No, it's not some astronomer's idea of a rude joke: Rather, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare view of one of Uranus' satellites, Ariel, floating over the planet and casting a shadow on the cloud tops.

Just how rare is it? Such an event is only possible only every 42 years, due to Uranus' bizarre sideways rotation.

NASA / ESA / UW-Madison

In this picture of Uranus, the bright spot is the moon Ariel, casting a shadow on the planet's cloud tops.

We can see moons transiting planets like Saturn and Jupiter relatively often, because those moons move straight through the solar system's ecliptic plane. But because Uranus and its moons turn sideways, from "north" to "south," the planet's equator has to line up precisely with the sun to provide the view seen by Hubble last month. That occurs twice during Uranus' orbit, which takes 84 Earth years.

Earthlings have never seen this phenomenon before, said Lawrence Sromovsky, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center. Smorovsky and his colleagues happened upon the transit while they were using Hubble to study Uranus' atmosphere.

"The technology wasn't there to see this the last time it happened," he explained.

Smorovsky told me it could well happen again in October, when his team will be watching Uranus using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. This is a good time to study how Uranus' cloud climate is changing, because the sideways planet's north and south poles are both visible and illuminated at the same time, he said.

If an observer were able to watch Ariel pass over from Uranus' cloud tops, they'd experience the event as a solar eclipse unlike any on Earth, Smorovsky noted. "The sun looks like a bright star, so the shadows are sharper than they are on Earth," he said.

This graphic accompanying today's image release from the Space Telescope Science Institute illustrates the differences between Uranian and earthly eclipses. Note the fuzzy dark spot on the Sahara, which represents the umbra and penumbra of a solar eclipse.

Another graphic shows how the orientations of the Uranian moons change over time - and you'll definitely want to check out these cool online videos showing the movement of the moons back in 1994.

Now, about those rings around Uranus...

In the wake of Pluto's demotion from the roll of solar system planets, astronomers are pointing out that a lot of the nitty-gritty details still need to be worked out - and that the plucky erstwhile planet shouldn't be counted out quite yet. Just wait until 2009!

Here's today's statement from the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences:

"Some questions have arisen over the recent International Astronomical Union (IAU) resolutions that defined three categories of bodies in the solar system: planets, dwarf planets, and small solar system bodies. These concerns are not surprising, given the long and difficult history of efforts to reach agreement on just what a planet is, and the unwillingness of nature to be categorized into neat compartments.

"The Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) recognizes the authority of the IAU to render a decision, and notes that it had considerable input by DPS members in the process.

"However, it is also mindful of the fact that future refinements of this definition will almost certainly be desired. All definitions have a degree of fuzziness that requires intelligent application: what does 'round' really mean? What does it mean to 'control a zone'? These are technical issues to be addressed by Division III of the IAU, currently chaired by Ted Bowell, a fellow DPS member. There is still work to be done, too, in constructing a definition that is generally applicable to extrasolar planetary systems. These and other changes, radical or moderate, presumably will be addressed at the next IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro in 2009, and the DPS community will continue to be involved in all stages of this process.

"Ultimately, the definition of a planet will come through common usage and scientific utility. There is no need to throw away current school texts; Pluto has not gone away.  We will continue to explore Pluto and the other objects orbiting beyond Neptune with telescopic observations and spacecraft missions to obtain a fundamental understanding of their place in our solar system.

"The DPS is the largest international professional organization of planetary scientists with approximately 1,300 members of which about 30 percent are from non-US countries."

While you're waiting for the final answer, take a walk on the lighter side of Pluto: Check out this cartoon roundup and Jason Kottke's list of new planetary memory aids.

Update for 10:10 p.m. ET: Hoo boy, the Pluto protest movement is growing. Space.com's Robert Roy Britt rounds up the resistance in this article and this blog posting. Late today, a fresh wave of criticism came to light from the Center for Space Exploration Policy Research and the Planetary Science Institute. Here's their news release:

"On August 24, a session of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly in Prague passed a resolution re-defining the planets of our solar system. Only 428 of the IAU's nearly 10,000 members were involved in the vote. A proposal crafted over the previous year by the IAU Planet Definition Committee would have expanded the number of objects designated as planets in the solar system to 12, with the potential for additions in the future. At the assembly, however, the proposal was modified over the course of several days to define the term with the intent of excluding all but the eight largest planets.

"Neither definition was subjected to critical review by the broader planetary science community prior to the assembly.

"As part of its role to examine the nature of scientific authority, the Center for Space Exploration Policy Research (CSEPR) is considering the role of the IAU and its findings, as well as a petition to reevaluate the principles for planet definition.

"Just after the August 24 vote, members of the space science community pointed out serious technical and pedagogical flaws in the IAU's definition of planets. As a consequence, a grass-roots petition was posted, stating:

"'We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU's definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed.'

"The statement was placed on the Web at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/planetprotest and circulated by e-mail to a small fraction of the world's astronomical research community.

"In less than five days, the petition was signed by 300 professional planetary scientists and astronomers. The list of signatories (posted at the Web site above) includes researchers who have studied every kind of planet in the solar system, as well as asteroids, comets, the Kuiper Belt and planetary interactions with the space environment. Many have been involved in the robotic exploration of the solar system from some of the earliest missions to Cassini-Huygens, missions to Mars, and ongoing missions to the innermost and outermost reaches of our solar system.

"Others are leading missions that are preparing for launch. The petition list includes prominent experts in the field of planet formation and evolution, planetary atmospheres, planetary surfaces and interiors, as well as international prize-winning researchers.

"'This petition gives substantial weight to the argument that the IAU definition of planet does not meet fundamental scientific standards and should be set aside,' states petition organizer Dr. Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. 'A more open process, involving a broader cross section of the community engaged in planetary studies of our own solar system and others, should be undertaken.'

"'I believe more planetary experts signed the petition than were involved in the vote on the IAU's petition,' adds co-sponsor Dr. Alan Stern, executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute. 'From the number of signatories that the petition received in a few days, it's clear that there is significant unhappiness among scientists with the IAU's planet definition, and that it will not be universally adopted by scientists and textbook writers.'

"'A key public policy question is who has the social mandate to alter the definition of something as fundamental as a planet,' says Dr. Mark Bullock, director of the CSEPR. 'Scientists have in the past vested the IAU with authority to name asteroids and other planetary objects. However, the word "planet" has cultural, historical, and social meaning and as such requires much broader discussion and consensus than those required for the naming of astronomical bodies.'

