* Astronomy

A Canadian circus billionaire boarded the International Space Station on Friday after a smooth ride up from Earth, and promptly played the entertainer by donning a red clown nose for a camera.
Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte became the seventh paying space tourist to travel to the station, where he plans to mix clownish fun with a serious message about the growing shortage of clean water on the planet 355 kilometres below.
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MDA robot arm snags a resupply ship in space
A robotic arm on board the International Space Station developed by an Ottawa company - snatched a Japanese supply ship yesterday, a feat that will allow cargo to head up to the station even after the shuttle retires.
Astronaut Nicole Stott used MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.'s robotic Canadarm2 to grapple the H-II Transfer Vehicle, a cargo ship on its maiden flight with five tonnes of supplies on board.

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Chinks in ISS armour deliver data on space junk impacts
Each pointing in a different direction - forward in the direction of orbit, upwards and sideways out to space - the three 10 by 10 cm aluminium foil panels formed the sensor units of an instrument called the DEBris In-orbit Evaluator-2 (DEBIE-2), returning telemetry on impact events to a separate data processing unit.
These units were sited on the European Technology Exposure Facility (EuTEF) which was mounted on the Columbus exterior until returned to Earth on the Space Shuttle this week. Columbus is an ideal position for impact monitoring since the module forms part of the leading edge of the International Space Station (ISS).
There are around 13 000 catalogued pieces of orbital debris larger than 10 cm across. These are big enough to be tracked by terrestrial radar so the ISS, the Shuttle and other satellites can manoeuvre out of their path. In addition there are many millions more items too small to be monitored from the ground. Traditionally most of what is known about these orbital populations has come from simply examining space hardware returned to Earth and counting the number and size of impact craters they have sustained while in orbit.

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Water Quality in Orbit
Space is not a fun place to get a stomach bug. To ensure drinking water is adequately disinfected, University of Utah chemists developed a two-minute water quality monitoring method that just started six months of tests aboard the International Space Station.

"Now they bring water back on the space shuttle and analyse it on the ground. The problem is there is a big delay. You'd like to be able to maintain iodine or silver [disinfectant] levels in real time with an onboard monitor" - Marc Porter, a University of Utah professor of chemistry and chemical engineering.

The new method involves sampling space station or space shuttle galley water with syringes, forcing the water through a chemical-imbued disk-shaped membrane, and then reading the colour of the membrane with a commercially available, handheld colour sensor normally used to measure the colour and glossiness of automobile paint.

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