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Even overseas the news remains a little slow -- the only really notable event being the revelation that Google is about to list on the stockmarket.

Things are a lot more exciting elsewhere in the universe however...

Many millions of miles away we have the latest Mars probe which appears to be performing precisely to expectations, having already sent back more stunning pictures of the red planet -- including a lovely 3-D panorama and now the first colour image of this mission.

Taking advantage of the close proximity of the planet, yet another NASA mission is set to touch down later this month elsewhere on the planet so the fun only going to get better.

However, as the ill-fated Beagle project proved, space is not the easiest of places to explore and this has been further emphasized by a report that the International Space Station appears to have sprung an air leak.

With space debris (both natural and man-made) always being a potential danger for space station inhabitants, sitting up there in orbit is a risky proposition -- especially while the space shuttle program temporarily out of action.

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But back to those inter-planetary probes -- how far has our technology come since the very first mission to Mars?

Well, in respect to the computing resources available onboard, we've come an awfully long way since the Viking mission of 1976.

All the data sent back and forth is now in digital format and there's a whole heap more number-crunching, bandwidth and memory available for the collection and transmission of data back to earth.

However, one only has to compare the pictures sent back by those early missions with those from the latest lander to realise that perhaps the space industry is very much like the PC one.

Yesterday several people remarked that the additional power of today's modern PCs seems to go almost unnoticed when you actually sit down to use them -- mainly because the software is less efficient and makes greater demands.

Well it appears that those Mars missions of a quarter-century ago are, once you take the technology into account, even more impressive than the ones currently underway.

That they sent man to the moon using 1960's technology was unbelievable enough, but to safely guide, land and return information from a Mars lander using 1970's technology is absolutely incredible.

Now if only they could find a cure for the common cold.

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