"The CSEPR is currently examining the nature of scientific authority, and its use and misuse in issues of fundamental concern to the public. The scientific and cultural value of the definition of planets, both within and outside our solar system, is of utmost significance. Accordingly, continues Stern, 'To achieve a good planet definition that achieves scientific consensus will require more work.'"

It should be noted that Stern is the principal scientific investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission, which was launched toward Pluto earlier this year. Sykes is a co-investigator for NASA's occasionally endangered Dawn mission - which will target another "dwarf planet," the asteroid Ceres. Bullock's specialty is planetary atmospheres, particularly on Venus and Mars.

So is this a time to "teach the controversy"?

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• RIA Novosti: Russia plans round-the-moon mission by 2012

The Federal Aviation Administration has given the environmental all-clear to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' plans for a suborbital launch operation in West Texas - setting the stage for final approval of the world's first private-sector spaceport.

The FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation issued its finding of no significant impact (PDF file) on Tuesday, along with a final environmental assessment (PDF file) for the proposed Blue Origin launch site, now under construction 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Van Horn, Texas, on a ranch owned by Bezos.

The documents follow up on a draft environmental assessment that was issued earlier this summer, which went into more than 200 pages' worth of detail on Blue Origin's plans. Since then, the FAA held a hearing in Van Horn and added just a few tweaks. For example, Blue Origin has signed onto an agreement to stop construction work if it came across any remains or historic objects that required preservation.

Several of my own questions about Blue Origin were included - and of course, I could have answered most of them myself if I had looked at the draft document more closely. For example, I should have known that Blue Origin's rocket components would be shipped down from its Seattle-area production facility to West Texas on commercial trucks. Some of them might be marked "Wide Load."

The bottom line is that Blue Origin has apparently cleared the last big hurdle standing in the way of spaceport operations. At the Van Horn hearing last month, the FAA's Douglas Graham said the environmental review process would take longer than the other requirements, which include a safety review and a look at the national security implications of Blue Origin's plans.

Thus, it shouldn't be too long before the FAA issues the appropriate permits and/or licenses for Blue Origin's rocket tests.

Blue Origin's plan is basically unchanged: The bulk of the construction work on the 18,600-acre (7,527-hectare) launch site should be finished up this year, and test flights could begin this year as well.

Those flights would start with relatively small-scale unmanned rocket tests, and lead up to manned flights in the New Shepard, Blue Origin's computer-controlled, vertical-launch-and-landing vehicle. At least three passengers would rise to a height of at least 100 kilometers (62.5 miles), from which they could see a curving Earth below the black sky of space. They'd feel a few minutes of weightless, experiencing what you could think of as the ultimate reverse bungee jump. The FAA document says the ride would last "more than 10 minutes."

Commercial service is due to begin in 2010, with up to 52 flights contemplated during the first year.

Then what? That will be the subject for a future licensing process, the FAA says. "Although Blue Origin proposes to continue operations at roughly the same rate beyond the 2010 timeframe, these operations are outside the scope of this analysis," the document states.

By the time Blue Origin begins taking on customers, several other companies might well be firmly settled in the suborbital space business. Who knows? Bigelow Aerospace might even be setting its sights on orbital trips, which would be much more of a draw than up-and-down jumps to the edge of space.

Will Bezos and his Blue Origin team be getting into the game too late, or will they actually be ahead of the game by receiving their FAA approval first? Feel free to weigh in with your comments.

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When NASA launched a pair of rovers to Mars more than three years ago, no one ever thought the darn things would still be working by now, says Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the top scientist for the Red Planet rover missions. The proof of that lies in the fix that the Mars program finds itself in today, with two separate missions transmitting on exactly the same frequency.

The data traffic jam isn't insurmountable, Squyres says, but it just goes to show that even a smashing success can carry complications.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell

A true-color image from NASA's Opportunity rover shows the "Baltra" outcrop in Beagle Crater, with a shallow hole drilled in the rock by the rover's rock abrasion tool. Click on the image for more.

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers were launched in the summer of 2003, and landed on opposite sides of the Red Planet in January 2004. Since then, the machines have had their glitches, but they're still producing piles of imagery and other scientific data.

"I never dreamed it was going to last this long," Squyres said.

Squyres admits that some of his colleagues have wondered whether he was really all that surprised. He must have known the rovers' ride was going to last more than the originally planned 90 days, right?

"When you look now, 940 days into what was supposed to be a 90-day mission, it'd be easy to convince yourself that we knew all along that it was going to be successful," he told me Monday. "And in fact, it was nothing like that. We lurched from disaster, to disaster, to disaster."

The evidence of that can be seen in "Mars Dead or Alive," a TV documentary being re-aired on PBS stations tonight. The program traces the preparations for the Mars missions, showing that at several points even before launch, Squyres and his team weren't sure whether the rovers would get off the ground.

In a backhanded way, the current data traffic jam provides still more evidence, Squyres said.

When Spirit was being prepared for flight, engineers built an extra X-band communications transponder as a spare. It turned out that the spare transponder wasn't needed for the Spirit rover - and instead, the equipment was put to use on another probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, which was launched to Mars last year.

At the time, the arrangement was seen as a clever money-saver. "The things cost a million bucks apiece," Squyres explained.

But there's a slight downside: The frequency settings are hard-wired into the transponders and can't be changed on the fly. "It turns out - and this is causing us all kinds of headaches now - that Spirit and MRO communicate with Earth at exactly the same frequency," Squyres said.

In this respect, the fact that Spirit is still alive and kicking is just a tad inconvenient.

"What it meant was the unthinkable occurrence that both spacecraft were alive at the same time," Squyres said. "Nobody expected that to be an issue, because everybody knew that Spirit would be dead by the time MRO got to Mars. And now it's come around to bite us."

Not that anyone resents Spirit's long life. Squyres said the mission teams for the rover and the orbiter "can work around the problem operationally," by orchestrating the interplanetary conversation so that Spirit's X-band is quiet when MRO is talking, and vice versa. Spirit also can use an alternate UHF antenna for communications with Earth through a Mars Odyssey relay.

Eventually, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter could serve as a data relay as well for Spirit as well as Opportunity.

So just how long can Spirit and Opportunity last? Obviously Squyres can't answer that question. But he does say both rovers are on the verge of a new spurt of exploration.

