A word of advice from Mike Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager:

“If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn’t get too close to it.”

Sounds like a good advice to me. Stay away from everything.

Actually, it’s because it’ll rain trash today.

Poor NASA. Just when they got rid of the “Mars face” mystery (see a related Google search) that of course was no mystery at all, another similar potential headache surfaces at Mercury. After all, what else can the following image, taken a few weeks ago by the space agency’s Messenger spacecraft, show than a clear likeness of a lawn mowing alien?

Can you see how it radiates cosmic love, and so tells us relax and take it easy? How it proves that the grass is always greyer on the other side of a big empty space?

New Scientist, of course, has a different focus on the whole story, but don’t believe them. It’s a government conspiracy. They are trying to bury the evidence. But the Truth is still out there. To be discovered by Mulder & Scully in July.

NASA has unveiled the James Webb Space Telescope, which will replace the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. A BBC News article gives the details.

BBC News reports China to have confirmed that it carried out a test where a ground-based missile destroyed a weather satellite. While the country maintains that it has absolutely no desire to enter a “space race” of any sorts, other countries, and especially so China’s own neighbours, are understandably worried.

“Space race!” shout I. Very little has happened in space colonisation since the USSR dropped out from the race in the 1980s, causing the US lose much of its interest, as well. Heck, at the end of this year it will be 25 years since man last set foot on the Moon. Something needs to be done!

Don’t ask me why, though.

NASA has lost contact with the Mars Global Surveyor, which was sent to Mars in 1996 to map the planet. It is, however, probable that communication will be restored soon. New Scientist Space has the story.

Now that the shuttle programme is more or less back on the tracks, it has the remaining three and a half years left to service the ISS before shuttles are retired in 2010. This means that the next years will see a large number of shuttle launches, between 15 and 18, aiming to expand the station threefold, as well as possibly maintenancing the Hubble Space Telescope.