NASA has ended operational planning activities for the Mars rover Spirit and transitioned the Mars Exploration Rover Project to a single-rover operation focused on Spirit's still-active twin, Opportunity.

This marks the completion of one of the most successful missions of interplanetary exploration ever launched.

It was a perfect launch. At exactly 02.08 a.m. Indian time on Saturday, from Kourou, French Guiana the 800-tonne Ariane 5 launcher carrying two communications satellites weighing over 9000 kilos in its nose fairing, blasted off into space. India’s GSAT-8, the largest and heaviest satellite built by ISRO and its partners weighing 3,100 kg , was one of the two "co-passengers" on the flight. The other, an even heavier satellite weighing 5 tonnes was from Singapore and Taiwan.

NASA's Space Shuttle mission STS-134 is the final flight for Endeavour and the second to last flight for the Space Shuttle Program. Endeavour cleared the pad just after 1826 Indian time 16th May (1256 GMT; 1356 BST). Its thunderous rise into a bright morning sky over the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was watched by hundreds of thousands of spectators.It is now on a path to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday.The ship will deliver a $2bn particle physics experiment, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), and a tray of critical spare parts..  

Indian Space Research Organisation has built a supercomputer, which is to be India's fastest supercomputer in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 TeraFLOPS (220 Trillion Floating Point Operations per second). The supercomputing facility named as Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility is located at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram. The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based supercomputer named "SAGA-220"  (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems. The supercomputer SAGA-220 was inaugurated by Dr K Radhakrishnan, Chairman, ISRO today at VSSC...  

This month is the centenary of what is arguably the most amazing discovery of the 20th century – that the apparently solid world around us is mainly empty space.  Yes atoms the basic structural units of the entire universe are more than 99.9999% empty. (But empty space have quiet different meanings - quantum mechanics never speak of empty space). Imagine how it will be when there is no empty space in an atom - the unverse would shrink to 0.00000001 % (u can put 12 zeros between '.' and '1' ).

In May 1911 Philosophical Magazine published a research paper by Ernest Rutherford. He had analysed the results of some measurements by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, who worked with him at Manchester University. The analysis led Rutherford to the conclusion that all the positive electric charge within an atom, and most of the mass, must reside in a tiny central region, with the negatively charged electrons swirling round far away. The central core became known as the atomic nucleus and the study of it led to our understanding of the fundamental particles and forces in the Universe.
 

Frankly one of the most hated names of the last decade - " Osama Bin Laden " will now join in the names of dead rather in the list of killed.  Osama bin Laden, leader of al Qaeda and alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, was killed in Pakistan in a joint operation involving the United States and Pakistani intelligence forces, according to President Barack Obama.

Looking tired and bleary-eyed, Mr. Obama made a statement shortly after 11:30 pm, in which he confirmed that bin Laden had been killed after a “fire-fight” in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and that U.S. forces then “took custody of his body.”

May be since the early evolution of mankind - we humans always stare at the dazzling sky counting stars. We prayed the Sun, our Moon, the stars as our Gods. Our ancient civilizations had the idea of the planets - their positions and discoverd a science called astrology to guess the future - which still attracts attention from round the Globe. But since Gallileo discovered telescope and Copernicus , Keppler set forth planetray theories man's quest to know outside this Globe has intensified. And at the turn of 20th century Man was really unstoppable and started erasing the boundaries one by one - Its 50 years since First Human Journey into outer space - Yuri Gagarin , 41 years man set his foot on moon and we are continuing various missions to scan the outer space and looking for exoplanets - where civilizations may be existing. And there is one more silent spacecraft that is reaching places so far that no human made object has ever reached before.

More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA's twin Voyager probes. Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched about two weeks later, on Sept. 5. Since then, the spacecraft have been traveling along different flight paths and at different speeds. Now some 17.4 billion kilometers (10.8 billion miles) from the sun and are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they're still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling. The message is, "Expect the unexpected." Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. Voyager 2 is about 14.2 billion kilometers (8.8 billion miles) from the sun.