Scientists have paved the way for the first permanently manned base on the Moon by developing a way to 'squeeze' oxygen out of lunar soil.

The space agency plans to take its extraction system to the Moon in 2011 as part of its Robotic Lunar Exploration Program, which will test a range of equipment designed to support human life. If the technique is successful, it could lead to a permanent station like Moon-base Alpha from the popular Seventies series Space: 1999.

Lunar soil brought back to Earth is in short supply and highly prized, so Nasa researchers have been using matter with the same composition for its tests.

The soil contains about 45 per cent oxygen by weight, but it is mostly 'trapped' in the form of silcon dioxide.

A powerful new telescope that will image the entire sky every three nights will be located in Chile, officials have announced. If it receives the required funding, the telescope is expected to begin operating in 2012.

The telescope will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night. This will allow astronomers to detect objects that quickly change their position, such as near-Earth asteroids, or their brightness, such as supernovae.

This should help astronomers discover dim objects as they glide through the outer solar system. It should be able to detect Earth-sized planets more than 10 times farther from the Sun than Pluto is, testing controversial theories that predict a dozen or so Earth-sized worlds were scattered out to such distances during the solar system's youth.

A US company has set up operations in China to sell land on the moon for 289 yuan (37 dollars) an acre, cashing in on renewed interest in space travel after the successful five-day voyage of Shenzhou VI.

The so-called Lunar Embassy, touted as the first extraterrestrial estate agency, started operations Wednesday in Beijing, the China Daily reported.

Lunar Embassy was set up by US entrepreneur Dennis Hope in 1980, 11 years after the Apollo II mission first landed people on the moon.

Hope believes a loophole in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty makes his property sales legitimate. The agreement forbids governments from owning extraterrestrial property but fails to mention corporations or individuals.

NASA is preparing to send the New Horizons probe to Pluto. It will be the first earth device to get intimate with the icy planet. And you can be there too - or, at least, your name. NASA is asking everyone to send them their names, which will be attached in the space device. The New Horizons probe will be launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, in the outskirts of the Solar System. It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand years.

If confirmed, the discovery by Mike Brown of the respected California Institute of Technology would be the first of a planet since Pluto was identified in 1930 and shatter the notion that nine planets circle the sun.

It's the farthest object ever discovered to orbit around the sun," Brown said in a conference call of the planet that is covered in methane ice and lies nearly 15 billion kilometers (nine billion miles) from Earth.

The planet was first spotted on October 31, 2003 with the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California.

But it was so far away that its motion was not detected until the scientists reanalysed the data earlier this year, Brown said.

The planet has not been noticed previously because its orbit is at a 45 degree angle to the rest of the solar system, he said.

NASA's new Administrator Mike Griffin told reporters today that he informed key members of Congress Thursday evening that he would direct engineers at Goddard Spaceflight center to start preparing for a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope on the assumption that one ultimately will go forward.

There is no replacement for Hubble's visible-light acuity even in the serious planning stages.

Griffin said today that a final decision on any possible crewed servicing mission is still pending NASA's successful return to flight with the launch of the shuttle Discovery. However, with that launch now delayed nearly two more months, Griffin said the Goddard team has to get started now to preserve the option of saving Hubble before the popular telescope is scheduled to go dark.

A recently rediscovered 400-meter Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) is predicted to pass near the Earth on 13 April 2029. The flyby distance is uncertain and an Earth impact cannot yet be ruled out. The odds of impact, presently around 1 in 300, are unusual enough to merit special monitoring by astronomers, but should not be of public concern. These odds are likely to change on a day-to-day basis as new data are received. In all likelihood, the possibility of impact will eventually be eliminated as the asteroid continues to be tracked by astronomers around the world.

Since 1994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter, scientists have been researching if it may be possible to deflect incoming asteroids. With the discovery in 1999 that asteroid (29075) 1950 DA may collide with the Earth in 2880, this problem has been taken more seriously by politicians and scientists. The most significant recorded impact in recent times was the Tunguska event, which occurred at Tunguska in Russia, in 1908.

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades. That is the bold prediction from a leading light at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California.

Shostak, whose calculations will be published in a forthcoming edition of the space science journal Acta Astronautica, first estimated the number of alien civilisations in our galaxy that might currently be broadcasting radio signals.

Shostak admits that there are myriad uncertainties surrounding his prediction, but he defends the basis on which he made it. ."I have made this prediction using the assumptions adopted by the SETI research community itself."

The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars.

Cosmologists do not usually think in terms of sound, but this aural picture is a good way to think about the Universe's beginnings, says astronomer Mark Whittle of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Whittle has reconstructed the cosmic cacophony from data teased out over the past couple of years from the high-resolution mapping by NASA's WMAP spacecraft of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the hot early Universe.

For those worried that you cannot have sounds in space, that is true today, but it was not so in the Universe's infancy. For perhaps its first million years, the Universe was small and dense enough that sound waves could indeed travel through it - so efficiently, in fact, that they moved at about half the speed of light.

There is life on Mars, a researcher has announced at a conference - unfortunately it is just spaceship-borne contamination.

"I believe there is life on Mars, and it's unequivocally there, because we sent it," Andrew Schuerger of the University of Florida told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, recently. He has been granted funding from NASA's planetary protection office to help develop better sterilisation techniques for future missions.

Schuerger says that of all the space probes sent to Mars, only the two Viking craft in 1976 were adequately heat sterilised. The procedures used for all missions since then, including NASA's twin rovers and Europe's Beagle 2, would have left some microbes aboard.

"They are probably not going to survive in 200 kelvin conditions and in sulphuric acid," says Jeff Kargel of the US Geological Survey, who believes that ponds and marshes of acidic brines are possible or even likely on Mars today.

But, he adds, "Maybe they could. And maybe we've just done a really terrible thing."