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| sci-tech > space > story page |  | |
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In Brief:California town wants to build first lunar colony, on EarthHESPERIA, California (Reuters) -- The city fathers of a California town plan to build the world's first lunar colony, but they will skip the tricky part of going to the moon to do it. The city council of Hesperia, in the Mojave desert 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles, voted in January to make a site available for a full-scale settlement of the kind that might one day be built on the moon or distant planets. Funding has yet to be found but the plan is to use the same techniques local architect Nader Khalili believes could be used by astronaut construction teams. Iranian-born Khalili is the founder and director of the Cal- Earth Institute in Hesperia, which promotes ideas for building safe, comfortable, affordable housing of earth and other readily available materials. His Web site is www.calearth.org. He initially developed his method as a way of housing those around the world who have no adequate shelter, but he believes it could also be applied on the moon or Mars. "He's quite a visionary. He's before his time," Hesperia Mayor Jim Lindley told Reuters. Lindley said the city did not have the $100,000 needed to kick start the prototype lunar colony but would assist in fund raising. Europe's x-ray space observatory snaps inaugural imagesMADRID (CNN) -- The European Space Agency's X-ray space observatory has taken its first pictures, confirming that the telescopes and instruments on the orbiting satellite are properly functioning, the ESA announced this week. Three cameras on the XMM spacecraft took pictures of two different extragalactic regions in late January. These views, featuring a variety of extended and X-ray point sources, were chosen to demonstrate the full functioning of the observatory. The images will be presented on February 9 in Madrid, where the XMM operations center is located. The observatory was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket in December. Further performance checks on the XMM's instruments will begin on March 3, with routine science operations starting in June. Want more? Go to previous In Brief
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