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The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch an experimental space plane this Wednesday to test out technologies needed for vehicles to survive the return to Earth from space.

The unmanned space plane, called the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV), is slated to blast off Wednesday (Feb. 11) at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) from French Guiana. Its suborbital flight will last 100 minutes. But first, the reusable spacecraft must separate from the rocket by itself while out of contact with Earth. (You can watch the IXV liftoff live here on Space.com, courtesy of ESA.)

A lesson about every single element on the periodic table

Created by the Periodic Videos team using the TED-Ed platform.

Somewhere dark and icy on a comet 320 million miles away, the history-making, comet-bouncing Philae spacecraft is sleeping. Its batteries are depleted and there isn't enough sunlight to recharge. But while the lander finished its primary job, collecting invaluable data on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Rosetta mission is far from over. For many scientists, the excitement is just beginning.

Cane toads in Australia have evolved to hop straighter and farther than ever before, Australia's ABC News reports. That means they're spreading faster than ever through Australia, sparking worries that they'll harm native species in places where they've never lived before. Twenty-six years after the debut of Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, it seems scientists are still struggling to control the large, poisonous toad.
Sugar growers released cane toads, which are native to Brazil, in Australia in 1935. They wanted the toads to eat cane beetles, a sugarcane pest. However, cane toads didn't eat cane beetles; instead they began killing off native species such as lizards and crocodiles, which would die after eating the toads. Sometime in the 1990s, a quirky documentary reporting on the cane toads' effects in Australia became popular-and made the chubby amphibians into the international poster children for what can go wrong with introduced species.

The New Horizons spacecraft, which launched in January of 2006, will get within 6,000 miles of Pluto on July 14, 2015.

Whatever the outcome, and the science returned, there will always be questions about the costs of such missions and whether they can be justified in the current financial climate.

On Twitter, Dr Taylor responded to just such a question by borrowing a catchphrase from the irascible BA Baracus character played by Mr T in the A-Team television show: "I pity the fool."

Thomas Reiter, director of human spaceflight and operations at Esa, acknowledged how the top line figure of 1.4bn euros appeared.

But he explained: "If you divide it by the 20 years that the development and the mission has cost, it's about cents per European citizen per year that was contributing to this new knowledge."

The Philae lander has attempted to drill into the surface of comet 67/P, amid fears that its battery may die in hours.

Researchers at Esa say the instrument is being deployed to its maximum extent despite the risk of toppling the lander.

Scientists hope they will also be able to capture some samples for analysis in the robot's onboard laboratories.

If the battery dies the results may not make it back to Earth.

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst performs a demonstration of how ESA's Rosetta mission will attempt to put a lander, called 'Philae' on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Alexander narrates the story of the Rosetta mission and performs a demonstration that visualises the difficulties of landing on an object that has little gravitational pull. Using the weightless environment of the Space Station, Alexander attempts to land 'Philae' (an ear plug) onto the surface of the 'comet' (an inactive SPHERES robot) with increasing levels of difficulty: a rotating comet that is not moving to one that is both rotating and moving.

This video is one of the six experiments and demonstrations in the Flying Classroom, Alexander will use small items to demonstrate several principles of physics in microgravity to students aged 10-17 years.

The Rosetta mission's lander, Philae, will be deployed on 12 November at 08:35 GMT/09:35 CET from a distance of 22.5 km from the centre of the comet. It will land about seven hours later, with confirmation expected to arrive at Earth at around 16:00 GMT/17:00 CET.

Final preparations are under way for what could be one of the most ambitious feats in space exploration.
On Wednesday, the European Space Agency will try to land a tiny spacecraft on a comet. This has never been attempted before.
The comet is about 300 million miles away (500 million km), far beyond Mars and is racing through space at about 34,000 mph (55,000 km/h).
Esa's Rosetta satellite has flown for 10 years in a four-billion-mile (6.5 billion km) series of loops around the Sun to pick up enough speed to fly alongside the comet, and it will now release a lander, called Philae, to try to touch down.
But the landing will be extremely challenging, as BBC Science Editor David Shukman explains.

