In the past week, engineers unveiled plans for a bizarre-looking spaceship, and astronomers revealed a stellar nursery that harbours some of the heaviest stars known.
The state of New Mexico hopes to collaborate with two firms to create suborbital vehicles for space tourists. This illustration is one concept for the ship, which will afford passengers a 360° view of space. Armadillo Aerospace plans to build an initial prototype of the vehicle in 2009 and is aiming for crewed suborbital flights in 2010. The reusable vehicles will take off vertically from Spaceport America near Las Cruces, New Mexico. The ships can take two passengers at a time, and tickets will cost an estimated $100,000. Rocket Racing Inc, which is developing a NASCAR-inspired rocket racing league, will fund the effort. (Illustration: Rocket Racing Inc)
Stellar nurseries are not calm, inviting places. Intense radiation from hot, young stars has ionised hydrogen gas in the Gum 29 nebula, which sits some 26,000 light years from Earth in the Milky Way's Carina spiral arm. This new image of the tumultuous region was taken with the Max-Planck/ESO telescope at a site in Chile's Atacama Desert. The star cluster at the centre of Gum 29 plays host to a pair of heavyweight stars that orbit each other every 3.7 days. At 82 and 83 times the mass of our Sun, they are among the most massive stars known. (Image: ESO)
The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft blasted off from a space centre in southern India on 22 October, marking the beginning of India's push to the Moon. The probe, which will to map the Moon's surface using an international suite of science instruments, will go into orbit around the Moon in early November. India has said it plans to send astronauts to the Moon by 2015. (Image: ISRO)
NASA's Mars exploration philosophy has been to 'follow the water', but Nili Fossae could change that to 'follow the methane'. The area is one of a handful of sites on Mars that may be jettisoning large amounts of methane. Since the gas might have a biological origin, sites such as Nili Fossae might make good landing spots for the Mars Science Laboratory, a giant rover targeted for launch in 2009. MSL can detect the ratio of carbon isotopes in methane, which could indicate whether life is the source of the gas. (Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)