After several shuttle delays last month, NASA has started its third countdown for shuttle Endeavour at Cape Canaveral, Florida.  Although space officials are anxious to launch Endeavour towards the International space Station, there is a 40 percent chance of thunderstorms and rain this weekend in Florida.

Despite the chance of poor weather, flight engineers have repaired the hydrogen gas leak that has plagued the previous two launch attempts.  The seven-man crew is expected to have a 16-day mission aboard the ISS with several spacewalks planned, as NASA continues to try and complete construction of the ISS before the current generation of space shuttles can be retired next year.

NASA recently issued a Kepler mission update, noting the spacecraft is now more than 7,767,140 miles away from Earth.  The spacecraft recently entered safe mode, and now flight engineers are attempting to figure out if there are any problems with Kepler's hardware or software.  All of Kepler's subsystems are functioning normally, and mission managers will help get it back to conducting research.

The U.S. space agency hopes its Kepler spacecraft can help discover new Earth-like planets millions of miles away from Earth.  It's possible Kepler will one day be able to find an Earth-like planet orbiting a sun that is ideal for lakes and oceans.

"We are all really excited to start sorting through the data and discovering the planets," a NASA Ames researcher said, regarding the Kepler mission.

Astronomers previously believed the first stars in the universe were created individually, but recent computer simulations indicate they may have had twins.  As researchers began to run the computer simulation, they discovered a binary star system formed, but it's unknown how many stars may have been binaries.

"While binaries had been proposed, they'd never been seen in cosmological simulations," Stanford graduate student Matthew Turk told Space.com.

Researchers also hope to develop newer telescopes that are able to look into time far enough to see the first few generations of stars.  Until then, researchers will attempt to figure out how many early stars had binaries -- a process that will certainly demand further computer simulations and research.