For now, Spirit is staying put in the Columbia Hills, with its solar panels oriented to make the most of the winter's wan sunlight. It recently weathered the southern hemisphere's winter solstice, and is conducting surveys of its surroundings while it waits for spring.

"The power will start very slowly creeping upwards before long, and boy, it's going to be good to see that," Squyres said. In six weeks or so, Spirit should be able to start rolling again.

Opportunity, meanwhile, is about 220 meters - a little more than twice the length of a football field - away from the rim of a half-mile-wide (750-meter-wide) Victoria Crater, which could serve as the stage for the rover's climactic scenes.

"Chances are that Victoria Crater is going to be Opportunity's final resting place," he said. "I don't expect we're ever going to leave the vicinity of Victoria Crater."

There are at least two reasons for that:

One is that the deep crater is likely to contain the best record of Mars' geological history ever found, and that it's likely to take more than a year (an Earth year, that is) to unravel that history. Even before Opportunity reaches Victoria's rim, NASA scientists want to check out a couple of smaller craters that could give them a foretaste of what Victoria itself will reveal.

"If we find that it's just like stuff that we've seen elsewhere, then we can move on," Squyres said. "But if we find that it's different, then we've got to take a little more time."

The other reason is that once you've seen Victoria, there's not much left to see, Squyres said: "You look around, and the next crater onward that's as big or bigger than Victoria is 25 kilometers (16 miles) away. ... This is it. Around us in every direction is a whole bunch of nothing."

But Squyres doesn't intend to end this adventure early, even if all that's left to see is a whole bunch of nothing. He's already had plenty of opportunities to immerse himself in other space missions. But as long as Spirit and Opportunity are willing, Sqyures intends to make them his first scientific priority.

"I've got to stay with these rovers," Squyres said. "Until the day they die, I'm going to be working with these rovers."

Keep posted on future chapters by checking out our "Return to the Red Planet" coverage as well as NASA's Web site for the Mars Exploration Rovers, Cornell's news archive and Squyres' own "Mission Update" page.

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• Wired: Science projects that scare us
• Discover: The next Katrina

"Never send a human to do a machine's job": It's one of my favorite quotes from Agent Smith in "The Matrix," and it also turns out to be a pretty close paraphrase of a space exploration dictum from engineer Gentry Lee, a veteran of NASA's Mars missions.

University of Maryland physicist Robert Park would agree with that dictum as well. He's a longtime critic of human space exploration, contending that robots can do the job more cheaply, more safely and more capably. That's why he's no fan of the international space station, as seen in this in-depth look at space station science.

So what would he spend the money on instead? He didn't hesitate to give three examples of robotic missions that could yield big payoffs but have been sidelined by NASA due to the agency's cost crunch:

• The Deep Space Climate Observatory, a.k.a. DSCOVR, a.k.a. Triana, a.k.a. GoreSat. This satellite would continuously monitor Earth in several wavelengths to learn about our planet's absorption of solar energy, and the effect on global climate. The $100 million spacecraft has been built and is ready for launch, but the mission has been mothballed. Park said sending DSCOVR to the L1 gravitational balance point is "the most important thing we could be doing in space right now."

Park pressed for the mission to proceed in a New York Times op-ed piece earlier this year, and several other articles have bemoaned DSCOVR's descent into limbo. Park told me that determining the root causes of global warming is "the most important question facing mankind, and we've built the device to do it."

He suspects the problem may have something to do with the satellite's parentage: DSCOVR was the latest incarnation of a mission suggested by Vice President Al Gore back in 1998. At the time, the satellite was criticized as little more than a 24/7 source of pretty space pictures - an "ideological playtoy," in the words of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. This timeline from NASA Watch makes it sound as if politics figured more prominently than science in the mission's genesis.

In any case, with the Republicans in charge of the White House as well as Congress, the prospects for "GoreSat" have definitely dimmed.

• The Terrestrial Planet Finder, or an equally powerful space telescope by another name. The TPF would actually be a set of telescopes flying in formation, with their observations combined through a trick known as interferometry. Such a telescope could spot planets like Earth orbiting distant stars, and perhaps even conduct a chemical analysis of those planets' atmospheres to look for telltale signs of life.

"We are now in a position where we have the capability to build a real space telescope," Park said.

This PDF file from NASA estimates the cost of the TPF at about $1 billion, but the cost almost certainly would be more than that. The most recent plan called for the mission to be phased in as two chunks, with completion due in 2020 or so. There are big questions about the technological hurdles facing the project. But for astrobiologists, the TPF (or something like it, such as the European Space Agency's Darwin probe) is a must-have tool in the hunt for Earthlike planets.

Unfortunately for astrobiologists, their favorite pursuits were hard-hit in the latest NASA budget, and projects like the TPF were put on the back burner. There's a ray of hope, however: The House's version of the NASA budget bill adds $10 million to keep the TPF project alive for the next fiscal year.

• The Europa orbiter would take a closer look at Europa, a mysterious moon of Jupiter that is thought to harbor a salty sea of liquid water beneath its globe-girdling crust of ice. The Galileo spacecraft found evidence for such an ocean - but the orbiter would carry radar-sounding equipment and other instruments that could delve more deeply into the mystery.

The mission went through several incarnations, one of the most recent being the nuclear-powered Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. NASA has shelved the idea for now, but Park says there's a "good chance" that a Europan ocean may actually contain some sort of extraterrestrial life. The House budget bill provides $15 million to fund preparations for an eventual Europa orbiter. You can traced the ups and downs of the Europa mission through this threaded discussion at UnmannedSpaceflight.com.

So those are Park's three top picks. "We ought to be getting on with it," he said. "Instead, we're squandering our resources on God knows what."

Would you agree with this list? Do you think sending people to the moon, Mars and beyond is more important? (Most of the people who have participated in our unscientific Live Vote say no.) Should it be all of the above? None of the above? Are some missions too good for NASA, or more appropriately funded by the private sector? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

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So, you want to become an astronomer? Maybe you had your appetite for stargazing built up by all these rumors about a monstrous Mars being visible this weekend, only to find out it's just an Internet hoax. Don't fret: It turns out there are plenty of opportunities to put your skywatching talents to good use - especially if you're a kid (or a kid at heart).

