It was hoped the robots would work for at least three months; but their longevity in the freezing Martian conditions has surprised everyone.

"These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day," said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity at Nasa's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Spirit has to drive backwards everywhere it goes because of a jammed wheel; and Opportunity's robotic arm has a glitch in a shoulder joint because of a broken electrical wire.

The full Moon will loom larger in the sky on Friday than it has since 1993, as it will be nearly as close as it ever comes to Earth in its orbit.

On 12 December, the Moon will enter its full phase, when its disc appears completely illuminated by the Sun, just four hours after reaching its closest point to Earth. This will make it 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons in 2008, though the difference will be hard to distinguish by eye.

The high-resolution color image from GeoEye-1, which was launched on September 6, was of Kutztown University campus in Pennsylvania.

While the fact that the satellite is being used by Google is getting all the attention, GeoEye-1's main client is the US government's mapping arm, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. GeoEye-1's government client will receive higher resolution photos than commercial clients such as Google.

In a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere.

After a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation.

The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn't there before. In fact, they don't even know where it is exactly located because it didn't behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.

The year is 1908, and it's just after seven in the morning. A man is sitting on the front porch of a trading post at Vanavara in Siberia. Little does he know, in a few moments, he will be hurled from his chair and the heat will be so intense he will feel as though his shirt is on fire.

It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. During its quick plunge, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit. At 7:17 a.m. (local Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs.

Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected.

"It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us."

Stephen Hawking, has called on the world to dedicate a meagre 0.25 per cent of all its financial resources in a push towards setting up settlements on the Moon, Mars, infinity and beyond.

He suggested first shooting for the Moon again in 2020, and maybe a human mission to Mars five to ten years later.

A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays - and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

"Viewed from Earth, the rotating tail appears to be laid out on the sky in an almost perfect spiral. It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," said Tuthill.

This means we are peering down the barrel of the gun, as when binary supernovae go off, all their energy is focussed into a narrow beam of wildly destructive gamma ray radiation that emanates (both up and down) from the poles of the system.

Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life.

A review panel, convened in the wake of the Lisa Nowak arrest to review astronaut medical and psychological screening, also reported "heavy use of alcohol" by astronauts before launch, within the standard 12-hour "bottle to throttle" rule applied to NASA flight crew members.

Meanwhile at Frenchie's Italian Restaurant, a popular astronaut hangout in Houston, owner Frankie Camera disputed the reports: "The Mercury astronauts may have been a little more wild (than later ones) but I did banquets for them and never really saw any of them drink so much they were out of control or drunk."

Japan's space agency has provoked surprise among other space experts by re-affirming its ambition to build a habitable base on the Moon within decades. At a lunar exploration symposium in Tokyo this week, head of the country's lunar and planetary exploration programme Junichiro Kawaguchi announced a deadline of 2020 for sending astronauts to the Moon, and 2030 for constructing the base.

The dates and details presented by Kawaguchi build upon the country's 20-year vision for space exploration, released in the spring of 2005, which began to consider far-flung ideas such as a Moon base.

A unilateral move by any country to colonize the Moon doesn't make sense, comments Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. "I don't think you'll see separate countries each with bases on the Moon - there's not that much to do there," he says.