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Amazing Photos of Planet Mars

Ever heard that story of the bird wanting to go into space? Well, it didn't go.

As part of the Saturday Morning Science program by Don Pettit during Expedition 6 to the International Space Station, his video "Cities at Night; an Orbital Tour Around the World" is a video made from digital still images.

Japan's space agency began recruiting astronauts for the first time in nearly a decade on Tuesday amid growing interest in the space program spurred by a Japanese astronaut's journey on the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour.

Japan's space program was in tatters in the late 1990s after a series of mishaps, but it sent its first lunar probe into orbit last year in hopes of putting the program back on track.

The first piece of a new Japanese laboratory was also installed on the International Space Station last month, paving the way for more Japanese astronauts to work in space.

Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon's South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice.

The Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA's history shows that such missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations.

"I think that people are apprehensive about it because it seems violent or crude, but it's very economical," said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator for the mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

According to NASA, the Asteroid 2007 TU24 will closely approach the Earth to within 1.4 lunar distances (334,000 miles) on 2008 Jan. 29.
Hit or not? End of the world by the end of this month? I hope not!

Can a boomerang do in zero gravity what boomerangs do down here on Earth? We're going to find out! Takeo Doi intends to test the theory once he arrives at the new, Japanese-made "Kibo" science module on a scheduled mission this March. You see, spaceflight isn't all rocket science!

Find out a little more about flying boomerangs, paper airplanes and more here.

I really don't know what to make of this story. University of Tokyo "researchers" and members of the Japanese Origami Airplane Association are trying to develop a paper "spaceplane" able to survive the flight back from the ISS to the Earth.

If that doesn't seem ridiculous enough, the prototype being tested in an "ultra-high-speed wind tunnel" at the University of Tokyo’s Okashiwa campus is a mere 3.1 inches long. What, they couldn't afford to spring for a full sheet of paper? I guess it was a little snarky of me to run down their wind tunnel, since it is able to subject test items to 5,300 mile per hour winds.

However, I find myself wondering if a paper airplane could even be subjected to 5,300 mph winds anywhere but in a wind tunnel. I'm thinking that the terminal velocity of a paper airplane is about twenty miles per hour.

A curved sheet of ice that built up on shuttle Discovery's external tank prior to launch broke off at liftoff Tuesday and struck the liquid hydrogen umbilical door on the underside of the orbiter.

In a message beamed up to the Discovery astronauts earlier today, NASA mission managers told the shuttle crew that engineers would review high-resolution photos taken during the shuttle's approach to the International Space Station to determine whether any serious damage was done.

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Seems like it's an obvious solution.

Gigantic satellites orbiting the Earth, equipped with solar cells, could collect enough energy from the sun every year to power the world seven times over.

Beaming the energy down to Earth in the form of microwaves or a laser, the satellites would provide energy which would be gathered in antennas on the ground and then converted to electricity.

It's not fiction. It's the future of our energy supply.

Let's hope that nothing ever goes wrong while astronauts are preparing to launch on their Ares 1 rocket - the new vehicle that will replace the space shuttle. But if there is a problem, and the astronauts need to escape right now, they'll have a fun ride down - on the 3rd tallest roller coaster in the world. It's called the Orion Emergency Egress System, but really, it's a roller coaster, designed to get the astronauts away from the vehicle and into a protective bunker in moments.

NASA called in the world's roller coaster designers to help them create the system. In fact, from a height of 116 metres (380 feet), the Orion Emergency Egress System would be the third tallest roller coaster in the world, after the Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey, and the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio.

A friend's granddaughter who works for NASA sent us these pictures - I am assuming the last picture is Hurricane Dean - I am going to drop her a note to make sure.

Makes you want to go up there, doesn't it?

The photo, 3032 x 2064 pixels, was taken on September 5, 2007 as the International Space Station (Expedition 15) orbited over United Arab Emirates. Image courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. Want to go to Dubai?

NASA posted a hiring notice for new astronauts Tuesday, seeking for the first time in almost 30 years men and women to fly aboard spacecraft other than the shuttle.