The first opportunity is the Star Count project, backed by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. This exercise is endorsed by none other than Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean, who's due to head for the international space station along with five crewmates aboard the space shuttle Atlantis this weekend.

Star Count calls upon students around the world to observe the night sky using simple equipment (OK, it can be a cardboard tube or even a rolled-up sheet of paper). You mark down how many stars you see, enter the numbers into an online database - and the result will eventually provide a good indication of how atmospheric light pollution in various locales affects the quality of night sky viewing.

MacLean will conduct his own observations during the shuttle flight, and check his results against the Star Count database. To learn still more about the project, check out the Canadian Space Agency's Web site and this report from The Canadian Teacher.

Then there's SuitSat, the empty spacesuit that was packed with amateur-radio transmitting equipment and shoved out from the space station back in February. The radio signals faded away months ago, but amazingly, the silent suit is still in orbit more than 200 days after its deployment, according to a report on ARRLWeb.

That means there's still time to enter the "Chicken Little Contest" organized by Amateur Radio on the International Space Station and the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp., known as Amsat. If you guess the exact day that SuitSat burns up in the atmosphere, you'll get a certificate. If SuitSat continues to beat the odds and outlasts your prediction, that's OK - all you have to do is renew your entry with a new date. (Tip o' the Log to Jim Oberg.)

Finally, the European Space Agency is putting out a call for amateur astronomers to turn their telescopes toward the moon on the night of Sept. 2-3, when the SMART-1 probe is due to smash into the lunar "Lake of Excellence."

The "smackdown" should raise a plume of debris from the impact, and the ESA hopes to gather observations from big-ticket observatories as well as small-fry observers. For the details, check out this technical data.

Here's hoping all these activities, plus the usual lineup of sky highlights, will take your mind off that nasty Mars hoax.

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Pluto's not a planet? That may be the verdict for now - but scientists, teachers and the general public will be digesting the International Astronomical Union's definition of planethood for years. Astronomers were quick to raise objections, and the debate over the worlds on the solar system's edge is sure to be revisited. So for now, think of plucky little Pluto's predicament as a classic "teachable moment."

That's how Carl Benoit, editorial director for Illinois-based Learning Resources, sees it. A week ago, the folks at Learning Resources were worrying about how they would rework their teaching aids - including solar system floormats, solar system stamps, their Planet Quest game and inflatable planet sets - to cope with a 12-planet solar system. Now they're wondering what to do about Pluto.

Benoit said the company would review their product line toward the end of the year and decide what needs to be done.

"What I'll recommend is that we'll obviously do the eight planets, and probably do something to label these dwarf planets to make sure everything's correct," he told me. "If I were to say today, would I recommend that? Yes, I would. But from what I'm reading, there could be 120 other dwarf planets."

Even if Pluto isn't on the official list of solar system planets, it may still stay in the educational lineup, Benoit said.

"I think it'd be a good idea to keep Pluto around and explain that this has been a planet for 76 years," he said. "It becomes an educational process, to explain to kids why it was a planet, and now why it's not. ... That's the kind of critical thinking that kids need to be doing when they do science."

That philosophical bent extended even to Patricia Tombaugh, the 93-year-old widow of Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's discoverer. She told The Associated Press that the IAU's verdict was "disappointing in a way, and confusing."

"I don't know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job," she told AP from Las Cruces, N.M. "But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes on. Clyde finally said before he died, 'It's there. Whatever it is. It is there.'"

She provided yet another aphorism to the Reuters news service: "Clyde would have said, 'Science is a progressive thing, and if you're going to be a scientist and put your neck out, you're apt to have it bitten upon.' He was a good scientist, and he knew how to judge things."

Reuters also gathered reaction from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Eleven-year-old Michael O'Sullivan, visiting from Garden City, N.Y., was amazed to hear the news. "Seriously! Pluto is not a planet?" he asked.

After a moment of thinking, he told the reporter: "At least Pluto the dog doesn't have to compete with the planet anymore."

The Disney cartoon canine has often crossed paths with the planet - in fact, the story goes that Walt Disney named the character Pluto to capitalize on the news of Tombaugh's discovery. During the IAU's crucial session, astronomers reportedly waved Pluto plush toys around to demonstrate their solidarity with the onetime planet.

Disney returned the love, according to Reuters: "Pluto is taking this news in stride," Disney Co. spokesman Donn Walker said, "and we have no reason to believe he might bite an astronomer."

If the decision sticks, schoolkids will have one less planet to memorize - but they'll also have to come up with new mnemonics to replace the old standbys, such as "My Very Eager Mother Just Sewed Us New Pajamas." We delved into this burning issue when it looked as if Xena might be added to the list of planets, but you're welcome to revisit the issue, either by submitting your comments here, or adding to the more than 1,000 postings on MSNBC's message board.

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The Large Magellanic Cloud serves as the cosmic canvas for a Turneresque view of starbirth in today's image from the Hubble Heritage Team.

The wisps of orangish dust seen in this  image may seem insubstantial, but they serve as the cradle where stars and planets like our own are born.

NASA / JPL / STScI / AURA

Glowing hydrogen and oxygen paint red and blue hues in this Hubble image of the N 180B star- forming region. Clouds of dust are shown in orange. Click on the image for larger versions.

The latest release from the Hubble Space Telescope's team shows a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud - which is a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way, roughly 160,000 light-years from Earth. Hubble's scientists say this region, known as N 180B, contains some of the brightest-known star clusters. Some stars are said to burn a million times as brightly as our own sun.

Such stars generate storms of ultraviolet radiation and violent winds of high-speed, electrically charged particles. The UV radiation ionizes interstellar hydrogen and oxygen, setting the gases aglow - and the winds disperse the streams across tens or hundreds of light-years.

In this picture, the oxygen glows in a colorized blue, while hydrogen clouds are marked as red. You can also see streamers of dust, stretching to a length of about 100 light-years (600 trillion miles) across the nebula. Orangish clouds of compact dust appear near the bottom right and top left corners of the image.

Stalks of dust that look like elephant trunks are visible among the clouds. They could give birth to fresh generations of stars, if they're compressed enough by the stellar winds. Such trunks in a different locale, the Eagle Nebula, have been made famous by a different Hubble picture known as the "Pillars of Creation."

This picture was actually taken back in 1998 by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, and processed by the Hubble Heritage Team. The stairstep shape of the picture, with blank spaces in the upper right corner, is the signature look for imagery from the WFPC2 ("Wiff-Pick Two") due to the camera's design.

