Biologist Colleen Handel saw her first black-capped chickadee with the heartrending disorder in 1998.

The tiny birds showed up at birdfeeders in Alaska's largest city with freakishly long beaks. Some beaks looked like sprung scissors, unable to come together at the tips. Others curved up or down like crossed sickles.

Mission controllers were in the dark Thursday about the fate of a tiny European craft despatched to Mars as a trial run for a rover to follow in a quest for life on the Red Planet.

The paddling pool-sized "Schiaparelli" lander was scheduled to touch down at 1448 GMT Wednesday after a scorching, supersonic dash through Mars' thin atmosphere to conclude a 496 million-kilometre (308 million-mile) journey from Earth.

Europe and Russia celebrated placing a robot explorer into Mars orbit on Wednesday, but ground controllers faced an anxious night searching for the tiny lander it had dispatched to the Red Planet's surface.

Long before the space age, Earthlings were already in hot pursuit of life on Mars, using primitive telescopes and even psychic mediums to seek evidence of sentient beings.

Two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut soared into orbit in a Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday at the start of a two-day journey to the International Space Station.

NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Andrei Borisenko and Sergei Ryzhikov of Roscosmos blasted off at 0805 GMT from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan after their launch had been delayed by nearly one month because of technical issues.   

A European lander started a three-day, million-kilometer (621,000-mile) descent to Mars on Sunday, quitting its mothership to test technology for a daring mission to scout the Red Planet for signs of life.

Flight director Michel Denis confirmed the lander Schiaparelli had separated, to loud applause at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany some 175 million kilometers (109 miles) from where the maneuver was executed.

Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza could contain two previously unknown "cavities", scientists using radiography to scan the millennia-old monument said on Saturday.

China will launch a manned space mission on Monday, official media said, as the Asian giant works towards setting up its own space station. 

Hurricane Matthew lashed NASA's rocket launch facility at Cape Canaveral on Friday, forcing power outages and damaging roofs as it battered the Florida coast with wind gusts, the U.S. space agency said.

Rockets, spaceships and crucial equipment for the U.S. space program and private companies like SpaceX are all stored in the area, which is home to Kennedy Space Center (KSC). 

A rocky planet discovered in the "habitable" zone of the star nearest our Sun may be covered with oceans, researchers at France's CNRS research institute said Thursday.