NASA has started development of Solar Probe Plus, a mission to study the sun more closely than ever before, with a target launch date of 2018, the agency says. The spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere at approximately 4 million miles from the sun's surface, into a region that no other probe has ever encountered, an agency release said. The mission will carry five separate science investigations hoping to discover more about our sun than any previous mission, NASA said.

The outskirts of Tucson may be the best place to watch the Perseids, but you'll find a meteor shower party at Sky Bar, 536 N. Fourth Ave., next Thursday. Sky Bar features an 8-inch Celestron CPC SchmidtCassegrain Telescope (complete with a light pollution filter) on the roof that takes photos of the skies, which are projected on a screen inside the bar. On the patio, there's a 12-inch Meade LightBridge Dobsonian Telescope and a new 6-inch Celestron customers can look through.

GREENBELT, Md., Aug. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) have found the first fast X-ray pulsar to be eclipsed by its companion star. Further studies of this unique stellar system will shed light on some of the most compressed matter in the universe and test a key prediction of Einstein's relativity theory. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star -- the crushed core of a massive star that long ago exploded as a supernova.

WASHINGTON, July 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA mission controllers have not heard from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit since March 22, and the rover is facing its toughest challenge yet - trying to survive the harsh Martian winter. The rover team anticipated Spirit would go into a low-power "hibernation" mode since the rover was not able to get to a favorable slope for its fourth Martian winter, which runs from May through November. On July 26, mission managers began using a paging technique called "sweep and beep" in an effort to communicate with Spirit.

PITTSBURGH, July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Pioneering observations made by researchers from Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Toronto with the National Science Foundation's giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have validated a new tool for mapping large cosmic structures. The findings will be published in the July 22 issue of Nature. "Our project mapped hydrogen gas to greater cosmic distances than ever before, and shows that the techniques we developed can be used to map huge volumes of the universe in three dimensions and to test the competing theories of dark energy," said Tzu-Ching Chang, of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the University of Toronto.

Two types of sodium-guidestar laser with phenomenally high optical power have been separately conceived and developed, one at the AFRL's Starfire Optical Range and one at the European Southern Observatory. With its virtual elimination of the effects of atmospheric turbulence, adaptive optics (AO) has allotted leading ground-based astronomical telescopes to resolve almost as well as if they were operating in space, Some optical telescopes now being planned will be far too large to loft into space; AO will be essential to the function of these mammoth ground-based instruments. Most AO systems for telescopes rely on the existence of a bright pointlike source of light thai exists above the turbulence of the atmosphere and appears somewhere in the telescope's field of view; the point source is used as a "guidestar, " whose wavefront aberrations are measured and then used as input for the AO correction.