Mars News from the edge.

LINKS NASA.gov The official homepage of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. SPACE.com For everyone who has ever gazed out at the stars and wondered. Skymaps.com High quality maps to the stars. UniverseToday.com Space exploration news.

Headlines for October 16, 2002 Atlantis headed home after ISS visit. After three spacewalks spent connecting lines to bring the International Space Station's newly installed truss online, the space shuttle Atlantis ended joint operations with the station on Tuesday. After spacewalks Monday by astronauts Piers Sellers and David Wolf the shuttle fired its main engines to push the space station into a higher, more stable orbit Read more at NASA.gov. Finally: Proof that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "We could not believe our eyes." -- Astronomer Thomas Ott on the surprising discovery of a star swinging around the very heart of the Milky Way. Surprising observations of a star swiftly orbiting the cloudy heart of the Milky Way Galaxy have verified with near certainty the existence of a central black hole, a theoretical object that still eludes direct detection. Astronomers tracked the star for nearly a decade, tracing two-thirds of its path around the center of the galaxy. No object ever before has been seen so close to the center of a galaxy, nor has any other object previously been observed for more than a tiny portion of its orbit about a galaxy. "Our work proves that there is indeed a supermassive black hole in our own galaxy," said Rainer Schoedel, a PhD student at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Germany. Read more at Space.com.