Space Exploration

India launched its first unmanned mission to the moon today, sending up a satellite on a two-year mission to redraw maps of the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-1 blasted off from the Sriharikota space center in southern India. Chandrayaan means "Moon Craft" in ancient Sanskrit. Scientists, clapping and cheering, tracked the ascent on computer screens as they lost sight of the rocket in heavy clouds.

The death watch is on for NASA's Phoenix lander, the first spacecraft to sample water on another planet. Buffeted by dust storms and chilled by temperatures as low as minus-141 degrees Fahrenheit from the impending arrival of the Martian winter, Phoenix is clinging to life, but barely, NASA officials said Friday. "We knew this was coming," said project manager Barry Goldstein. "It's bittersweet." Days earlier, Phoenix fell silent, going into safe mode to save battery power.

After hearing nothing from the Phoenix spacecraft in more than a week, NASA officials on Monday declared an end to the nearly six-month mission at Mars' north pole, the first to touch and taste the water on an alien planet. Phoenix sent its last message on Nov. 2 before a lack of power caused it to go to sleep -- permanently, it now appears.

Space shuttle Endeavour linked with the International Space Station on Sunday, kicking off a huge home makeover that will allow twice as many astronauts to live there beginning next year. Cmdr. Christopher Ferguson guided the shuttle to a smooth docking as the two spacecraft soared 212 miles above India. His ship's radar worked fine, despite earlier trouble with the antenna.

An orbiting spacecraft has discovered a key mineral in bedrock on the Martian surface that suggests the planet might once have had an environment hospitable to life, scientists have reported. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected carbonate mineral in rock outcrops in Nili Fossae, a region of valleys that have cut into the planet's ancient crust. Its presence indicates water there wasn't as acidic. The results appeared Friday in the journal Science.

Saturn's largest moon is the only body in the solar system besides Earth with lakes, leading scientists to compare it to this planet before life evolved. A study in the current issue of the journal Nature said radar images from a NASA craft show the moon Titan has lakes of liquid methane and ethane. That suggests Titan, with a dense atmosphere like that of primordial Earth, also shares Earth's hydrological cycle of rainfall, formation of lakes and rivers, and evaporation, the study said.

Like millions of others, Barbara Morgan was watching as the ill-fated Challenger spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on a chilly winter morning in 1986. But her connection to that flight was more intimate than most. The elementary-school teacher from Fresno was the backup to Christa McAuliffe, the bubbly woman chosen to be the first teacher is space. If McAuliffe had fallen ill, it would have been Morgan on that flight, which ended with the deaths of all seven astronauts.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is zooming toward a close encounter with Jupiter to study its atmosphere, ring system and four of its moons before dashing off to see Pluto in 2015, scientists said Thursday. It will be the seventh probe to visit the solar system's largest planet. After 12 months of flight, the probe is due to make its closest pass by Jupiter on Feb. 28, flying within 1.4 million miles.

Scientists are scrambling to find an alternative landing site for a long-armed robot set to launch this summer on a mission to dig into Mars' icy north pole. The original landing spot was nixed after images beamed back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed scores of bus-sized boulders littered over old crater rims on flat plains. The gigantic rocks pose a danger to NASA's Phoenix Mars lander.