If you haven't checked out the Heritage Team's archives, it's well worth clicking to. You can also browse through our own repository of greatest hits from Hubble and other space probes. And to keep up to date with the very latest imagery from Hubble, sign up for the Space Telescope Science Institute's "Inbox Astronomy" e-mail alerts. 

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For weeks, the name of NASA's next spaceship has been one of the space agency's worst-kept secrets. Today, "Orion" finally became official, after a space station astronaut spilled the beans yet again.

NASA

The Crew Exploration Vehicle, shown here in an artist's conception, will be known as the Orion, just as earlier moonships were known as Apollo spacecraft.

It's been weeks since the CollectSpace Web site (and Space.com) reported that NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle would be dubbed the Orion. CollectSpace's Robert Pearlman even published the logo designed for Project Orion.

So it was really no surprise when space station astronaut Jeff Williams, through no fault of his own, used the not-quite-official name in a spaceship-to-shore radio transmission today.  The Associated Press happened to be listening in as Williams delivered a statement celebrating the Orion name: "We've been calling it the Crew Exploration Vehicle for several years, but today it has a name - Orion," Williams declared.

The statement apparently was meant to be held back for release on Aug. 31, when NASA announces its selection of the prime contractor for the CEV project (either Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, which has the Boeing Co. on its team).

But because the name was aired on an open channel - and because AP reported the name - NASA apparently decided to go ahead and make it official, more than a week in advance of its original timetable. Here's the full statement from the space agency, released late today:

"NASA announced Tuesday that its new crew exploration vehicle will be named Orion.

"Orion is the vehicle NASA's Constellation Program is developing to carry a new generation of explorers back to the moon and later to Mars. Orion will succeed the space shuttle as NASA's primary vehicle for human space exploration.

"Orion's first flight with astronauts onboard is planned for no later than 2014 to the International Space Station. Its first flight to the moon is planned for no later than 2020.

"Orion is named for one of the brightest, most familiar and easily identifiable constellations.

"'Many of its stars have been used for navigation and guided explorers to new worlds for centuries,' said Orion Project Manager Skip Hatfield. 'Our team, and all of NASA - and, I believe, our country - grows more excited with every step forward this program takes. The future for space exploration is coming quickly.'

"In June, NASA announced the launch vehicles under development by the Constellation Program have been named Ares, a synonym for Mars. The booster that will launch Orion will be called Ares I, and a larger heavy-lift launch vehicle will be known as Ares V.

"Orion will be capable of transporting cargo and up to six crew members to and from the International Space Station. It can carry four crewmembers for lunar missions. Later, it can support crew transfers for Mars missions.

"Orion borrows its shape from space capsules of the past, but takes advantage of the latest technology in computers, electronics, life support, propulsion and heat protection systems. The capsule's conical shape is the safest and most reliable for re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, especially at the velocities required for a direct return from the moon.

"Orion will be 16.5 feet in diameter and have a mass of about 25 tons. Inside, it will have more than 2.5 times the volume of an Apollo capsule. The spacecraft will return humans to the moon to stay for long periods as a testing ground for the longer journey to Mars.

"NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, manages the Constellation Program and the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Exploration Launch Projects' office for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Washington."

As NASA lays its plans to return to the moon, some officials undoubtedly hope that Orion-Ares will become as well-known as Apollo-Saturn. So if the twists and turns of the naming process make a bit of news, so much the better.

In addition to the Orion brouhaha, there's another name game that space geeks can play, having to do with the trailer for the "Transformers" movie. One of my colleagues at MSNBC.com, Will Femia, touted the mini-movie in his freshly made-over Clicked blog. The only problem is, the rover is playing a different character.

The trailer misidentifies the six-wheeled rover as the British-built Beagle 2 probe, which was mysteriously lost just as it was landing back in late 2003. The real Beagle had no wheels at all, which would make it even more of a sitting duck for the movie's super-stomping villainbot.

Do you have a favorite space-fiction faux pas to share? Feel free to reference it in your comments below.

Update for 9:40 p.m. ET Aug. 22: I reworked this item to reflect the fact that NASA threw in the towel on its CEV secret. (Thanks to XRayDog for the heads-up.)

There's a new federation in the space business - and although it's not a United Federation of Planets, the membership is as diverse as a "Star Trek" crew, with high-profile rivals in the commercial space race sitting down at the same table.

"These people are the ultimate competitors - but that's not why they get around the table," Stuart Witt, general manager of the Mojave Spaceport and the treasurer of the Personal Spaceflight Federation, told me today. "They get around the table to talk about, 'How are we going to handle our first accident? What are we going to do first? How are we going to underwrite these operations?' ... That's a big deal to me."

The Personal Spaceflight Federation has actually been around since early 2005, but it's just now settling on a slate of officers as well as a dues structure that allows it to hire staff members and step up its activities.

The membership roster reads like a who's who list for the entrepreneurial space frontier:

• SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler, which won contracts just last week from NASA for a spaceship demonstration project, as well as SpaceDev and t/Space, which were passed over this time.
• Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, which are working on SpaceShipTwo, as well as Space Adventures, XCOR Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace, which are developing competing suborbital spaceships.
• California's Mojave Spaceport as well as New Mexico's Spaceport America, which are both vying for a piece of the suborbital space tourism pie.

Bigelow Aerospace, the X Prize Foundation and Air Launch round out the roster.

"There are going to be areas where we have different agendas," admitted Virgin Galactic's Alex Tai, who was elected as the federation's chairman during a meeting in May, "but I think those hopefully will be few and far between."

In addition to Tai and Witt, the federation's officers include XCOR Aerospace's Jeff Greason as vice chairman, Rocketplane Kistler's George French as secretary and Michael Kelly as president. As of this May, John Gedmark was hired as the group's executive director.

The entrepreneurs behind the federation - including Scaled Composites' Burt Rutan, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Bigelow Aerospace's Robert Bigelow - aren't exactly shrinking violets. But so far, they're not letting their ambitions get in the way of their common goals.

"At the end of the day, every single person who sat down in that room made it clear that we're here to build an industry, and not just create an environment for one or two companies to succeed," Gedmark told me.

The federation already has passed along a set of recommendations for revisions in the Federal Aviation Administration's rules for commercial human spaceflight. Most of those recommendations would streamline and sharpen safety regulations so that everyone is clear on the rules of the suborbital road.

