Population: 1

Just how wacky can Republican candidates get?  Newt Gingrich has called for a huge ramping up of US space exploration, including a permanent Moon settlement by the end of his second term as President.  I suppose that's possible if the American people get so pissed off at him they load him into a rocket for a one way trip to the Moon.  Or his second term as President is 50 years after the first.  This also brings to mind the old saw about amateurs and logistics.

Go Go Voyager 1!

How many electronic devices do you have that still work after 32 years of hard use?  For most of us the answer is not many if any.  But NASA can point to their Voyager spacecraft.  Launched back in 1977 the plucky probes are still providing valuable data.  Observations taken this year by Voyager 1 indicate that it has gone beyond the influence of the solar wind and is about to enter interstellar space.  Not bad for a spacecraft designed with late '60s-early '70s electronic technology.  It's now so far away from Earth that a signal from it takes 16 hours to reach Earth at the speed of light.  Hopefully it and its sister craft Voyager 2 will continue to operate for years to come.

More good news from space tonight. NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter has successfully entered orbit around the red planet. Now the orbiter will spend the next few months gradually altering its current orbit to one suited to observing Mars. NASA's 1993 and 1999 attempts to send exploration craft to Mars failed, and you can read James Oberg's article on the reasons why they failed here.

This is very cool. There's a new possible site for life in our solar system. Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft indicates Saturn's moon Enceladus has liquid water on it. Combined with the detection of CO2, methane, and propane on the moon scientists say this means organic life as we know it could exist on Enceladus. Just don't expect it to be a little green man. Rather if life exists there it will probably be like the organisms that live deep in Earth's oceans near geothermal vents. Still, if life is found elsewhere in our solar system this will be the first evidence life exists elsewhere besides Earth.