Space, Astronomy, Astronaut, NASA News from Kepea

AP - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There's his grand research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he's warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without electricity.

AP - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There's his grand research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he's warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without electricity.

SPACE.com - For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system — material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy, researchers announced today (Jan. 31).

Reuters - Russia blamed radiation on Tuesday for a computer glitch that doomed its Mars moon mission, but space industry experts cast doubt on the findings of an investigation into the crash of what was to be Moscow's first deep space mission in two decades.

SPACE.com - Violent sun storms that shoot bursts of energy in Earth's direction have the potential to damage satellites and power infrastructures, but they can also clear the skies of dangerous space debris,  NASA scientists say.

AP - Romanian authorities are investigating a 20-year-old who is suspected of hacking into several Pentagon and NASA servers and posting confidential data he retrieved from those servers on his blog, officials said Tuesday.

AP - The head of Russia's space agency said Tuesday that cosmic radiation was the most likely cause of the failure of a Mars moon probe that crashed to Earth this month, and suggested that a low-quality imported component may have been vulnerable to the radiation.

AP - The head of Russia's space agency says that a manned launch to the International Space Station is being postponed from March 30 because of faults found in the Soyuz capsule.

SPACE.com - WASHINGTON — NASA plans to solicit proposals Feb. 7 for the third round of its commercial crew program and award at least two funded Space Act Agreements this summer that will run through 2014 and prepare competing astronaut transportation concepts for production.

SPACE.com - More than 20,000 radio antennas will soon connect over the Internet to scan largely unexplored radio frequencies, hunting for the first stars and galaxies and potentially signals of extraterrestrial intelligence.