On Friday (5 Feb 2010) NASA released the most detailed images yet taken of Pluto. The photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) show the dwarf planet's icy, mottled surface undergoing seasonal changes - the surface has become much redder and the illuminated northern hemisphere is getting brighter. The changes are probably due to surface ice sublimating to gas on the sunlit pole and then freezing again on the opposite pole as Pluto moves into the next phase of its 248-year seasonal cycle. Read the full story on NASA's website.

Image: NASA / HST

Read the ROG's Pluto fact file

NASA announced on 3 February that it is extending the international Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its moons to 2017, with a budget of $60 million per year.

This is the second extension to the mission which was originally launched in October 1997. Dubbed the Cassini Solstice Mission, this seven-year extension will allow scientists to study seasonal and other long-term weather changes to the ringed planet and its moons as it moves from winter to summer. It also will allow continued observations of Saturn's rings and magnetosphere.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

Read the full story on NASA's JPL website. Further Cassini information is available at www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Image: Looking down on Saturn's northern hemisphere, Cassini uses false-colour imaging to reveal different layers of cloud. PIA09212. © NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. View the ROG's online gallery of Cassini-Huygens images, Visions of Saturn.

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich has just launched Solar Season, running until 9 May.

Come and see the Sun in a whole new light with new exhibition Solar Story, planetarium show Secrets of the Sun and a programme of talks, tours and workshops. Speakers include solar physicist Dr Lucie Green and ROG Curator for the History of Science and Technology Dr Rebekah Higgitt.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is currently scheduled for launch tomorrow (10 February 2010) from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

NB launch actually took place on Thursday 11 February, 10:23 EST (15:23 GMT).

SDO is a powerful solar observatory which will look deep into the Sun and record images at 10 times higher resolution than HDTV. It is the first mission to be launched for NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) Program, designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. It is hoped that it will reveal how solar storms erupt, help us understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space and also help scientists build effective models for space weather forecasting.

The SDO spacecraft will orbit the Earth at a distance of about 22,300 miles, relaying its readings instantly to a ground station in New Mexico.

Image: Artist's impression of SDO (NASA)

NASA's space shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station (ISS) at 23:06 CST on Tuesday 9 February, towards the end of day 2 of mission STS-130. Endeavour's primary payload on this mission consists of a third connecting module for the station, the Tranquility node, and a seven-windowed cupola which will be used as a control room for robotics, intended to increase human understanding of our planet.

STS-130, the 32nd shuttle mission to the ISS, is led by Commander George Zamka and piloted by Terry Virts. Endeavour's launch at 3:14 CST on Monday was NASA's last ever scheduled space shuttle night launch.

The mission is scheduled to last for a total of 14 days from launch to landing back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Image: Space shuttle Endeavour emerges from behind its exhaust plume as it lifts off from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 4:14 a.m. EST, 8 Feb 2010. (NASA/ Kenny Allen)

23 Feb 2010 - the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in partnership with Zooniverse and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, today launched Solar Stormwatch. This exciting web project allows anyone to help spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. If you get involved your work will help give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way - and you could make a new scientific discovery.

Solar Stormwatch uses archive and near real-time data from NASA's STEREO mission, a pair of spacecraft orbiting the Sun. Each spacecraft carries a Heliospheric Imager (HI) containing two cameras, creating a massive field of view stretching across the 150 million km from the Sun back to the Earth. Mission volunteers will be looking at these images to spot huge explosions from the Sun's surface - these are the solar storms, or more technically Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). These storms throw out about a billion tons of hot solar gases at a million miles an hour, representing a serious radiation hazard to both spacecraft and astronauts. They can knock out communication satellites, disrupt sat nav and mobile phone networks and damage power lines. Solar Stormwatch will help minimise this disruption by providing real-time alerts to those in the firing line, such as the crew of the International Space Station.

Multiple volunteers will look at each batch of STEREO data, and and if several independently confirm an interesting find it will be flagged up to a solar scientist.

Chris Davis, one of the solar scientists on the project team, says: "With your help, we can analyse many more events and do so in a way that is free of the subjective bias introduced by one person sat in his office making arbitrary decisions... Together we can use STEREO images to learn what it takes to make an accurate forecast of space weather conditions. Space exploration will always be a risky business but with an accurate space-weather forecast, astronauts will have one less thing to be worrying about as they leave the relative safety of Earth orbit and start to explore our solar system."

You can get involved now at www.solarstormwatch.com

Images: Artist's impression of the deployment of the STEREO spacecrafts' solar panels (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory); Coronal mass ejection taken by the SOHO spacecraft, 2002 (SOHO, NASA and ESA)