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Original Source: BBC News

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The Phoenix lander is due to touch down on Monday in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 423-million-mile journey from Earth. The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water ice thought to be buried beneath the surface. Scientists say the mission should give the clearest indication yet of whether Mars could once have harbored life.

The final seven minutes of the probe's ten-month journey is regarded as the riskiest part of the mission. After it enters the top of the Martian atmosphere at nearly 5.7km/s (13,000 mph), the probe must perform a series of maneuvers to come safely to rest. It will release a parachute, use pulsed thrusters to slow to a fast walking speed, then come to a halt on three legs. If all goes to plan, the Phoenix lander will reach the surface of Mars at 0053 BST (1953 EDT) on May 26. Nasa controllers will know in about 15 minutes whether the attempt has been successful.

Landing on Mars is a notoriously tricky business. Of the 11 missions that have tried to land probes on Mars since 1971 - only five have succeeded. Phoenix is an apt name for the current mission, as it rose from the ashes of two previous failures. In September 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft crashed into the Red Planet following a navigation error caused when technicians mixed up "English" (imperial) and metric units. A few months later, another Nasa spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander (MPL), was lost near the planet's South Pole. Phoenix uses hardware from an identical twin of MPL, the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander, which was cancelled following the two consecutive failures. The probe was launched on 4 August 2007 on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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Original Source: Spaceflight Now

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PRINCETON, NJ -- When she peered into the screen of her computer one day in January, Alicia Soderberg was supposed to see a small, dull glowing smudge in one corner, the evidence of a month-old supernova that would help her better understand the mystery of these huge exploding stars. What the Princeton University astronomer saw instead was anything but dull. As Soderberg and Edo Berger, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton, studied the X-ray emissions conveyed from space by NASA's Swift satellite, they saw an extremely bright light that seemed to jump out of the sky. They didn't know it, but they had just become the first astronomers to have caught a star in the act of exploding. The once-in-a-lifetime event, described in a paper published in the May 22 issue of Nature, has transfixed the worldwide astronomical community.

Soderberg and Berger wanted to observe a supernova known as SN 2007uy in the spiral galaxy NGC 2770, located 90 million light years from Earth in the constellation Lynx. They could plan to do that because they are able to view images captured by the telescope a few hours after the observation merely by downloading the data from the Swift website. The sudden appearance nearby of the X-ray burst of the newer supernova, easily captured by the NASA satellite with multiple instruments that can detect gamma rays, X-rays and ultraviolet light, has set scientists on a new path. "This phenomenon had been predicted more than 30 years ago, but is now observed for the first time," said Roger Chevalier, the W.H. Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. "These are the earliest observations of light from a supernova after the central collapse that initiated the explosion."

In the Nature paper, Soderberg and 38 colleagues show that the energy and pattern of the X-ray outburst is consistent with what scientists would have expected to see in the birth of a neutron star -- a shock wave blasting through the surface of the original massive star. Until now, astronomers have only been able to observe supernovae brightening days or weeks after the event, when the expanding shell of debris is energized by the decay of radioactive elements forged in the explosion.

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Photos Courtesy of AFP and NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler

*Update*
Editor's Note
Princess Diana's popular quotes
"I am not a political figure, nor do I want to be one; but I come with my heart."
"Family is the most important thing in the world."
"There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded."

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Prince William Opens Up About Princess Diana

'My children will never know her': Prince William opens up about missing Diana as new photo released of family
Prince William has revealed how he misses his late mother intensely in one of his most candid ever interviews about Princess Diana. The future King says it has taken him 20 years to talk properly about Diana's death, the extraordinary week that followed it and the enormous impact it had on him and Prince Harry.

"I would like to have had her advice. I would love her to have met Catherine and to have seen the children grow up. "It makes me sad that she won’t, that they will never know her."

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Original Source: Star Bulletin

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"As I was revolving these matters in my mind, while the war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue being one which might easily been settled without bloodshed."

This quote from Julia Ward Howe is cited as the background for the initial Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870, born of her call to women to "take counsel with each other (so that) the great human family can live in peace."

Over the decades, the initial focus morphed through pacifism, workers' rights and finally fused itself on the role of the mother as the nurturer of new life, the bond of solidarity in the family and the one whose voice should always cry for peace and justice.

In 1908, Anna Jarvis took up the cause of her mother, Ann, who had organized women to campaign for sanitation and medical care for both sides during the Civil War. The daughter publicized Mother's Day with a celebration in Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, Grafton, W.Va., attended by more than 400 children with their mothers.

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Mostly Mother's Day celebrates the gift of life and its continuity, making it the annual event of reflection. We are born, we grow, we appreciate and we reflect. Most of all we harbor that spark of life which the next generation carry, torchlike, into a still troubled world where no mother wants her child to be fodder for war.

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Photos courtesy of AP

"Q: What is the difference between the Debt and the Deficit?

A: The National Debt is the total amount of money owed by the government; the federal budget deficit is the yearly amount by which spending exceeds revenue. Add up all the deficits (and subtract those few budget surpluses we've had) for the past 200+ years and you'll get the current National Debt.

Q: How has the National Debt grown over time?

A: The National Debt on January 1st 1791 was just $75 million dollars. Today, it rises by that amount every hour or so. "

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