LOS ANGELES - The Phoenix lander's first chemical sniff of Martian soil did not turn up any trace of the building blocks of life. Engineers said a short circuit that occurred last month in one of its test ovens designed to shake and bake miniscule soil samples could happen again when the instrument is turned on. Phoenix, which landed near the Martian north pole on May 25, has eight single-use ovens that heat and analyze Martian soil and ice for signs of organic, or carbon-based, compounds that are essential for life.

GREENBELT, Md., July 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's sun- focused Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, twin spacecraft unexpectedly detected particles from the edge of the solar system last year. The two STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006 into Earth's orbit around the sun to obtain stereo pictures of the sun's surface and measure magnetic fields and ion fluxes associated with solar explosions. From June to October 2007, sensors aboard both STEREO spacecraft detected energetic neutral atoms originating from the same spot in the sky, where the sun plunges through the interstellar medium.

NASA Goddard is responsible for several aspects of GLAST's mission as it begins transmitting data for the world to see. The GLAST Mission Operations Center (MOC) and the GLAST Science Support Center (GSSC) were provided by and are located at NASA Goddard. The second operation is the Large Area Telescope (LAT) Instrument Science Operations Center (ISOC) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), in Menlo Park, Calif. The ISOC is responsible for maximizing the LAT's science performance in the areas of Flight Operations, Science Operations and the development of Science Analysis Systems.

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., July 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA is considering the development of a university-based, student-led satellite development initiative to begin passing the space exploration torch to a new generation. "It is important to provide meaningful experiences to our next generation of engineers, but we need to do it in a thoughtful way," said Dr. Joyce Winterton, assistant administrator for Education at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Under the ASMO concept, teams would learn directly from NASA mentors as part of a diverse, nationwide, higher education initiative that enables students to design, build, launch, operate and own a small spacecraft and its payload.

Jul. 2--GREENBELT -- In about two weeks, some 24,000 pounds of what may be the most thoroughly tested and closely inspected hardware on Earth will be packed into custom crates, mounted on flatbed trucks and shipped as "wide load" cargo to Cape Canaveral, Fla. When it arrives, the one-of-a kind camera and spectrograph, now being stored at the Goddard Space Flight Center, will be inspected once more, loaded onto the space shuttle Atlantis and launched into orbit 350 miles above Earth. There, astronauts will rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope for a long-delayed 11-day servicing mission.

The Universe is Not the Only Thing Expanding... one of the world's leading designers and manufacturers of telescopes, binoculars, spotting scopes, microscopes and related accessories, has announced a price reduction for their award-winning SkyScout(R) Personal Planetarium(R), making it more affordable than ever. Celestron is also pleased to announce a new version of firmware (1.30) that expands the knowledge of SkyScout beyond 50,000 objects.

MEYRIN, Switzerland - The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August. But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN - some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider .

Excerpt from report by corporate-owned Russian military news agency Interfax-AVN website Barnaul, 26 June: The Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) will invest in the construction of the second line of the Altay optical-laser centre which is a branch of the Scientific Research Institute of Precision Instrument-Making in Moscow, Altay Territory deputy governor Boris Larin said on Thursday [26 June] at the Interfax press centre. According to the head of the Altay Territory directorate for international and interregional ties, Aleksandr Zhilin, the centre is designed for monitoring the course of space debris and finding lost satellites.

The U.S. space agency's Cassini spacecraft is ending its first mission at Saturn and starting a two-year task to focus on Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus. Cassini completed its four-year primary mission Monday, beginning the extended mission, which was approved in April. Among other things, Cassini revealed the Earth-like world of Saturn's moon Titan and showed the potential habitability of another moon, Enceladus, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.

(NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that NASA Ames Research Center has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage for a mission that will send the Kepler Space Telescope into orbit around the Sun to find planets in solar systems outside our own. NASA Ames chose the resilient 3PAR storage system to meet its strict cost and performance requirements while maintaining massive scalability and avoiding the need for a full-time, dedicated storage expert. We simply can't predict our ultimate storage needs at this time, but the agility, resilience, and scalability of 3PAR's technology gives us confidence in our storage infrastructure -- no matter how large our data needs grow."

MOUNT WILSON - Five-thousand feet above Pasadena, a small group of USC researchers and graduate students celebrated a milestone last week: the 100th anniversary of Mount Wilson's solar telescope. In June 1908, just months after the telescope's completion, George Ellery Hale, the astronomer responsible for creating the device, made a critical discovery: The surface of the sun has magnetic fields, just like Earth. "No one had ever thought there were magnetic fields on the sun," astronomer Ed Rhodes said, as he fondly touched a massive bust of Hale in the telescope control room.

