Pasadena CA (SPX) Feb 08, 2010 - This composite image shows the effects of two galaxies caught in the act of merging. A Chandra X-ray Observatory image shows a pair of quasars in blue, located about 4.6 billion light years away, but separated on the sky by only about 70 thousand light years.

If you've been peeking out the windows at night, or maybe looked up while walking the dog before bedtime or taking out the trash after dinner, perhaps you've seeb three fairly bright stars in a row. Depending on how early or late you look, you may see them lined up side-by-side above the horizon, or they may be one on top the other when they are setting to the west. If you've noticed them, you wouldn't be the first… Humankind has been telling stories about this set of stars for centuries!

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden introduced today five commercial space companies that NASA will use to support transport of crew to and from low Earth orbit as part of the Commercial Crew Development program. The firms were selected in an open competition for $50 million in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. During the event, Bolden countered the criticism of NASA's new plan proposed by President Obama. "I respectfully disagree if you think we are abandoning human spaceflight. I think we'll get there quicker. This is a fundamental re-baselining and a new ways of doing business to develop a program that is truly sustainable for the long term," Bolden said. "This is a roadmap to even more historic achievements… We are not abandoning human space flight by any stretch of the imagination. We are on a new course, but human space flight is in our DNA."

NASA's new proposed budget will in part shift the space agency's focus from landing people on the moon back to Earth, with more money slated to go to projects that will help us understand our planet's climate and even plans to re-launch the carbon observatory that failed to launch last year.

If I told you that your great, great, great grandkids would be building houses on that crimson world known as Mars, what would be the first thought to enter your head?

Rovers? Check! A comfy Martian house? Check! Power cutting rock tools? (for us guys) Double check! A bio fuel gas tank? Che–huh?!

Cumbrian Sky: Please, PLEASE, PLEEEEEASE go over to my “Road To Endeavour” blog to see the latest images of Concepcion Crater, taken by Oppy. I’ve stitched them together and colourised them to make them into a – well, you’ll have to go see for yourselves… but trust me, it’ll be worth clicking on the following link.

There were many, many treats waiting on the Cassini raw images website this morning. Yesterday, Cassini traversed the G ring, taking photos all the way. While doing so the spacecraft passed within 13,000 kilometers of Aegaeon, the tiny, recently discovered moon that is now believed to be the parent body of the G ring. (Small meteorite impacts onto Aegaeon would toss up dust particles that would escape the little moon's almost nonexistent ....

The Mars rover Spirit, which this month passed its sixth anniversary of landing on the Red Planet, will apparently rove no more. NASA announced in a teleconference Tuesday that Spirit, stuck for months in a patch of soft soil known as Troy, has been designated a "stationary research platform". Spirit has not managed to free itself in a series of extraction maneuvers that began in November , and the rover's controllers say that their focus must now turn to preparing for the onset of winter in the Martian southern hemisphere--a harsh season, lasting nearly half an Earth year, that Spirit may not survive.

For the past 50 years, scientists have scoured the skies for radio signals from beyond our planet, hoping for some sign of extraterrestrial life. But one physicist says there's no reason alien life couldn't already be lurking among us — or maybe even in us.

Last night I was tweeted by NASA Astronaut TJ Creamer (whose praises I have sung on Twitter more than once ;-) ) and I have never been so excited as I was when I saw his responses! It was such a HUGE thrill to get a message from the International Space Station - absolutely amazing! As you can tell 24 hours later and I am still excited!

During a total solar eclipse in 2009, a group of Czech solar astronomers took a series of photographs of the event. The result is an incredibly detailed view of the inner structure of the solar corona.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted more impact craters on Mars. This time however, the craters are fresh and there's a cluster of them, exposing dark rock under the dust.

A meteorite "no bigger than the size of a mango," according to a local news station, slammed into a doctor's office in Lorton, Va. on Monday, punching a hole through the roof, a firewall, ceiling and then drove a divot into an examination room floor before shattering. The chondrite is estimated to have hit the building at a velocity of over 220 miles per hour (354 km/hr).

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has completed all 30 relay overflights of the Phoenix landing site that were scheduled for Jan. 18 to 21, and heard nothing from the lander. Additional listening campaigns will be conducted in February and March. The Phoenix landing site will be receiving more sunshine during those periods, but the lander is still unlikely to be able to reawaken after the harsh Martian winter conditions that it was not designed to withstand. Phoenix operated for two months longer than its planned three-month mission on Mars in 2008.

NASA's Mars exploration rover Opportunity is allowing scientists to get a glimpse deep inside Mars. "Marquette Island is different in composition and character from any known rock on Mars or meteorite from Mars," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. "It is one of the coolest things Opportunity has found in a very long time."

Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher, is credited with saying, "There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres." This idea of the "Music of the Spheres" has endured over the centuries, ultimately informing how Kepler visualized the movements of the planets, which led him to formulate his laws of planetary motion. The notion that the stars, planets and galaxies resonate with a mystical symphony is a rather appealing one.

If you've ever been curious about how this music would sound, I'd invite you to watch and listen to The Wheel of Stars. Jim Bumgardner, a software engineer specializing in visualizations who consults out of his home in Los Angeles, created this visualizer that utilizes data from the Hipparcos mission. The program puts the stars in the sky to an ethereal music of their own making.

 Using the vibration from a stereo speaker to levitate dust off of surfaces may one day help keep colonies up and running on Mars and the Moon. Blasting a high-pitched n0ise from a tweeter into a pipe that focuses the sound waves can create enough pressure to lift troublesome alien dust off surfaces, according to a study published January in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Dust is one of the biggest obstacles for long-term lunar and Martian space colonies. On the moon, there’s no atmosphere and no water, so the dust particles don’t get moved around, worn down and rounded like they do on Earth.

Pasadena CA (SPX) Jan 20, 2010 - Sols 2137-2143 - Spirit remains embedded at the location called "Troy" on the West side of Home Plate. Extrication drives were tried on sols 2138, 2140 and 2142 (Jan. 7, 9 and 11, 2010).

A strange comet-like object discovered on January 6, 2010 may actually be the result of a collision between two asteroids. Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey in New Mexico spotted an object in the asteroid belt, called P/2010 A that looked "fuzzy," with a tail like a comet rather than a speck of light like a normal asteroid. But comets don't normally reside in the asteroid belt, and the object's orbit is all wrong for a comet. While the asteroid belt is made up of debris from the "leftovers" of our solar system, and like the remains of early crashes between giant rocks, astronomers haven't witnessed a collision before.