The Space Shuttle Endeavor touched down at Edwards Air Force Base in California at 22:25 BST (21:25 GMT) on 30th November 2008. STS-126 was NASA’s 124th space shuttle mission, the 22nd flight for Endeavour and the 27th shuttle visit to the station. 

One of the most publicized events of the 16-day journey was the loss of a toolbag.

In a press release, NASA points out some of the stuff that the crew did:

The STS-126 mission featured important repair work and prepared the International Space Station to house six crew members on long-duration missions beginning next year. The new station equipment includes a water recovery system, additional sleeping quarters, a second toilet and an exercise device. During four spacewalks, the crew serviced the station’s two Solar Alpha Rotary Joints, which allow its solar arrays to track the sun, and installed new hardware that will support future assembly missions. 

Weather concerns prevented the shuttle to land at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the primary end-of-mission landing site.

The next shuttle mission is due to liftoff on the 12th Febuary 2009.

For more about the STS-126 mission and the upcoming STS-119 mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

For more about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station

Last week astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was forced to watch as her toolkit float away. She was fixing a joint on one of the ISS’s solar panels and had put the bag down to wipe some grease off her hands,  then there was a little “explosion” and the bag started drifting away.

The STS-126 MCC Status Report #09 reads:

About halfway into the spacewalk, one of the grease guns that Piper was preparing to use on the SARJ released some Braycote grease into her crew lock bag, which is the tool bag the spacewalkers use during their activities. As she was cleaning the inside of the bag, it drifted away from her and toward the aft and starboard portion of the International Space Station. Inside the bag were two grease guns, scrapers, several wipes and tethers and some tool caddies. Piper and Bowen spent the remainder of the spacewalk sharing a duplicate set of tools from the other crew lock bag they had with them. - from NASA - STS-126 MCC Status Report #09

Because bag, which costs around £70,000, is so close to earth (around 200 miles up), you should be able to see it using binoculars or a telescope. For detailed steps, The Society for Popular Astronomy has this web page.

The Large Hadron Collider has been brought to a halt after a fault with a magnet. The LHC began colliding beams of protons on the 10 September 2008 admist claims that it was going to make a black hole.

It is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle among those predicted by the Standard Model. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would shed light on the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, through which the particles of the Standard Model are thought to acquire their mass. In addition to the Higgs boson, new particles predicted by possible extensions of the Standard Model might be produced at the LHC. - from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The iPhone 3G is now available on Pay & Go (or Pay As You Go) in the UK. The iPhone 3G is the second generation of Apple’s phone (read more about it on Wikipedia).
In the iPhone 3G’s first week it sold over 1 million units, despite all the shortages. [1]
For more info about the iPhone go to Apple.com or the O2 website.

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