The spectacular sight of a Delta IV Heavy moving away from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Sunday's (GMT) flight carried a classified military payload into space. The rocket is the biggest expendable launcher in the US fleet.

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An H2A rocket, carrying Gosat, the world’s first greenhouse-gas monitoring satellite, launches from the Tanegashima
Space Center, southern Japan. Gosat will be followed into orbit by a Nasa carbon mission next month.

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Nasa puts on show components from the Ares 1-X rocket, such as this launch escape tower.
The test flight in the summer paves the way for the introduction of the Ares 1, the vehicle
that will carry astronauts into orbit after shuttle retirement.

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A Russian Express-AM44 communications satellite undergoes preparations at the
Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The satellite is due to launch on 11 February.

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It's snowing on Mars ...

High in the sky above Mars, it is snowing right now. Very gently snowing. The snow does not settle on the rubble-strewn
land below - not these days, anyway - but instead vaporises into the thin atmosphere long before it reaches the ground.


Cape St Vincent, one of the cliffs of the Victoria crater, Mars

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