On October 17th, The SETI Institute opened the Carl Sagan Research Center for the Study of Life in the Universe at Mountain View, California. The research group includes 50 scientists and is devoted to pursuing the scientific questions that fascinated Carl Sagan the most.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is building a new fleet of spacecraft to help get supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The Automatic Transfer Vehicle (ATV) will be put into use in 2007.

China launched a satellite last month carrying the largest payload of plant and fungi seeds ever, at 474 pounds. The satellite will orbit Earth and return in two weeks. Chinese officials say that seeds exposed to the conditions of space (radiation and microgravity) contain more vitamins and other crucial minerals. The purpose is to improve the quality and yield of terrestrial crops by using the space-exposed seeds.

Twenty-three university groups worked together over the Internet to build a satellite and its payload. European university students built a satellite under the supervision of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa (Falcon) has traveled 200 million miles to the asteroid 25143 Itokawa and is hovering about 15 miles above its surface. Hayabusa has a laser altimeter to measure surface heights and two spectrometers to analyze mineral compositions.

On November 9, 2005, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched their space probe Venus Express from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket. The $257 million space probe is a less-expensive twin copy of the Mars Express design. The 2,700-pound spacecraft has spectrometers, cameras, and other instruments to study the atmosphere of Venus from a very elliptical polar orbit.

More than two years after its inaugural flight ended in disaster, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Ariane-5 ECA rocket from Kourou, French Guiana on February 12, 2005. The 780-ton rocket can carry a 10-ton payload.