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AFP – Haute couture is the preserve of the elite, clothes with astronomical price tags that only the wealthiest can afford — or so the received wisdom goes.

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AP – NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

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An advanced sensor and data processing used to monitor air quality inside space station is now being used in an innovative fire protection system for Stockholm’s metro system.

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Mars Express has uncovered geological evidence suggesting that some depositional process, revealed by erosion, has been at work on large scales in the equatorial regions of the planet. If so, this would provide another jigsaw piece to be fitted into the emerging picture of Mars’ past climate.

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Locked in a giant tin can for months on end, isolated from the outside world, it is a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare. In Moscow, scientists are trying to find out how well humans would survive the 18-month journey to the Red Planet. This is a vital experiment if a long-held dream to put human life on Mars is ever to become a reality.

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SPACE.com – TheInternational Space Station dodged a small piece of space junk Sunday leftoverfrom a spent Chinese rocket that broke apart in orbit nine years ago.

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SPACE.com – NASA is scrambling to rework plansfor the last of three spacewalks by astronauts at the International SpaceStation after a string of bad luck Saturday ended up in lost time andincomplete tasks, mission managers said.

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ESA’s GOCE satellite was formally declared ready for work at 01:00 CET on 20 March. During the critical Launch and Early Orbit Phase beginning with separation from its booster on 17 March, GOCE was checked out to confirm that all of its control systems are operating normally.

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AP – North Korea warned the United States, Japan and their allies not to interfere with its plan to launch a satellite into space next month, saying Tuesday any intervention could doom already stalled talks on ending its nuclear weapons program.

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ESA PR 06-2009. This afternoon, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) was lofted into a near-Sun-synchronous, low Earth orbit by a Rockot launcher lifting off from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia.

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