SPACE.com - Famed Mercury astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, is urging NASA to keep its space shuttles flying beyond their planned 2010 retirement to fill a gap in U.S spaceflight capability until a suitable replacement arises.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a complex network of gas clouds and star clusters within our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This region of energetic star birth is one of the most active in the nearby Universe.

John Glenn flew on the space shuttle in 1998. Credit: NASA

US spaceflight legend John Glenn has weighed in on the current human spaceflight debate, releasing an 8-page paper outlining his feelings and a potential plan to allow US astronauts to keep launching on US vehicles. While Glenn supports President Barack Obama's plan to extend operations of the International Space Station and to forego returning to the Moon for the time being, he thinks retiring the space shuttles at this point is a mistake.

"The world's only heavy lift spacecraft and the U.S.'s only access to space should stay in operation until suitably replaced by a new and well tested heavy lift vehicle," Glenn wrote. "The Shuttle system is working extremely well, has had systems upgrades through the years, and has had "the bugs" worked out of it through many years of use. The Shuttle is probably the most complex vehicle ever assembled and flies in the harshest of environments. Why terminate a perfectly good system that has been made more safe and reliable through many years of development?"
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Read the rest of John Glenn: Keep the Space Shuttles Flying (410 words)

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Satellite image of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, as seen on June 19, 2010. Credit: MODIS Rapid Response Team.

Here's the latest satellite image of the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil keeps spreading towards the northeast, and appears as a maze of silvery-gray ribbons in this image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The MODIS team said that the spot of black just north of the location of the oil well may be smoke; reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say that oil and gas continue to be captured and burned as part of the emergency response efforts.

The MODIS team is putting out about two satellite images of the region a day, which can be seen at this link.

Below is a video from reporter David Hammer from the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans, Louisiana, who is covering the BP oil spill, explaining the latest developments as of June 21,2010. Apologies for the 15 second ad at the beginning, but Hammer provides a good overview of what has been happening.
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Read the rest of Gulf Oil Leak: Day 62 Update (6 words)

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SPACE.com - A group of seventh-graders in California has discovered a mysterious cave on Mars as part of a research project to study images taken by a NASA spacecraft orbiting the red planet.

The search (xkcd)

To date, SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) has focused on ETs who 'phone home' using the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and even a very small region within that.

But what if ET's phone doesn't use radio waves? Sure the xkcd comic, is funny, but maybe it points to a deep flaw in our attempts to contact, or hear from, an ETI?

When Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison suggested the possibility of interstellar communication via electromagnetic waves in a 1959 paper in Nature, only radio was feasible, as we then had the ability to detect only artificial radio signals, if produced by ETIs with 1959 human technology. Since then we've developed the ability to detect a laser signal, brighter than the Sun (if only for a nanosecond) if it came from a source several light-years away … but lasers weren't invented then.

What might ET's equivalent of ants' pheromones be?
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Read the rest of Maybe ET's Calling, But We Have the Wrong Phone (814 words)

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AP - Mercury astronaut John Glenn wants NASA's space shuttles to keep flying until a reliable replacement is ready, no matter how long it takes.

Titan and Dione as seen by Cassini. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Another stunning image from the Cassini spacecraft, suitable for wallpaper on your desktop. Click image for larger version, or click here for a large 1.125 MB version.

This is Saturn's moon Dione, in crisp detail, against a hazy, ghostly Titan. Simply stunning.

The "wispy" terrain on Dione is visible, and on Titan are hints of atmospheric banding around Titan's north pole. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Dione (1123 kilometers, 698 miles across) and Titan (5150 kilometers, 3200 miles across), and was taken on April 10, 2010.

No images available yet from Cassini's extremely close flyby of Titan over the weekend where it buzzed the hazy moon at an altitude of just 880 kilometers (547 miles) above the surface. (...)
Read the rest of Titan + Dione = New Desktop (203 words)

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LiveScience.com - The pools have opened and kids are out for summer break, but in an astronomical sense summer begins Monday, which is officially summer solstice for the Northern Hemisphere.

