Via Astronomy Picture of the Day, my premier space porn site, comes this amazing time-lapse video shot from the International Space Station.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Some random other links below the fold.

Jon Voisey of Universe Today discusses how to find rings around exoplanets. Pro tip: don’t use an old VHS tape to record the results. Once you find an exoring, you will die in seven days.

Scientists have evidently reestablished contact with Phobos-Grunt, meaning the Russian mission to Phobos may not have failed just yet, despite it failing to receive the signal to leave Earth’s orbit when it originally launched.

Meanwhile, a dry-run nearly-two-year isolation project has ended, and the Russian cosmonauts have left their “shuttle” finally. The dry-run was intended to test human psychological problems that might come up isolating a group of them in a spaceship for the round-trip to Mars. Evidently they’ve tested only men, out of concerns that including women might lead to, well, gender-related issues. Why not all women? Why only men?

And NASA’s preparing to put another rover on Mars. Hopefully Curiosity will be as long-lived as Spirit and Opportunity. There’s so much more left to explore!

The asteroid Lutetia may have been formed at the same time as Earth, being composed of largely the same stuff. I don’t know if getting to and from this rock would help expand our knowledge of the early solar system more than merely knowing what it’s made of by spectrography, but maybe there’s science to be had in this.

Finally, Nature has published a paper describing evidence for liquid water lakes on Europa — and where there’s liquid water, there’s a chance of finding life-as-we-know-it. The holy grail which may or may not exist, extraterrestrial life, could be on Mars or Europa if it exists presently anywhere within our current reach. Wouldn’t it be something to find extraterrestrial biota in our lifetime?