"A solid regulatory background, based in common sense, is something that we should all fight for," Tai told me.

It sounds as if the FAA is on board with the industry effort as well. "The federation has made it clear that safety is their first concern," Patricia Grace Smith, the FAA's associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said in a statement. "That is, and must always be, the vital link among all partners in the industry, because it is the key to public confidence."

Tai said safety regulations are just one of the agenda items for the federation. Another priority is to ease the burden of U.S. export regulations for spaceflight technology - which has been a sticking point for Virgin Galactic as well as Space Adventures and Bigelow Aerospace, all of which are involved in international ventures. Insurance arrangements, the legal framework for space tourism and the "interoperability" of spaceport facilities are among other priorities, Tai told me.

Both Tai and Witt said such issues require cooperation among competitors - just as they did in the early days of civil aviation.

"I would put it more akin to 1929, where you had fledgling airlines competing with each other, but they sat down and said, 'We need to set some standards,'" Witt said. "History is rather on our side at this point, because the industrial players that we have around the table all see the benefit of sitting down once or twice a year and talking about common interests with the regulators and with Congress."

Witt said such "coopetition" is exactly what he hoped would happen when SpaceShipOne's X Prize flights opened up the era of private-sector spaceflight two years ago.

"It doesn't have anything really to do with competition," he said. "That will take care of itself."

While they were on the phone today, Tai and Witt also provided updates on their own efforts in the personal spaceflight revolution:

• Tai said Scaled Composites was "making great progress" on the development of SpaceShipTwo, the prototype for Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceship fleet. The prototype will undergo an "awful lot more testing" than SpaceShipOne did, and the design may be fine-tuned for the rocket planes that actually enter commercial service, he said.
• In the past, Virgin Galactic has said commercial service might start in the 2008-2009 time frame - and although Tai said the precise timetable was up to Scaled Composites, he thought the ships would be ready to go "within six months of that time period."
• The first pilots for the SpaceShipTwo flights have been named, including test pilot Dave MacKay and chief astronaut pilot Steve Johnson. These pilots - and future fliers - will be coming from the ranks of the Virgin Group's airlines. For the details, Tai pointed to a report from Flight International.
• Witt said a legislative bid for $11 million in loans for new facilities at the Mojave Spaceport was currently stuck in limbo in the California Legislature. However, he wasn't disheartened by the situation, because the debate raised the spaceport's visibility and may open the way to alternate funding sources. "I do believe we're going to see some relief," he told me. "It was a win, even though we didn't get our money. We have access to avenues of money now that were not there before."

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If it's August, it must be time for the Great Mars Hoax. You know, that e-mail message that says Mars is going to loom as big as the moon? It's actually a garbled version of the real science that surrounded our historic encounter with Mars in 2003. As it turns out, now is the worst time to look for Mars in the night sky. But just wait until December 2007...

Over the past couple of weeks, I've received several inquiries about claims that the Red Planet will be unusually, even uncomfortably close to Earth next weekend. From Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma, Win Kyaw wrote:

"Mars can be seen with our naked eyes in this month of Aug? How big?  ... Is there any danger of tidal waves in the oceans on Earth?"

Win was no doubt referring to e-mail chain letters like this one, preserved in the Urban Legends Reference Pages:

"The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.

"The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.

By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m. That's pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month. Share this with your children and grandchildren. NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN"

Or maybe Win saw this e-mail, captured by the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers:

"Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting next August 2006. It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will culminate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65 M miles of Earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the Earth has 2 Moons. Don't Miss it.....The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.

"NOTE : Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again. ONLY LIFETIME CHANCE THIS TIME"

There's even a PowerPoint presentation on the subject, preserved (with plenty of disclaimers) on the Alachua Astronomy Club's Web site.

Such e-mail chain letters have been popping up every August for the past couple of years. If we're talking about this year, absolutely none of this information is true. Mars is actually on the far side of the sun - and even if you were somehow able to make it out amid the sun's glare, it would be just a barely visible speck.

But if we're talking about 2003, some of the information in the first message is actually pretty accurate. What's been happening is that the basic specifications for the 2003 encounter - when Mars really did come within 34.6 million miles of Earth - have been repeated and, ahem, enlarged upon.

Notice how the first message says that the telescope image of Mars would seem as large as the full moon as seen with the naked eye. That was pretty much true for 2003. But in the second message, the facts are mixed up to make it sound as if Mars and the moon would be the same size this week.

If that were the case, there would indeed be bad news on the tidal wave front. As it is, however, Mars basically has no effect on the tides, even during its closest approaches.

And it'll be a while before Mars is in a good viewing position again. This December, the Red Planet will be emerging from the glare of the sun and should be visible in the morning sky. Its next close approach is due in December 2007, but even then, it will still be 55 million miles away. Thus, the view won't be as spectacular as it was in 2003 or even 2005. In fact, the year 2018 is the next time our view of Mars from Earth will be anything like it was in 2003 - and it'll take until 2287 for Mars to come closer than it did three summers ago.

This video from MSNBC's "The Most" provides additional background from the University of Colorado's Larry Esposito, and the Alachua Astronomy Club offers this fantastic visual aid.

If you were looking forward to a monstrous Mars, don't be totally disheartened: There's still plenty to see up above. Just before dawn on Tuesday, the moon will make a joint appearance with Mercury, Venus and Saturn on the eastern horizon. Check out this map from SpaceWeather.com for a guide. And this weekend, you can track the crescent moon's close encounter with Jupiter and the bright star Spica in the evening sky.

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Jerry Pournelle has seen both sides of the divide between science fiction and science fact: On one side, he's a novelist who, along with his frequent collaborator Larry Niven, is getting a lifetime achievement award at tonight's Writers and Illustrators of the Future Awards ceremony. On the other side, he's been an aerospace researcher, an adviser to President Reagan's transition team on space policy and an outspoken advocate for private-sector spaceflight.

To hear Pournelle talk, the business of science fiction makes a lot more sense nowadays than the politics of science fact.

Niven and Pournelle are being honored with the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to the Arts, which is funded from the estate of the late science-fiction author (OK, he also had something to do with Scientology, but I won't get into that here). The program provides $30,000 in prizes annually for writers and illustrators on the rise. This year, there are 24 honorees. Niven and Pournelle have been judges for the writing contest since 1985.