The pilots, scientists, engineers and educators that NASA recruits will train primarily for three- to six-month missions aboard the international space station. However, some could be among those who stroll on the surface of the moon as part of NASA's plan to return human explorers to the lunar surface by 2020 aboard the shuttle fleet's successor spacecraft.

"Yes, I think it's quite likely," said Ellen Ochoa, who supervises NASA's astronaut corps as the director of flight crew operations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Astronauts on space shuttle Discovery will have a little something extra in their gear when they blast off in October: Luke Skywalker's original Jedi lightsaber.

As part of the 30th anniversary celebration of "Star Wars," NASA has agreed to carry the prop weapon into orbit and jettison it in space.

collectSPACE.com said the lightsaber will be handed over to the space agency by Chewbacca at the Oakland Airport, not far from George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch.

In the new sci-fi film Sunshine, an astronaut named Mace must leave his spacecraft without a protective suit. He makes it through his exposure with only a case of frostbite. Could you really survive outer space without a suit?

Yes, for a very short time. The principal functions of a spacesuit are to create a pressurized, oxygenated atmosphere for astronauts, and to protect them from ultraviolet rays and extreme temperatures. Without it, a spacewalker would asphyxiate from the lack of breathable air and suffer from ebullism, in which a reduction in pressure causes the boiling point of bodily fluids to decrease below the body's normal temperature. Since it takes a bit of time for these things to kill you, it's possible to make it through a very quick stint in outer space.

Two astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Wednesday to help fold up a solar wing and try to bring to life a rotating joint that will allow a new pair of solar arrays to track the sun.

Space shuttle Atlantis astronauts Patrick Forrester and Steve Swanson spent the first two hours of their scheduled 6.5-hour spacewalk helping to put the 115-foot solar wing away in its storage box.

Why would the shadow of a space shuttle launch plume point toward the Moon?

In early 2001 during a launch of Atlantis, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence. First, for the space shuttle's plume to cast a long shadow, the time of day must be either near sunrise or sunset. Next, just at sunset, the shadow is the longest and extends all the way to the horizon. Finally, during a Full Moon, the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the sky..

Imagine being in a dragster, peeling out from zero to 100 in three seconds, then keeping your foot to the floor for a full six minutes until you reach 17,500 mph.

On Friday, the Kennedy Space Center will open the Shuttle Launch Experience, an amusement-ride-cum-astronaut-flight-simulator designed to mimic the 17,500-mph liftoff of a NASA shuttle orbiter.

The 44,000-square-foot attraction isn't just a ride; it's a flight simulator on par with what astronauts in training experience, says Bob Rogers, CEO of BRC Imagination Arts, which built it.

"This isn't an imaginary flight," says Rogers. "This is real."

Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to fly in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, has died. He was 84 years old.

Schirra's NASA career began with his selection as one of the original seven Mercury astronauts in 1959 and spans the period from Americas first tentative steps into space to the missions to the moon.

Schirra flew on the fifth Mercury flight in 1962, orbiting the Earth six times. He commanded Gemini 6A in 1965, a flight with Tom Stafford that had the historic distinction of being the first rendezvous of two manned, maneuverable spacecraft. Gemini 6A and Gemini 7 flew in formation for five hours, as close as one foot to one another.

Yeah, but was he on the moon?

NASA will try to launch four space shuttle flights in 2007 to continue building the international space station, managers for the U.S. space agency said Monday.

The targeted launch dates in 2007 will be June 8 for Atlantis; Aug. 9 for Endeavour; Oct. 20 for Discovery and Dec. 6 for Atlantis.

NASA officials also announced dates for two of next year's flights, although more shuttle missions are expected in 2008, including one to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Endeavour is scheduled to be launched on Valentine's Day in 2008 and Discovery is set to fly again on April 24, 2008.

A museum honoring the first man to walk on the moon is not afraid to confront conspiracy theorists who argue his 1969 lunar landing was a hoax.

"If it takes a controversy to get them here, that's fine with us,'' said Andrea Waugh, an education specialist at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum, named after Apollo 11 astronaut and hometown hero Neil Armstrong.

The museum in western Ohio set up a display Saturday featuring some of the talking points that conspiracy theorists make in books and numerous Web sites to try to back up their claims that NASA staged all of its moon landings from 1969 to 1972 in a movie studio.

Zooming through low-Earth orbit at 17,500 mph, Suni Williams completes the standard marathon distance every 5.4 seconds.

But for next month's Boston Marathon, the U.S. Navy commander will run the equivalent distance on a treadmill -- 210 miles (338 kilometers) above Earth in the international space station, and tethered to her track by bungee cords so she does not float away.

"She thought it would be cool if she gave it a try," said Williams' sister, Dina Pandya, who will run the race the traditional way with almost 24,000 other runners. "She said, 'I'll call you on Heartbreak Hill.' "

Although the world's oldest annual marathon starts at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Earth, Williams might not be able to run at that time because her sleep schedule -- a fairly arbitrary matter in space -- is set for the arrival of a Soyuz mission.

In an official statement on Wednesday, NASA said U.S. Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak's position as a NASA astronaut has been terminated, effective March 8, by mutual agreement between the space agency and the U.S. Navy.

Nowak is charged with attempted kidnapping and burglary with assault after confronting Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman at Orlando International Airport last month.

According to prosecutors, Nowak collected more than a dozen e-mails that Shipman sent to shuttle pilot William Oefelein, including one he received during his shuttle mission in December.

For the Apollo astronauts, it was like bringing home the goods. Covered from helmet to toe with lunar dust, the "dirty dozen" Moonwalkers from 1969 through 1972 snagged, bagged and tagged 840 pounds (382 kilograms) of rock and other surface material.

Today, much like King Tutankhamen’s holdings, the "Apollo collection" is vaulted treasure.

Safely sequestered here at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), Moon specimens are protected from natural hazards such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Sealed for study in nitrogen-filled cabinets, the lunar sample inventory is also guarded against Earth contamination, preserving the history-telling tales they hold about the origins of our solar system.

It's the diaper that boldly goes where no incontinence product has gone before.

The sordid saga of a love-struck, diaper-clad astronaut has transformed a somewhat obscure NASA undergarment into a cultural phenomenon.

Comedians and bloggers can't get enough of the topic.

"We will not be stopping for commercials tonight ... because I am wearing a diaper," Jay Leno joked Thursday.

And David Letterman told his audience that when police nabbed astronaut Lisa Nowak in Florida, "she was wearing a wig and an adult diaper — and there was a lot of confusion because authorities originally thought she was Elton John."

The hunt for Earth-like worlds orbiting distant suns will get a big boost next year with the liftoff of NASA's Kepler mission. That spacecraft's job is to monitor 100,000 stars in a stellar staring contest intended to detect periodic decreases in a star's brightness--a falloff of light due to planets transiting their parent stars.

Kepler's pursuit of rocky Earth-sized planets is a step forward in taking on some tough but major questions, such as: What are their sizes and distances?

A NASA astronaut was arrested Monday on battery and attempted kidnapping charges after allegedly trying to subdue a romantic rival with pepper spray and abduct her from a parking lot at Orlando International Airport, police said.

Navy Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, who was a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Discovery in July, and Colleen Shipman were both reported to be "in a relationship" with astronaut Bill Oefelein, a Navy commander, according to a police report of the incident.

Nowak, 43, has been charged with battery, attempted kidnapping, attempted burglary to a vehicle and destruction of evidence. Police have recommended Nowak be held without bond.

Ever since the end of the Apollo program, "folks around the world have been thinking about returning to the moon, and what they would like to do there," says Jeff Volosin, strategy development lead for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Now, NASA is going back; the agency plans to send astronauts to the Moon no later than 2020.

If you woke up tomorrow morning and found yourself on the moon, what would you do? NASA has just released a list of 181 good ideas.