The U.S. space agency says its Messenger spacecraft will make the second of three flybys of Mercury next week to collect more science data. NASA said the flyby also will provide a critical gravity assist needed for the probe to become, in March 2011, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. "The results from Messenger's first flyby of Mercury resolved debates that are more than 30 years old," said Sean Solomon, the mission's principal investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Sep. 30--The UA-led Phoenix Mars Mission has discovered a substance nearly as alien to Tucson as the red planet itself: snow. A series of weather experiments made public on Monday shows that clouds recently formed above the spacecraft have been releasing snow into the Martian atmosphere, though Phoenix has yet to see any of it hit the ground. And while the latest discovery twists scientists' understanding of weather on Mars, another series of experiments has mission leaders believing that water frozen beneath the arctic soil once existed as a liquid on the surface of the region.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA said Monday it is delaying its shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope until next year because of an unexpected breakdown of the telescope. Space shuttle Atlantis was scheduled to blast off in just two weeks, carrying seven astronauts on a mission to upgrade the telescope. But on Saturday night, Hubble stopped sending science data, meaning it is unable to capture and beam down the information for its stunning deep space images.

China, hailing its astronauts' successful spacewalk, has set its sights on a manned lunar landing when its current three-stage space program ends in 2020. "When the three-phased strategy in our manned space program is completed, we will travel even further terrestrially," Wang Zhaoyao, deputy head of China's manned space program and spokesman for the spacewalk mission, told reporters after the latest mission ended Sunday with the return of the astronauts after their 20-minute spacewalk, China Daily reported. "After comprehensively analyzing the general trend in international manned space developments, as well as Chinese realities, we see a manned lunar landing as both a very challenging and tactical field in global hi-tech," he said.

Sep. 29--Reacquainting Pittsburgh's youngsters with "Uncle John" Brashear will begin in the same North Side factory where the renowned optics expert toiled over precision mirrors and lenses for Gilded Age telescopes. Historian and musician Lisa A. Miles wants to transform Brashear's vacant Perrysville Avenue factory into a temporary classroom to teach about the scientific achievements of Brashear, who died in 1920, and contemporaries such as astrophysicist Samuel Pierpont Langley. Brashear was acting chancellor of Western University of Pennsylvania -- now the University of Pittsburgh -- from 1900 to 1904.

To some, Irvine-based telescope maker Meade Instruments Corp. has lost its focus. The maker of telescopes, binoculars and microscopes has been dogged by supply issues since moving the last of its manufacturing from Irvine to Mexico earlier this year. Last month, Meade reported a 32% drop in sales from a year earlier to $12 million for the three months through May.

Scientists using data from the U.S. space agency's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters. National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers say the cause of the motion might be the gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe. "The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," said lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We never expected to find anything like this."

The U.S. space agency says the Kepler spacecraft, scheduled to be launched next year, has survived a thermal vacuum test. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration test simulates the vacuum of space, and the extreme temperatures Kepler will face. "The goal is to make sure the spacecraft and its detectors operate properly in the space-like environment," NASA said, noting an electromagnetic compatibility test, to ensure Kepler's electronics are sound, will soon begin.

JERUSALEM - Albert Einstein's long-lost telescope, forgotten for decades in a Jerusalem storage shed, goes on display this week after three years and $10,000 spent restoring the relic. The old reflecting telescope is cumbersome by modern standards, but a demonstration for The Associated Press showed it still works well enough to see five of Jupiter's moons and stripes on the surface of the huge planet. It was a gift from a friend named Zvi Gizeri, who probably made it himself, said officials at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where the public will be able to view the telescope starting Thursday.

WASHINGTON - The sun has dialed back its furnace to the lowest levels seen in the space age, new measurements from a space probe show. The solar wind - a stream of charged particles ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere at 1 million miles per hour - is significantly weaker, cooler and less dense than it has been in 50 years, according to new data from the NASA-European solar probe Ulysses. The cause for the sun's slight weakening seems to be a change in its magnetic flux, said Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says its Swift satellite has found the most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected. The burst occurred less than 825 million years after the universe began, when the universe was less than one-seventh its current age. "This is the most amazing burst Swift has seen," said scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It's coming to us from near the edge of the visible universe."

WHEN the first man landed on the moon, he found an enterprising Indian welcoming him to dine at his eatery. Chandrayaan-I, India's maiden unmanned mooncraft, the size of a table, is all ready to take off in a rocket 50 metres tall, weighing 400 kilogrammes. Indeed, it is a cooperative and a global scientific endeavour, with European and American instruments hitching a ride on a satellite and rocket designed and launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro).

Sep. 17--NASA officials gave the UA-led Phoenix Mars lander another two months to live this week, buying scientists even more time to conduct the final experiments on the red planet's arctic surface. In August, NASA gave Phoenix an extra month to finish several experiments, drawing on previously earmarked funds to continue operations. Given the extra time, it appears that the mission will continue until there either isn't enough solar power to keep the lander alive or wind storms and dry ice cause it severe damage, said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

WASHINGTON--NASA chose a University of Colorado proposal for a $485 million Mars mission on Monday after a nine-month delay caused by a conflict of interest in the selection process. NASA chose the University of Colorado's proposal to study the Martian atmosphere from 20 other ideas to study Mars that were trimmed to just two before a conflict of interest was declared. The space agency said last December that a "serious" conflict of interest in one of two proposals forced it to disband the board formed to pick the winner and create a new panel to award the contract.

Sep. 15--Damage assessments from Hurricane Ike at NASA's Johnson Space Center continued on Sunday, and a space agency spokesman said it could be late this week or sometime next week before the facility is ready to reopen for normal operations. Johnson, which employees 16,500, received roof damage to the Mission Control Center, the installation that watches over the international space station and its three-man American and Russian crew. Teams of controllers near Austin established a temporary control center before Johnson was closed on Thursday.

Sep. 7--CAPE CANAVERAL In congressional testimony and speeches across the country, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has presented the Bush administration's space policy as under pressure but on track to returning humans to the moon by 2020. In a remarkably candid internal e-mail to top advisers obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, Griffin lashed out last month at the White House for what he called a "jihad" to shut down the space shuttle, expressed frustration at the lack of funding for a new moon rocket -- and despaired about the future of America's human-spaceflight program.