Pournelle told me he had no idea why the organizers of the award program decided to honor him and his writing partner. "They didn't consult me," he said. But he suspects it has something to do with their role in making science fiction, well, saleable.

"'Mote in God's Eye' was a New York Times best-seller, and then we did 'Lucifer's Hammer,' which got the biggest advance that any science-fiction book ever got," he recalled. "We had some effect on changing the perception by publishers about science fiction - that it was worth real money."

Today, science fiction is a huge genre - or even a spectrum of genres, ranging from the "hard science fiction" that Niven and Pournelle generally do, to fantasy tales covered with a thin patina of science fiction and space-opera lore.

"'Star Wars' is more fantasy than science," he observed. "We don't know of any mechanism by which someone could think his way into shooting lightning bolts out of his fingers."

The kind of routine space travel that Niven and Pournelle wrote about more than 30 years ago in "The Mote in God's Eye" is looking more and more like a fantasy nowadays, when NASA is struggling with the challenges of going back to the moon and on to Mars.

I asked Pournelle why real-life space travel was so far behind the time line laid out by science-fiction authors from H.G. Wells to Arthur C. Clarke. Why wasn't 2001 more like "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Pournelle refers to it as the "where's my flying car" question.

"The money was there," he said. "We have spent enough money on the space program that we should be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now."

Pournelle blames NASA and its need to sustain a permanent "standing army" of bureaucrats. He invoked his Iron Law of Bureaucracy (as he has many times before): Every bureaucracy has two types of people - those who are dedicated to the goals of the bureaucracy, such as educating children or building rocket ships, and those who are dedicated to the preservation of the bureaucracy itself.

"The second group always gets to be in charge," he said. "NASA is certainly no exception."

The way Pournelle sees it, that mind-set has kept human spaceflight frozen in place for a quarter-century. "Your flying car basically got eaten by NASA," he said.

Of course, some NASA officials are trying to change that. On the same day that we chatted, the space agency announced that two entrepreneurial-minded companies would get a shot at developing new types of supply ships for the international space station. Pournelle applauded such efforts - but he was still worried that the standing army would eventually grind down this latest wave of reform.

He had two recommendations for real change:

• First, take a page from the X Prize playbook and offer private-sector prizes for outer-space innovation. But don't be skimpy with the purse. Recently, billionaire Robert Bigelow said that there weren't any serious contenders for his $50 million orbital space prize - and when I mentioned that to Pournelle, he said the problem was that the prize was too paltry. He recommended offering $5 billion to the first U.S. company that puts the same spaceship into orbit 24 times in the course of a year, and $10 billion tax-free to the first company that keeps a 31-person colony on the moon for three years and a day. "How long do you think it would take?" he asked rhetorically. "I'd give it five years."
• Second, take a page from the X-plane program playbook from the 1950s and 1960s - experimental craft like the X-1, the X-3 and the X-15 (but not the X-33, which Pournelle called a "boondoggle"). If they're done right, experimental spacecraft can quickly translate on-paper technologies into true space vehicles, he said. "X programs do not invent new technologies," he said. "They build the best thing you can build with the technology that you have as of Aug. 31, 2006."

Pournelle is hopeful that the federal legislation laying out the ground rules for commercial spaceflight will, in a backhanded way, use Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy for good rather than evil.

"There's now a section of the FAA which won't exist unless it has something to regulate," he said. "That's always good."

For more of Pournelle's peppery perspective, you can always check out his Chaos Manor Musings on the Web. And for an introduction to the fictional writings of Niven and Pournelle, you can check out "The Mote in God's Eye," "Lucifer's Hammer" ... or a little number that I'll list as an official selection of the Cosmic Log Used Book Club. The CLUB Club highlights books with cosmic themes that have been out long enough to show up at your local library or used-book shop.

This month's selection, "Inferno," is a modern retelling of Dante's Inferno. "We wrote 'Inferno' from the point of view that people could actually escape from hell," Pournelle said.

The book is currently out of print, but you can still find it in the usual CLUB Club haunts. Moreover, Pournelle said that Tor Books is planning a reissue to coincide with the publication of a sequel, "Escape From Hell."

The second "Inferno" from Niven and Pournelle is due to come out in 2007, so that gives you plenty of time to page through the first book. By then, we may even find out if the science fiction of private-sector spaceflight is any closer to becoming science fact.

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An innovative space transmission system built by volunteers has started sending down pictures from the international space station to the whole wide world via amateur radio. Thanks to SpaceCam1, anyone with a police scanner or a suitable radio rig, plus a computer and the appropriate software, should be able to receive pictures from orbit, the project's organizers say.

Tony Hutchinson / SpaceCam1

Space station commander Pavel Vinogradov looks into the camera while he operates the SpaceCam1 system on his laptop, visible in the background.

The SpaceCam1 slow-scan television system, which combines a couple of hardware gizmos plus the signal-coding software on one of the station's laptop computers, has been three years in the making. The project follows up on a http://www.msnbc.com/news/227580.asp">less sophisticated system that was tested aboard Russia's Mir space station in its waning years.

"It's been fun, and this is just a steppingstone," said Miles Mann, project lead and chief executive officer for the MAREX amateur-radio club. MAREX was involved in the Mir project - and it teamed up with another volunteer group, Amateur Radio on the International Space Station, for SpaceCam1's next-generation SSTV system.

SSTV basically means snapping a digital still image and translating the scan lines of that image into a sequential stream of data. That stream can be transmitted on a radio frequency, then decoded on the other end to reconstitute the digital image.

On the space station, the original image can come from something as simple as a Webcam, hooked up to an onboard laptop. Astronauts can point the camera at themselves, at the station interior or just set it up at one of the station's windows for a view of Earth below.

The data conversion is done through software on the laptop plus a little hardware interface known as a "VOX box." Then the data is beamed down to Earth via a radio transmitter.

David Worboys / SpaceCam1

This SpaceCam1 picture shows NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, Russia's Pavel Vinogradov and Germany's Thomas Reiter, flanked by empty spacesuits.

Down on the planet, you can tune your scanner or radio receiver  to 145.800 mHz on the 2-meter band, pick up the signal, have it converted automatically on your own computer ... and voila! you've made contact. (Here's a technical how-to with links to shareware sources ... or you can do a Web search for software.)

The equipment and the software was sent to the station last September on a Progress cargo craft, and since then the space station astronauts have been working off and on to get the system running. On July 30, they sent the first still image - and at least two more have come down since then.

