Universe Today - December 12, 2001

NASA has decided to extend the time in space for the space shuttle Endeavour, pushing the undocking back a day. This will give the astronauts time to move equipment and supplies between the shuttle and the International Space Station. Endeavour will push off from the station on Saturday, and carry the crew of Expedition 3 back to Earth on Monday.

NASA has provided its approval to Russia for plans to send South African Internet millionaire Mark Shuttleworth to visit the International Space Station. If all goes as planned, Shuttleworth will board a Soyuz taxi mission in April 2002 and visit the station for about a week. As with Dennis Tito before him, it's believed that Shuttleworth paid $20 million US for the trip.

A group of astronomers studying the structure of the universe believe that dark matter is spread around as evenly as regular matter. On cosmic scales, measured in tens of millions of light-years, dark matter and galaxies have the same shapes and structures, with spiderweb-like grouping. This distribution of dark matter was determined by performing mathematical predictions on the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey - a collection of data on 200,000 galaxies.