NASA

NASA's Glory atmospheric research mission satellite crashed into the southern Pacific Ocean early today after a protective nose cone fairing failed to separate during launch aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. Taurus XL rocket. The $424 million failure was the second in a row for the Orbital Sciences booster following the 2009 loss of another environmental satellite due to a similar nose cone malfunction.

"I think it's not an understatement to say tonight we're all pretty devastated," said Ronald Grabe, a former space shuttle commander who now manages Orbital's Launch Systems Group. "But we … Read more

HOUSTON--The shuttle Discovery glided to a picture-perfect docking with the International Space Station on Saturday, the veteran space plane's 13th and final linkup with the orbiting outpost.

With commander Steven Lindsey manually flying Discovery from the aft flight deck, the shuttle's payload bay docking system engaged its counterpart on the front end of the station's Harmony module at 1:14 p.m. CST.

"Station and Houston, Discovery has capture confirmed," an astronaut radioed.

The historic linkup marked the first time in the station's 12-year history that spacecraft from the United States, Russia, the European … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--After a last-minute Air Force computer glitch threatened to derail launch, the shuttle Discovery, carrying an all-veteran crew of six, critical supplies, and a final U.S. module for the International Space Station, blasted off with seconds to spare and vaulted into orbit Thursday to begin its 39th and final flight.

Several relatively large pieces of foam insulation fell away from the shuttle's repaired external tank during the climb to space, including some that hit the ship's heat shield. But the observed impacts occurred well after Discovery was out of the dense lower atmosphere … Read more

Twelve years after launch and seven years after it collected dust from comet Wild 2, NASA's Stardust probe streaked past comet Tempel 1 late Monday, capturing 72 Valentine's Day closeups to find out how the icy body has changed since it was visited by another NASA spacecraft in 2005.

The renamed Stardust-New Exploration of Tempel mission--Stardust-NExT--passed within about 110 miles of the nucleus of Tempel 1 at 11:40 p.m. EST Monday, using its navigation camera to snap a string of images and recording thousands of dust grain impacts as it raced past at a relative velocity … Read more

Faced with reduced funding and an uncertain outlook, NASA's $18.7 billion fiscal 2012 budget prioritizes the Obama administration's major goals and objectives, focusing on maintaining the International Space Station, retiring the shuttle and ramping up efforts to spur development of commercial manned spacecraft.

The budget also reflects the administration's commitment to building a new heavy-lift rocket and a crew capsule that could be used for deep-space exploration.

But the budget follows the administration's proposal to freeze federal funding at 2010 levels for the next five years, resulting in a $276 million decrease for NASA compared … Read more

Twelve years after launch and seven years after it collected dust from comet Wild 2, NASA's Stardust probe is making a bonus Valentine's Day flyby late today. This time the probe will close in on comet Tempel 1 to find out how the icy body has changed since it was visited by another NASA spacecraft in 2005.

The renamed Stardust-New Exploration of Tempel mission--Stardust-NExT--is on track to pass within about 124 miles of the nucleus of Tempel 1 at 8:37 p.m. PT, snapping 72 high-resolution images and collecting data about the dust environment in the immediate … Read more

Just one month after U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot in the head in Tucson, Ariz., her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, announced Friday that he will resume training Monday to command the shuttle Endeavour during its final flight in April. He said his recuperating wife "would be very comfortable with the decision I made."

What input Giffords may have provided was not clear because "I just don't want to go into details about her condition," Kelly told reporters during a news conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Then people speculate … Read more

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope detected 1,235 possible extra-solar planets during its first four months of operation, astronomers announced Wednesday, including 68 approximately Earth-size worlds. Five of those are orbiting in the parent star's habitable "Goldilocks" zone, where conditions are "just right" for liquid water to exist in environments favorable for life.

The planetary "candidates" must be confirmed by additional observations and analysis, and it will take another two years to collect enough data to determine how common Earth-like worlds might be. But based on the initial results, "Kepler's … Read more

Using a powerful new camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered what appears to be the most distant object ever observed, a small proto galaxy some 13.2 billion light-years away that dates back to just 480 million years or so after the Big Bang birth of the universe.

The object was found in "deep field" images taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 that combined scores of optical and infrared exposures to capture a cosmic core sample showing nearby and increasingly distant galaxies. Showing up only in infrared light, the proto galaxy appears as … Read more