speculation about the agency's name - was welcomed by scientists and business leaders.
At one point Lord Drayson, the minister for science and innovation, had hoped to call the body Her Majesty's Space Agency.
Yesterday, he said the creation of UKSA was crucial to promoting Britain's growing space industry.
'The action we're taking shows that we're really serious about space,' he said.
'The UK Space Agency will give the sector the muscle it needs to fulfil its ambition.'
The agency was launched in London yesterday with the help of British astronaut Major Tim Peake, who is training in Russia to be a European Space Agency astronaut.
Although the UK has long been a member of ESA, this is the first time it will have a fully fledged space agency.
Germany, France and Italy all have national space agencies.
Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, stressed the role of the agency in Britain's satellite, robotics and telecoms industries.
'I think it is important to remember that although it is cutting edge, this stuff is not sci-fi,' said Lord Mandelson.
'It may start in space, but it comes down to Earth very quickly and is directly relevant to all our daily lives.'
The recession- defying space industry already contributes around £6billion a year to the economy and supports 68,000 jobs directly and indirectly.
Over the next 20 years it has the potential to grow to a £40billion industry and create 100,000 jobs, ministers believe.
Major Peake, a test pilot in the Army Air Corps, had the job of starting a countdown to unveiling the space agency's logo, displayed on a large screen at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre.
The logo is a £10,000 design, based on the Union Flag, that shows a |red arrow aiming for the skies.
Logo: The nation's first space agency has been unveiled
Soichi Noguchi in a rare moment outside the ISS. The astronaut has posted dozens on photos on Twitter and is now uploading video on YouTube
Astronaut Soichi Noguchi has already made his name as a prolific Twitterer, who delights his 125,000 followers with live pictures from the International Space Station.
Now the Japanese engineer has gone one better, posting stunning footage of Earth and the Moon on his own YouTube channel.
This morning he posted a two-minute video of the Earth filmed from the window of the new observation deck on the orbiter.
'Welcome to the journey over Madagascar! Enjoy the out-of-the-world view,' he wrote.
The outline of the world's fourth largest island is clearly visible under patchy cloud, as the space station zooms at 17,500MPH over head.
A week ago he unveiled a beautiful one minute clip showing the Moon slowly setting into the horizon.
The 44-year-old has been orbiting 200miles above our planet since December 2009 and is due to come back this June. His last ISS mission was in 2005.
Mr Noguchi was taking advantage of the Italian-made cupola installed on the new Tranquility module last month. The £17million observation deck has one central window and six outer windows, which give panoramic views.
It is used by crew members to operate the robotic arms on the station as well as monitor the approach of supply ships.
Major construction on the £60billion orbital outpost is complete and Nasa has only four more shuttle missions planned to ferry spare parts and supplies to the station, a project of 16 nations that has been under construction since 1998.
There crystal clear views of alien rock formations are just a few of the impressive images sent back from Nasa's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter.
Captured by the onboard HiRise camera, they show dramatic landscapes including inverted craters, deep water-forged gullies and frost covered dunes. To date, scientists have released 11,762 such images to the public.
They were sent back to Earth from the spacecraft, which is circling the Red Planet 72million miles away.
This week the orbiter broke through a major download milestone by passing the 100 terabytes of data mark. This is more than three times the amount of data collected from all other deep-space missions combined.
Just one terabyte is the equivalent of 300 hours of good quality video or 1,000 copies of the Encylopedia Britannica.
'What is most impressive about all these data is not the sheer quantity, but the quality of what they tell us about our neighbor planet,' said MRO Project Scientist Rich Zurek.
'The data from the orbiter's six instruments have given us a much deeper understanding of the diversity of environments on Mars today and how they have changed over time.'
The milestone comes as the orbiter completes its fourth year of operation. The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars on March 10, 2006, after it was launched on August 12, 2005, from Florida.
It completed its primary science phase in 2008 and continues investigations of Mars' surface, subsurface and atmosphere.
The orbiter sports a dish antenna 10 feet in diameter and uses it to pour data Earthward at up to 6 megabits per second. It has a number of instruments including three cameras - one of which is HiRise, a spectrometer for identifying minerals, a ground-penetrating radar and an atmosphere sounder.
The capability to return enormous volumes of data enables these instruments to view Mars at unprecedented spatial resolutions.
Half the planet has been covered at 20 feet per pixel, and nearly one per cent of the planet has been observed at one foot per pixel, sharp enough to discern objects the size of a desk.
The radar, provided by Italy, has looked beneath the surface in 6,500 observing strips, sampling about half the planet.
Among the mission's major findings is that the action of water on and near the surface of Mars occurred for hundreds of millions of years. This activity was at least regional and possibly global in extent, though possibly intermittent.
The spacecraft has also observed that signatures of a variety of watery environments, some acidic, some alkaline, increase the possibility that there are places on Mars that could reveal evidence of past life, if it ever existed.
This image shows dark sand dunes and inverted craters in the Arabia Terra region of Mars. The sand is dark because it was probably derived from basalt. The 'inverted' shape is found on Mars and Earth where erosion has stripped away surrounding topography
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