U.S. space agency engineers said final testing has started for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that's to be launched later this year. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite, nicknamed LCROSS, is designed to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed lunar crater. NASA said a thermal vacuum test completed earlier this month subjected the spacecraft to 13 1/2 days of heating and cooling cycles, with temperatures ranging from 230 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Lou Coban has what many people would consider the ultimate office: plenty of space, little supervision and a stellar view. He's encouraged to clock in around noon because his work as administrator and electronics guru of the Allegheny Observatory usually takes him late into Riverview Park's starry evenings. "Most people have an office; I have a whole building," Coban said as he gazed at the 96-year-old observatory's largest telescope.

WASHINGTON--Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them. It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca.

Australian astronomers working in China say they've remotely controlled telescopes in three nations and streamed the data to a New South Wales observatory. We're now in the age of astronomy without borders, said Tasso Tzioumis of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's Australia Telescope National Facility. Tzioumis and colleagues Chris Phillips and Shaun Amy worked with Chinese and Japanese astronomers to control the 25-meter radio telescope of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, the 34-meter telescope of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Kashima, Japan, and the CSIRO radio telescopes in New South Wales.

Jun. 23--Identical twin stars born of the same cosmic dust are not always exactly the same, astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Vanderbilt University have found. UW-Madison professor Robert Mathieu, together with his former doctoral student, Keivan Stassun, discovered the not-so-identical twin stars -- the youngest pair of "identical" twin stars ever seen -- in the distant Orion Nebula, a well-known stellar nursery some 1,500 light years away. "These two stars formed from the same cloud of gas," said Mathieu, "and we would expect them to look identical, but they don't."

LOS ANGELES - Scientists believe NASA's Phoenix Mars lander exposed bits of ice while recently digging a trench in the soil of the Martian arctic, the mission's principal investigator said Thursday. Crumbs of bright material initially photographed in the trench later vanished, meaning they must have been frozen water that vaporized after being exposed, Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement. Phoenix Mars is studying whether the arctic region of the Red Planet could be habitable.

The U.S. space agency and Walt Disney Studios have signed an agreement to promote science and technology to schoolchildren. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the Space Act Agreement calls for a series of educational and public outreach activities related to Disney-Pixar's new movie, WALL-E that opens June 27. NASA officials said the collaboration highlights the similarities between the movie's storyline and NASA's real-life work in robot technology, propulsion systems and astrophysics.

NEW YORK--A first edition of the book in which Nicolaus Copernicus presented his earthshaking theory of the cosmos has fetched more than $2.2 million at a New York auction, nearly doubling the expected price. The 1543 copy of Copernicus' "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) was among more than 300 books offered at Christie's. The auction house says Tuesday's sale brought in a total of more than $11 million.

WASHINGTON--European astronomers have found a trio of "super-Earths" closely circling a star that astronomers once figured had nothing orbiting it. Monday's announcement is the first time three planets close to Earth's size were found orbiting a single star, said Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz. He was part of the Swiss-French team using the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in the desert in Chile.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida--More than two weeks after Discovery's blastoff battered the launch pad, NASA is close to nailing down its repair strategy and insists the damage can be mended in time for the next space shuttle flight. NASA plans to send Atlantis to the launch pad at the end of August, for an early October liftoff to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA allowed journalists to see the damage for themselves Monday, two days after Discovery's safe return to Earth.

The U.S. space agency's newest satellite -- the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST -- lifted off at 12:05 p.m. EDT Wednesday from Florida. But during a Monday launch readiness review, National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists, engineers, technicians and officials, declared the project ready to go. NASA said GLAST will orbit the Earth at a distance of approximately 300 nautical miles, with an inclination of approximately 25.6 degrees to the equator, surveying the universe's electromagnetic spectrum from 20 million electron volts to more than 300 billion electron volts, the upper end of which is a relatively unexplored area.

U.S. space agency scientists say they've developed a plan for making giant telescope mirrors on the moon, avoiding the cost of shipping mirrors from Earth. The researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., say all one needs to build a mirror that dwarfs anything on Earth is a bit of carbon, some epoxy and lots of lunar dust. We could make huge telescopes on the moon relatively easily, and avoid the large expense of transporting a large mirror from Earth, said Peter Chen of NASA Goddard and the Catholic University of America.

astronomers say they've moved a step closer to understanding how the spinning neutron star known as the Crab Pulsar is slowing down, losing energy. Researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration, or LIGO -- an international collaboration headed by University of Florida physics Professor David Reitze -- have ruled out one long-hypothesized cause: emission of gravitational waves. We can now say definitively that gravitational waves play only a minor role at best in this phenomenon, said Reitze.