Space News Archive - June 05, 2007

Poets may see "a face of plaintive sweetness" or "a cheek like beryl stone" when they look at the moon, but Shaopeng Huang sees something else altogether: the ideal location for a network of observatories dedicated to studying climate change on Earth.

The spacecraft is MESSENGER, and the planet is Venus. On June 5, 2007, MESSENGER will fly past Venus just 338 km above the planet's surface--and it will shoot a laser into the clouds.

NASA started a countdown Tuesday toward the first space shuttle flight of the year. Engineers reported no major technical problems and the weather forecast looked favorable for a Friday launch.