At the International Aerospace Exhibition and Conference (ILA) in Berlin, May 2006, a new ‘International Space Village’ within groups together space agencies and industry from around the world. In the space pavilion Europe's highly ambitious Aurora programme for the future exploration of Mars and the solar system is featured, including the ExoMars rover.

The large rover and its deployment on the surface of Mars are probably the most challenging elements of the ExoMars mission, currently slated for launch in 2011, which will search for traces of life on and underneath the surface of Mars. The rover will carry a payload, dubbed Pasteur, and will be equipped with a drilling system that will reach up to two metres below the Martian surface. 

Through the mock-up and accompanying background animation the many visitors to ILA2006 could gain an appreciation of the different mission phases, the rover surface operations, as well as the rover's expected size.

While an artist's view was used to produce both the rover and its animated graphics, European industry is gearing up to design and manufacture the real thing after having conducted conceptual studies (Phase A) both for the mission and for the rover as one of the mission elements.

Artist's rendering of Orbital's Hybrid Launch Vehicle (HLV) in flight (Photo: Business Wire).

“For the first time, we have discovered a planetary system composed of several Neptune-mass planets”, said Christophe Lovis, from the Geneva Observatory and lead-author of the paper presenting the results.

During more than two years, the astronomers carefully studied HD 69830, a rather inconspicuous nearby star slightly less massive than the Sun. Located 41 light-years away towards the constellation of Puppis (the Stern), it is, with a visual magnitude of 5.95, just visible with the unaided eye. The astronomers’ precise radial-velocity measurements allowed them to discover the presence of three tiny companions orbiting their parent star in 8.67, 31.6 and 197 days.

Artist's rendering of Orbital's Hybrid Launch Vehicle (HLV) in flight (Photo: Business Wire).

Mr. Brian Winters, Orbital's HLV Program Manager, said, "The U.S. Air Force seeks a space launch architecture that combines the cost reductions and fast response time that a reusable design offers, while avoiding some of the penalties associated with a fully reusable system. We are using the X-34 research vehicle that Orbital designed and built for NASA in the late 1990's as a point of departure for this effort. As a result, the HLV effort is afforded a significant head start compared to starting the program from scratch."

Under the HLV Studies and Analysis contract, Orbital is evaluating alternative aerodynamic, propulsion and structural configurations, identifying potential development program risk and mitigation plans, and providing recommendations for technical risk reduction activities.

This illustration compares the size of a gargantuan star and its surrounding dusty disk (top) to that of our solar system.

The discovery was made through NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope observations of two hypergiant stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud--the Milky Way's nearest neighboring galaxy--by a team led by Joel Kastner, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology's Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. His team's findings will appear in the Feb. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

So far, searches for planets outside the solar system have been restricted to sun-like stars. All of these stars are older, dimmer and cooler objects than hypergiants, which are extraordinarily large and luminous but shorter-lived by billions of years.

Kastner and his team used infrared spectra obtained by Spitzer to study a population of dying stars. They added a new direction to their project when Spitzer's infrared spectrograph revealed unexpected information. Spitzer's sensitive spectrometer, which breaks down infrared radiation into component wavelengths as a prism splits visible light into a rainbow, indicated that a third of the stars in the population thought to be in decline--including two massive and exceedingly luminous hypergiants--were actually younger stars in varying stages of development.

The curious spectra of these two hypergiants (R126 and R66)--with one star being 70 times bigger than the sun--led Kastner to reexamine the stars' classifications as dying. The shape of the spectra, or the amount of light from different wavelengths, is characteristic of flattened disks of dust orbiting the stars.

The two stars' similar spectra differ in detail, with one encircled by dust in crystalline form, the other by more shapeless, amorphous dust grains. This expands the range of known conditions under which complex dust grains and molecules can form and persist around stars, Kastner says.