UK broacaster ITV has just announced Mission to the Moon – News from 1969, a series of five 10 minute mini documentaries that will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, with each programme taking the form of a news bulletin to report each day’s momentous events with a modern twist.

NASA has successfully launched two hypersonic experiments which may help further space exploration, as secondary payloads atop a NASA-built Terrier-Orion two-stage research sounding rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The European Space Agency has announced six individuals who will become Europe's new astronauts, including one British spacenaut, Timothy Peake. The new recruits will join the European Astronaut Corps and start their training to prepare for future missions to the International Space Station, and beyond.

VFXWorld has posted a superb peice on the visual effects work of the new Star Trek movie, which includes interview material with director J.J. Abrams and ILM's visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral in March, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.

Here's today's weirdandbeard round up of news found whilst scurrying through the Internet trying to avoid media-hyped stories about swine flu, exciting stuff as NASA gets closer to taking humans back to the moon, electronic paper moves a step closer to reality and more...

It sounds like something from The X-Files, Fringe or Doctor Who, but a former astronaut says he is convinced extraterrestrial life exists, and that the truth is being concealed by the United States and other governments - and has been for decades.

• This compilation from LunaCognita, a group involved in the 2009 DVD release Moon Rising, purporting to prove a cover up of what astronuats found on the Moon during the Apollo landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This compilation includes several intriguing NASA UFO encounters/sightings that have been archived over the years. "All of these examples (with the exception of the second-to-last one) were captured on film by NASA astronauts or Russian Cosmonauts over the past half-century," says Jose Escamilla, "showing many amazing examples from different eras - Gemini, Apollo, Apollo/Soyuz Test Project, Skylab, STS, the ISS, plus a couple Russian-source additions from their unmanned Zond and Mir Space Station programs as well thrown in to round things out."

 

Today's round up of technology and other stories that caught our eye on the web including dangerous space debris, a cool radio station browser idea ftom the BBC and more...

For you Firefly fans, check this out. NASA is running a poll for the name for the International Space Station's newest habitat node... and "Serenity", the name of the spaceship in Joss Whedon's short-lived but cult status SF show is leading among the five nominees!

Voting will be open until March 20th, 2009.  NASA will announce the winning name in April 2009.

International Space Station’s Node 3 is a connecting module and its cupola for the station. NASA wants the name to reflect the spirit of exploration and cooperation embodied by the space station, and follow in the tradition set by Node 1- Unity- and Node 2- Harmony.

NASA and its station partners traditionally have named each habitable part of the station, including its three laboratories (the U.S lab- Destiny, the European lab- Columbus, and the Japanese lab- Kibo or Hope), two airlocks (Quest and Pirs or Pier), and two Russian-built modules (Zvezda or Star, and Zarya or Dawn).

• More info: www.nasa.gov/externalflash/name_ISS/index.html