Tonight, at 11:35 p.m. PST, Rosetta will release its 220-pound lander craft, dubbed Philae, which will slowly descend from a height of about 13 miles onto the landing site named Agilkia, a relatively flat spot on the duck's head. You can follow along here (above) as the landing unfolds on live webcast from the ESA's mission control starting at 11:00 a.m. PST/2:00 p.m. EST today. NASA TV is also providing live coverage starting at 6:00 a.m. PST/9:00 a.m. EST tomorrow.

A collection of short PBS videos connected to concepts across the curriculum.

Plate tectonics mini-lab.

We have known for some time that Bárðarbunga was going to do something-we just didn't know what. Because it is covered in ice, we rely on instruments to reveal its behavior.

Now that it has stirred, it is giving us clues about what it is about to do. The clues from the patterns of earthquakes and earth movements reveal two clusters where magma is moving toward the surface, and if it gets there, it will erupt. But whether this will be a gentle or a violent eruption is uncertain at the time of writing.

There is no way to predict when the eruption may happen, but we should get a few hours' notice. The good news for air travel is that both clusters are away from the heart of the main volcano, which makes it less likely that an eruption will produce the fine ash that causes disruption.

Evolution has produced some masterful solutions for animals to avoid predation. Look no further than the camouflage abilities of the dead leaf butterfly, the flower mantis, or the freaky vanishing octopus for proof.

But, a new study takes trickery to a whole new level. Researchers have discovered that the tropical harlequin filefish camouflages its scent by eating the coral it lives on, so as to blend into the olfactory background. It's the first time a vertebrate animal has been found to practice such smell-deception.

There are more than 140,000 species of butterflies and moths in the world, fluttering on every continent except Antarctica. Their wings contain countless patterns and colors, providing critical tools for camouflage, finding mates and scaring off predators.

A Bay Area professor is trying to learn more about how those colors develop and evolve - by going very, very small.

Nipam Patel, a professor in the Molecular & Cell Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, studies the thousands of tiny cells, known as scales, on butterflies' wings.

From a distance, the rows and rows of scales look like vivid patterns that decorate a butterfly's wings. But up close, each scale is like a dab of paint in a Pointillist painting or a tile in a mosaic; they represent an individual unit of color.

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Update 5:53 p.m. Well that was quick. High upper altitude winds scrubbed the launch for tonight, so SpaceX will have to try again tomorrow. See you then!
Update 5:50 p.m. We're getting ready to roll! The SpaceX livestream is up and running, with some snappy elevator music to keep us occupied until we see what's going on at the launch pad.
Original story below:
For SpaceX tonight, it's time for round two of "catch the rocket."
The company will attempt to launch another Falcon 9 rocket at 6:05 p.m. ET. On board is the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a satellite designed to orbit the Earth and keep a lookout for incoming solar storms that can muck up communication and power systems.
DSCOVR has waited 17 long years to get into space, making this launch particularly exciting. But an extra-special part of this mission happens after launch: The majority of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt to safely land itself on an autonomous drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. If the feat is successful, it'll be a big step toward a future in which reusable rockets may become the norm.
Typically, most of a rocket is either destroyed or lost after it leaves the launch pad, never to be recovered. This makes space travel pricey because an entirely new rocket must be built for every launch. SpaceX hopes to change that paradigm by recovering as much of the rocket as it can for reuse in future launches. And that could drastically reduce the cost of spaceflight.
To save its rockets, SpaceX now equips them with "hypersonic grid fins." These pop-out devices slow and guide the Falcon 9 toward its target, and they're powered by a hydraulic system that releases fluids over time to control the descent. In a previous attempt to land a Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX apparently didn't store enough hydraulic fluid in the system. The result: The rocket hit its target a bit too hard: