[Python] R expand.grid() function in Python

Is there a Python function similar to the expand.grid() function in R ? Thanks in advance.

(EDIT) Below are the description of this R function and an example.

Create a Data Frame from All Combinations of Factors

Description:

Create a data frame from all combinations of the supplied vectors
or factors.

> x <- 1:3
> y <- 1:3
> expand.grid(x,y)
Var1 Var2
1 1 1
2 2 1
3 3 1
4 1 2
5 2 2
6 3 2
7 1 3
8 2 3
9 3 3


(EDIT2) Below is an example with the rpy package. I would like to get the same output object but without using R :

>>> from rpy import *
>>> a = [1,2,3]
>>> b = [5,7,9]
>>> r.assign("a",a)
[1, 2, 3]
>>> r.assign("b",b)
[5, 7, 9]
>>> r("expand.grid(a,b)")
{'Var1': [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3], 'Var2': [5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9, 9]}


EDIT 02/09/2012: I'm really lost with Python. Lev Levitsky's code given in his answer does not work for me:

>>> a = [1,2,3]
>>> b = [5,7,9]
>>> expandgrid(a, b)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 2, in expandgrid
NameError: global name 'itertools' is not defined


However the itertools module seems to be installed (typing from itertools import * does not return any error message)

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