Hasta La Gadget!

According to new report, NASA astronaut Mark Kelly is set to announce today plans to return to space later this year on the final Endeavour mission. Kelly’s return to space has been in question since his wife, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head last month, during an assassination attempt at a public appearance in Tuscon.

Kelly’s decision will be announced today during a press conference. Politico has confirmed that he will, in fact, announce his return, according to “a source familiar with the decision.”

Kelly is a veteran of space travel. The two-week Endeavour mission set for April 19th, will be his fourth.

A number of Utah residents reported seeing a UFO above the town of American Fork around 7:15 last night. The UFO appeared in the form of three red lights, which hovered in formation and apparently dropped flares.

Resident Lynette Chidester told the local news, “I don’t believe in extra-terrestrials,” but added that the lights didn’t belong to a helicopter or airplane, “I noticed over the roof of the garage a red light and white light and the red light isn’t flashing like a plane light and that’s what draws my attention to it.”

The local Provo and Salt Lake City airports didn’t report any unusual activity. Mike Galbraith issued a similar report from miles away, “They looked like they were flying in formation perfectly together and then whatever was dropping looked like it was burning real bright.”

Neither the Provo nor Salt Lake City airports reported any unusual activity for the night.

A smartphone is about to boldly go where plenty have droids have already ventured–space. A team of British scientists at Surrey Satellite Technology in Guildford, England are preparing to launch a handset into space. The scientists have yet to reveal the model of the phone, stating only that it will be running a version of Android.

The idea behind the launch is, simply, to find out whether modern smartphones will work in space. The phone will be used to control a satellite, which will, in turn, be taking pictures of our home planet.

Of course, we’ve seen a number of stories about smartphones in weather balloons over the past year or so, but According to the BBC, this is the first time such a phone has gone into orbit. The business has been deemed STRaND-1 (Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration).

“Modern smartphones are pretty amazing,” Shaun Kenyon, the head of the team told the BBC. “They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory. First of all, we want to see if the phone works up there, and if it does, we want to see if the phone can control a satellite.”

The phone, Kenyon said, will remain intact. “We’re not taking it apart; we’re not gutting it; we’re not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite – we’re flying it as is. And, in fact, we’re going to have another camera on the satellite so we can take a picture of the phone because we want to operate the screen and have some good images of that as well.”

Something for the budding geniuses out there: NASA is inviting student teams to design and build experiments the agency will fly into the stratosphere, a near-space environment, more than 100,000 feet above the Earth. The second annual Balloonsat High-Altitude Flight Competition is open to student teams in ninth to twelfth grades from the U.S. and its territories. Each team must submit an experiment proposal to NASA by February 11. Experiments can be on a wide range of topics, such as bacteria studies or weather observations.

Once entries are received, a panel of NASA engineers and scientists will evaluate them. The top eight will be announced on March 4. The top four will get up to $1,000 to develop their experiments and travel to the research center. The other four teams will get up to $1,000 to develop their experiment, but will participate via the Internet.

There goes the neighborhood. American Astronomers discovered a black hole in a Henize 2-10, a galaxy some 30 million light years away from the earth. According to the scientists, the black hole has roughly a million times the mass of our own sun.

Henize 2-10 has been the target of much study, as of late. Scientist have observed its ability to birth starts quite rapidly. It’s one of the few dwarf galaxies known to sport a massive black hole–they usually reside in much larger galaxies.

“This galaxy probably resembles those in the very young universe, when galaxies were just starting to form and were colliding frequently,” the University of Virgina’s Kelsey Johnson told AFP. “All its properties, including the supermassive black hole, are giving us important new clues about how these black holes and galaxies formed at that time.”