Being that Endeavour is still in the process of making its retirement flight to its final resting place in Cali, and that sometimes Meteorologists are also sometimes “space junkies,” here are a few headlines from the world of space!

The Mars Rover caught a rare sight from its photo lens.  The Mars moon Phobos grazed the sun’s disk causing for a partial eclipse.  The Rover caught the  image from the Martian surface, and it may tell scientists a lot about about the planet’s composition.

Scientists will use these photos to nail down the orbits of Phobos and Deimos (Mars’ moons) precisely, and to determine how much they have changed over the last few years, researchers said. This information, in turn, could yield key insights about the interior of Mars, which remains largely mysterious.

Europe’s second polar-orbiting meteorological satellite, Metop-B, was successfully placed into orbit Sept. 17 by a Soyuz rocket operating from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Officials at the European Space Agency’s Esoc space operations center here, which has responsibility for Metop-B’s postlaunch operations phase, confirmed that ground stations had received a signal that the satellite was healthy in orbit.

The 4,082-kilogram satellite, carrying 11 observing instruments from Europe, the United States, Canada and France, will operate in an 820-kilometer polar low Earth orbit. After six months of in-orbit tests, it will monitor weather conditions in tandem with the nearly identical Metop-A launched in October 2006.