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Here is newly released home video by the family of "Balloon Boy" Falcon Heene of the liftoff of the balloon from the backyard yesterday. You see the father, Richard Heene, doing a countdown, and then the balloon takes off with the father appearing agitated. The father was close to the balloon as it took off. . . . (VIDEO)

PARIS (AFP) - Venus Express, the European Space Agency's first mission to explore Earth's closest neighbour, will be launched next Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The ESA gave the prospective launch time as 0443 GMT. The 1.27-tonne unmanned spacecraft, which will be taken aloft by a Russian-made Soyuz-Fregat rocket, is expected to arrive at Venus on April 6. Venus Express, equipped with seven instruments, is intended to map the Venusian surface and weather system, looking at temperature variation, cloud formations, wind speeds and gas composition. Its main goal is to help understand why Venus fell prey to runaway...

America held its breath Tuesday morning. Twice, it had seen what could happen when 4.5 million pounds is hurled skyward by 7.4 million pounds of thrust to achieve an orbit of the earth and then shed that energy for a safe, passenger-jet speed landing. Twice it had grieved. The Challenger lift off explosion in 1986 and the Columbia re-entry disaster of 2003 had taken 14 lives of men and women who had placed them in the hands of technology only to learn its implacable cruelty. Would the shuttle Discovery somehow redeem that trust? In a world where headlines are made...

If all goes well, a Delta II rocket will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California at 3:01:59. This will be the fourth attempt. Live coverage right now in countdown mode on NASA TV webstream. Image is clear on dial-up ISP. Listen for a loud sonic boom on the West Coast. "Image : Aura's Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) is designed to profile atmospheric chemistry across the globe. Aerosols are one of the trace gases humans introduce into the atmospheric chemistry through pollution. Credit: NASA" "Aura is part of the Earth Observing System (EOS), a program dedicated to monitoring the...