Solscape

Frenzied star-making in the Milky Way Galaxy starting about 2.4 billion years ago had extraordinary effects on life on Earth. Harvests of bacteria in the sea soared and crashed in a succession of booms and busts, with an instability not seen before or since. According to new results published by Dr. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center, the variability in the productivity of life is closely linked to the cosmic rays, the atomic bullets that rain down on the Earth from exploded stars. Most likely, the variations in cosmic radiation affected biological productivity through their influence on cloud formation. Hence, the stellar baby boom 2.4 billion years ago, which resulted in an extraordinarily large number of supernova explosions, had a chilling effect on Earth probably by increasing the cloud cover.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/Research/Research_divisions/Sun_Climate/SC_The_Milky_Way_shaped_life_on_Earth.aspx

Astronomers have identified 20 new stellar systems in our local solar neighbourhood, including the twenty-third and twenty-fourth closest stars to the Sun. When added to eight other systems announced by this team and six by other groups since 2000, the known population of the Milky Way galaxy within 33 light-years of Earth has grown by 16 percent in just the past six years. The discoveries were made by a group called the “Research Consortium on Nearby Stars” (RECONS), which has been using small telescopes at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes since 1999. The new results will appear in the December 2006 issue of the Astronomical Journal.
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr06/pr0614.html

The European Space Agency (ESA) has elected to delay the launch of its next Mars mission, ExoMars, by two years. The decision gives ESA scientists extra time to test key technologies and to lobby for an expansion of the mission, which could almost double its cost. ExoMars is Europe’s first planned rover mission to Mars. Originally slated to launch in 2011, the mission will now blast off in 2013. The new launch date will allow ESA to spend more time refining technologies like airbags, supersonic parachutes, descent control, and stability systems. The rover’s drive systems and navigation controls are also likely to come under further scrutiny. The delay also gives mission planners time to expand the scope of the mission, something scientists have been pushing for since the mission was first mooted.
ExoMars @ ESA

In the South Pacific, south of Late Island along the Tofua volcanic arc in Tonga, a new volcanic island Home Reef is being re-born. The island is thought to have emerged after a volcanic eruption in mid-August that has also spewed large amounts of floating pumice into Tongan waters and sweeping across to Fiji about 350 km to the west of where the new island has formed. In 2004, a similar eruption created an ephemeral island about 0.5 by 1.5 km in size; it was no longer visible in an ASTER image acquired in November 2005. The following simulated natural color image shows the vegetation-covered stratovolcanic island of Late in the upper right. Home Reef is found in the lower left. The two bluish plumes are hot seawater that is laden with volcanic ash and chemicals; the larger one can be traced for more than 14 km to the east. The image was acquired on October 10, 2006, and covers an area of 24.3 by 30.2 km.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA01899.jpg

NASA moved the space shuttle Discovery to its launch pad on Thursday in preparation for its next mission in just under a month. Discovery arrived at launch pad 39B after 9 a.m. EDT on Thursday, a little less than nine hours after leaving the Vehicle Assembly Building. Discovery is scheduled to launch on mission STS-116, an ISS assembly flight, on the evening of December 7, 2006. The shuttle crew will deliver a third truss segment, a SPACEHAB module and other key components to the International Space Station.

A hurricane-like whirlpool with a well-developed eye ringed by towering clouds, a phenomenon never before seen on another planet, has been sighted by multiple Cassini instruments at Saturn’s south pole.
http://ciclops.org/view_event.php?id=57&flash=1

One year after its launch on November 9, 2005, and a few months into its science phase, ESA’s Venus Express keeps working well and continues to gather lots of data about the hot and noxious atmosphere of the planet. Newly released images show additional details of the thick cloud deck that surrounds Venus.
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMCTD0CYTE_index_1.html

An unexpected break in communications has NASA struggling to restore contact with its Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft. If communication cannot be restored soon, NASA may try to diagnose the problem by having another spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), take pictures of MGS. MGS recently had its 10-year anniversary in space. It was launched on November 7, 1996, and has been orbiting Mars since September 1997. It has far outlasted its original mission, which ended in 2000. NASA has repeatedly extended its mission since then.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/newsroom/20061107a.html

A large survey, made with ESO’s VLT, has shed light on our Galaxy’s ancestry. After determining the chemical composition of over 2000 stars in four of the nearest dwarf galaxies to our own, astronomers have demonstrated fundamental differences in their make-up, casting doubt on the theory that these diminutive galaxies could ever have formed the building blocks of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Cut from Different Cloth

A new image from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes looks more like an abstract painting than a cosmic snapshot. The masterpiece shows the Orion nebula in an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light colors.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/247-ssc2006-21-Spitzer-and-Hubble-Create-Colorful-Masterpiece