Space Exploration

Europe's shiny new $2-billion science laboratory, Columbus, was anchored to the International Space Station on Monday by a team of astronauts laboring inside and out. "A great day for Europe," said the European Space Agency's station program manager, Alan Thirkettle. "She looks just beautiful." French astronaut Leopold Eyharts announced its arrival. Installation was an exhausting daylong affair that took more time than expected.

A robotic spacecraft circling Mars has snapped the first image of a series of active avalanches near the planet's north pole, scientists said Monday. The image, taken last month by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, reveals at least four avalanches of fine ice and dust breaking off from a steep cliff and settling on the slope below. The cascade kicked up massive debris clouds, with some measuring more than 590 feet across.

Shuttle Endeavour pulled away from the international space station and headed for home after 12 days of shared work, the longest mission of its kind. The 10 astronauts performed a record-tying five spacewalks, put together a space station robot and provided a new Japanese compartment -- and resident -- for the orbiting complex. "In my mind, in my view, it's been an extraordinary mission," said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team. The shuttle is due to land at Cape Canaveral on Wednesday.

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying South Korea's first astronaut and two cosmonauts blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, bound for the International Space Station. South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon, 29, and cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Volkov will spend two days in the cramped capsule before docking at the orbiting station. NASA said Yi is the world's youngest female astronaut.

Mars' north pole, like a French parfait, comes in layers. Scientists analyzing radar images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft have found as many as seven distinct layers of ice and dust beneath the north pole. Roger J. Phillips, a scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said the layering was probably caused by changes in the planet's orbit over the last 4 million years.

Prospecting near Mars' north pole was set back at least a day Tuesday when a communications link to NASA's Phoenix lander, nestled into a wide, undulating expanse nicknamed Green Valley, was interrupted by what spacecraft operators called a "transient event." The event, caused by a cosmic ray or some other high-energy particle, knocked out the UHF radio on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of two NASA spacecraft circling Mars that relay computer commands between Phoenix and Earth.

Scientists for the Phoenix Mars Lander are wrestling with an intermittent short circuit in a device that will analyze ice and soil from the planet's surface. Phoenix's three-month mission is to study whether the Martian north pole region could support primitive life. The craft is to perform several experiments seeking traces of organic compounds.

Space shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven astronauts thundered through a blue Florida sky Saturday afternoon on a mission to deliver a Japanese laboratory to the International Space Station and to help fix some nagging plumbing problems on board. The start of NASA's 123rd shuttle mission went smoothly; it is expected to dock with the station Monday. Some of the details of the two-week mission: The crew Veteran astronaut Navy Cmdr. Mark E. Kelly, who is married to Rep.

For all but a few select humans, the way to outer space -- the real outer space, not the one where the Cylons live -- has been through a TV screen. You can climb to the top of Mt. Everest, or trek to the South Pole or go down under the sea and see it for yourself, but space is still the province of professionals: We know it only by the pictures they take.

NASA launched a telescope to scout out elusive, super high-energy gamma rays lurking in the universe. GLAST -- a NASA acronym for Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope -- began its 5- to 10-year mission with a midday blastoff aboard a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral. Everything went well and, in just over an hour, the telescope was orbiting 345 miles above Earth as planned.