Farrell Winder, a retired electrical engineer who is part of the SpaceCam1 team, said the system was still being adjusted for the optimal operating mode. After the shakedown, the camera can be set to run even when the astronauts are off doing something else.

T. Veall / M. Beralso / SpaceCam1

SpaceCam1's first picture from orbit shows the space station's Expedition 13 logo mounted on a window, with a solar array and Earth's glare visible outside.

"We have great confidence that it's going to give us hundreds of pictures a day," he said.

And that's just the start. Eventually, the system will be able to receive pictures sent up to the station from licensed ham-radio operators, Mann said.

Mann is already dreaming of the day when a SpaceCam can be fitted aboard a moon-bound spacecraft, to serve as a transmitter or even as a relay for earthly transmissions. A fair number of radio enthusiasts are already bouncing their signals off the moon to reach faraway earthlings, Mann noted.

"We'd be able to increase the number of people who can do that tenfold," Mann told me.

For the record, here's the full release from the SpaceCam1 team:

Amateur Radio established an exciting "first" for the international space station on July 30, August 12 and August 13, 2006.  This event was the sending of still picture images from  the ISS via amateur radio. Amateur-radio and shortwave listeners in many countries including England, Russia, Brazil and Australia were able to see these images from the ISS, which is orbiting Earth approximately every 90 minutes at an altitude of around 225 miles.  These pictures were sent by ISS Commander Pavel Vinogradov, an amateur-radio Operator with call sign RV3BS.

The amateur-radio software program used to send pictures is called SpaceCam1. This project is currently being operated intermittently during the crew's free time.  After testing is complete, the system will have the capability of sending several hundred images per day from the ISS Amateur Radio VHF link. With a direct onboard camera feed pointed out the window or in the cabin, each picture sent down could be of unique content.

SpaceCam1 was developed over a three-year span. The concept was initiated by the same group that developed the very successful amateur-radio TV system flown on board the Russian space station Mir, 1998-2001.

Those involved with this amateur-radio development are:

Dr. Don Miller, W9NTP
Hank Cantrell, W4HTB
Miles Mann, WF1F
Farrell Winder, W8ZCF

While the Mir system was a hardware system, the ISS SpaceCam1 system is a software-based system which was developed primarily by Jim Barber, N7CXI, Silicon Pixels, working with the above team.

Several international amateur radio teams supported the final success of this system under the auspices of the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) international working group.

In the United States, team members from AMSAT (Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation), and NASA, under the direction of Frank Bauer, K3HDO, supported systems integration, safety verification and extensive ground-based testing.

AMSAT member Lou McFadin, W5DID, was responsible for the integration hardware between the Kenwood D700 Radio Transmitter and the onboard computer, which comprise the SpaceCam1 system.

In Russia, Sergey Samburov, RV3DR, chief of the Cosmonaut Amateur Radio Department, RSC Energia in Korolev, Russia, coordinated Russian cosmonaut training, onboard procedure development, hardware and software flight manifest on a Progress launch vehicle.

The final image downlink tests from ISS, performed over the last few days, were coordinated by a team that included Miles Mann, WF1F, MarexMG CEO; Kenneth Ransom, N5VHO, NASA Amateur Radio Coordinator; and Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, in the United States; Sergey Samburov, RV3DR, in Russia; and Pavel Vinogradov, onboard the ISS.

We expect many additional pictures to follow as soon as final tests are concluded.  SpaceCam1 has picture-receive capability aboard the ISS from Earth, which will be tested at a later date. ...

Anyone can receive picture signals from the ISS. See the MAREX-MG Web page, www.marexmg.org  for details about  receiving and tracking the ISS. See also the ARISS Web site, www.rac.ca/ariss. Being an amateur-radio operator is not a requirement for receiving transmissions from the ISS.

Amateur-radio contacts by the ISS crew with amateur operators on Earth give the crew a break from formal activity. We have learned from one of the recent crew members, Bill McArthur, KC5ACR, that it provides great pleasure and relaxation during off-duty time. It likewise gives amateur operators and schoolchildren on Earth a challenge and excitement of outer-space communications involving very interesting and educational pictures.

Update for 4:30 p.m. ET Aug. 21: I've revised the item to reflect the SpaceCam1 system's shakedown status.

PlanetSpace

An artist's conception shows a rocket taking off from PlanetSpace's proposed Nova Scotia launch facility. The schedule calls for orbital launches to begin by 2010.

Following up on last week's Log item about PlanetSpace, Canadian news outlets are reporting that Nova Scotia is setting aside 300 acres of coastal land on Cape Breton for the Canadian-American spaceship venture to use as a launch facility. The Globe and Mail calls it "Canada's Cape Canaveral."

"Cape Breton provides basically the anchor for our space program," PlanetSpace's chairman, telecom millionaire Chirinjeev Kathuria, told me today as he confirmed the plan. His current schedule calls for suborbital flights to begin in 2008, with the transition to orbital flights in the 2009-2010 time frame.

PlanetSpace's orbital design, known as the Silver Dart, is an updated version of the golden-oldie FDL-7 space glider that was once considered by the Air Force for space operations. The power behind it would take the form of a beefed-up Canadian Arrow being developed by Kathuria's Planetspace partner, Geoff Sheerin, with vintage V-2 technology as his guide.

PlanetSpace had been considering a lakeside Ontario site for its suborbital Canadian Arrow flights, and Kathuria said the Ontario scenario is still under consideration as well.

There are other initiatives in the air - including an agreement with a NASA center for technical assistance in developing the Silver Dart system, and a deal with a Midwestern state for a suborbital launch facility, Kathuria said. But for now, he declined to spell out the details of those pending deals.

PlanetSpace doesn't expect to get any money from NASA during the initial phase of its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS. But Kathuria said he hoped his venture's spacecraft would be far enough along by 2010 to be a serious contender for Phase 2 contracts to transfer crew and cargo to the international space station.

NASA has confirmed that the winners in the COTS program's Phase 1 competition, due to be announced Friday, won't be the only ones eligible to vie for Phase 2 money. The teams that were passed over during the Phase 1 review will have yet another opportunity - and PlanetSpace intends to put in a bid. Although he declined to go into detail (again), Kathuria said "corporate and institutional partners" were in place to fund spacecraft development even if NASA doesn't kick in any money.

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