NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location. Software uploaded this winter is the latest example of NASA taking advantage of the twin Mars rovers’ [...]

Quasars are active and very powerful black holes at the centre of distant galaxies. The black holes are extremely massive weighing between 100 million and 10 billion solar masses and rotating around the super massive black hole is a disc of gas and dust. The inner ring of the disc moves faster than the outer [...]

NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate is inviting teams of undergraduate and graduate students throughout the country to participate in the fourth annual Systems Engineering Paper Competition. Participants in the competition will submit a paper on an Exploration Systems mission topic. The deadline to register for the competition is April 16. Papers are due April 23. [...]

Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17, is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky of a type known as a fossil group. Astronomers use this term to emphasise the isolated nature of these galaxies. However, are they like fossils — the last remnants of a once active community — or [...]

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. has selected 17 new candidates for the 2010 Hubble Fellowship Program. The fellows may pursue their research at any host university or research center of their choosing in the United States and will begin their programs in the fall of 2010. Each fellowship provides support to [...]

NASA and the Italian Space Agency announced a new use for an existing Multi Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM) known as “Leonardo.” It will be transformed into a Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) for the International Space Station. For nearly a decade, the Italian-built logistic modules have flown inside the payload bays of NASA’s shuttle fleet, successfully [...]