Creaking and arthritic it may be, but Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity continues to deliver remarkable science.
The near-eight-year-old mobile geologist has just found slivers of a bright material that looks very much like it is gypsum (hydrated calcium sulphate).
Nothing illustrates better the benefits to society of space activity than meteorological satellites. Weather forecasts save lives and limit damage to property.
We've seen forecast skill steadily improve over time, and much of that can be put down to the information now coming from orbiting sensors.
British scientists and engineers want a piece of the Moon.
They're keen to participate in the European Space Agency's (Esa) Lunar Lander mission which will attempt to put down on the body's southern pole later this decade.
It is one of the most important weeks in the history of European space activity.
On Thursday, two satellites will launch from French Guiana to begin the process of rolling out Galileo - Europe's multi-billion-euro version of the American Global Positioning System (GPS).
I doubt those going to the Homebase DIY store in Chelmsford to buy a pot of paint give much thought to what goes on in the hi-tech factory building next door.
This is the HQ of e2v, a company that made its name producing valves for the post-war television industry but which now produces camera sensors for some of the biggest space missions flying today.
It couldn't have been planned better. Just as the Nobel committee was announcing its physics award would go to the research that identified the "accelerating expansion of the Universe", delegates to the European Space Agency were sitting down in Paris to approve a mission to investigate "dark energy" - the very thing thought to be pushing the cosmos apart at a faster and faster rate.
Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the US and Brian Schmidt of Australia will share the Nobel. The trio studied a particular type of stellar explosion, or supernova, and found that the most distant of these objects were receding quickest.
The British spacecraft manufacturer SSTL has announced its intention to start building radar satellites.
It is a significant move for the Guildford-based company which has, until now, been associated with small, low-cost satellites that view the Earth at optical and near-infrared wavelengths, producing images that are recognisably the sort of thing we see with our own eyes.
"We're back," is the rallying cry from Sea Launch President Kjell Karlsen.
The company that lofts big telecommunications satellites from a converted oil rig in the Pacific Ocean is preparing for its first flight since emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Nasa has finally delivered its design for a huge rocket that could take humans to asteroids, Mars and a few other exotic corners of the Solar System.
The Space Launch System (the name will be changed at some point, surely) will be the most powerful launcher ever built - more powerful even than the Saturn V rockets that put men on the Moon.
There was always the risk that when the US shuttles were retired, continued operations on the International Space Station (ISS) could be left more vulnerable should there be a failure on the Russian Soyuz rocket system.
Soyuz has become the sole means of getting people to the 400km-high outpost. If it can't fly, no-one can. It's the classic single-point failure with no back-up.
So much from so little. When Japanese scientists opened the sterile canister from their sample-return mission to Asteroid Itokawa, they dared to hope they would have something to analyse.
They did - more than a thousand rocky fragments, but none of them bigger than a couple of tenths of a millimetre across. But with today's powerful laboratory tools, this mini-haul proved just ample, and, in the current edition of Science magazine, the Hayabusa mission-scientists report their key findings.
Should we be surprised by the latest assessment of how much it will cost to build, launch and operate the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)? Documents sent to the US Congress by Nasa indicate the final bill will now be $8.7bn.
But if you spend annually what the US space agency spends on this telescope project and you don't launch until 2018 - that's about what you come out with. Those close to the project have been saying this for some months, so the new assessment is not a shock disclosure.
The cheers and the tears. The Atlantis shuttle returned from space on Thursday, book-ending the 135-flight sequence of Nasa's re-usable spaceplanes.
People will debate long and hard on the value of the shuttle. There's no denying its iconography; its story is inextricably linked with that of Hubble; and it gave us the space station.
You can't deny the drama. The weather officers were telling us there was little chance that the Atlantis space shuttle would get off on time and we'd probably be back on Sunday for a second launch attempt when the showers and storms had passed.
On Thursday, few argued with that assessment. It chucked it down at Kennedy, and the place looked more Glastonbury than spaceport.
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