SPACE.com - WASHINGTON — Frustrated by a lack of visibility into the planning and analysis underpinning NASA's dramatic shift in course for its human spaceflight program, House lawmakers have given NASA Administrator Charles Bolden until June 25 to deliver all records, charts, e-mails, voice messages and other supporting materials used in drafting the agency's 2011 budget proposal.

In part 2 of the Mars500 video diary Romain Charles shows us around the control room, the medical facility where the crew do experiments, and where they sleep and eat. Catch a glimpse of his Russian crewmates preparing lunch - see what's for dinner and what's growing in the greenhouse.

AFP - New Delhi's metro train system, which residents and tourists hope will ease congestion in the Indian capital, made a key breakthrough Monday by linking up with the satellite town of Gurgaon.

Kepler Discovers Hundreds of New Planets

SPACE.com - A spectacular new image taken by astronauts on the International Space Station shows the various layers of Earth's atmosphere during sunset over the Indian Ocean.

Sunrise as seen by Doug Wheelock (Astro_Wheels on Twitter) from the ISS.

Expedition 23 astronaut Soichi Noguchi took and shared so many amazing images during his 6-month stay on board the International Space Station, and I was a little worried that his return to Earth would result in a bit of a let-down in the space imaging department. I now see I had nothing to fear: Three new members of the Expedition 24 crew arrived at the ISS late last week and Doug Wheelock seems to have filled Soichi's shoes (or socks, since they don't wear shoes on the ISS) quite nicely. He posted two new images today on his Twitpic page that are nothing short of stunning. This image, above of an orbital sunrise provides a great look at the ISS bathed in "morning" light.

"A stunning sunrise aboard the International Space Station, as seen from the Russian MRM1 Module. We're blessed with 16 sunrises each day!" Wheelock, a.k.a Astro_Wheels wrote.

See below for an aurora he captured over the South Pole.
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Expedition 24 heads to the ISS, more water on the Moon (and Mars, too), Kepler finds lots of potential planets, and Miles O'Brien has an exclusive interview with former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin about SpaceX and the space program's new direction.

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Credit: SETI Institute

Fifty years of eerie silence in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence has prompted some rethinking about what we should be looking for.

After all, it’s unlikely that many civilizations would invest a lot of time and resources into broadcasting a Yoo-hoo, over here signal, so maybe we have to look for incidental signs of alien activity – anything from atmospheric pollution on an exoplanet to signs of stellar engineering undertaken by an alien civilization working to keep their aging star from turning into a red giant.(...)
Read the rest of Astronomy Without A Telescope – SETI 2.0 (566 words)

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An artist's rendering of a Kuiper Belt object. Image: NASA

How do you study an extremely small planetary body in the dim outer reaches of our solar system? Get all your friends from around the world to wait for a very elusive – if not short-lived – special event. And in doing so, you may find something completely unexpected. Enter James Elliot from MIT, who worked with dozens of observatories and astronomers across the globe, including Jay Pasachoff from Williams College in Massachusetts, in an attempt to make observations of the Kuiper Belt Object 55636, (also known as 2002 TX300) a small body orbiting about 48 AU away from the Sun. Since this KBO is too small and distant for direct observations of its surface, the astronomers tracked and plotted its course, figuring out when it would pass in front of a distant star.

The KBO occulted, or passed in front of a bright background star, an event which lasted only 10 seconds. But in that short amount of time, the astronomers were able to determine the object's size and albedo. Both of these results were surprising.
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Read the rest of Occultation Reveals Distant Kuiper Belt Object is Surprisingly Icy Bright (875 words)

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It's a crater, but where is it located? You can find the answer to this week's Where In The Universe Challenge back on the original post. And check back next week for another test of your visual knowledge of the cosmos! Great job, everyone!

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Mars500 participant Diego Urbina (follow him on Twitter at @diegou) provides a tour inside the Mars500 facilities – see how the crew are living and working for the next 17 months in isolation. On June 3, 2010 Urbina and five fellow crewmates from Europe, Russia and China embarked on a 520-day mock mission to Mars, and are living in a crew module in a warehouse in Moscow. See our preview article here.

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