Mementos from canceled NASA moon plan flying on space shuttle, Collectspace

"Together with a piece of Everest's summit, also retrieved by Parazynski, the plaque-mounted moon rocks will be displayed inside Tranquility's new seven-windowed Cupola to inspire the astronauts working there. "Imagine being in the Cupola and looking out this huge series of windows and looking at the Moon and having a piece of the Moon right next to you. What's that going to be like? I have no idea. I'll come back and tell you," said STS-130 mission specialist Stephen Robinson. Robinson had a role in including aboard the flight another, albeit subtle, nod to NASA's lunar exploration history in the form of his and his crewmates' mission patch. The six-sided emblem, which was shaped to resemble the Cupola viewing port attached to Tranquility's side, depicts the Earth as it was first seen in a photograph taken from the Moon by Lunar Orbiter I."

Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

NASA and General Motors are working together to accelerate development of the next generation of robots and related technologies for use in the automotive and aerospace industries.

NASA will extend the international Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its planets to 2017. The agency's fiscal year 2011 budget provides a $60 million per year extension for continued study of the ringed planet.

ESO is releasing a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which therefore serves as an excellent "local" analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be "weighed" so far.

The Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera has imaged craters both young and old in this view of the Southern Highlands of Mars.

Part of the Sirenum Fossae region in the Southern Highlands, the area in this image is centered at about 28*S / 185*E. The image captures an area to the north of the Magelhaens Crater. It extends some 230 km by 127 km and covers about 29,450 sq km, roughly the size of Belgium. The image resolution is approximately 29 meters per pixel.

Astronomers have discovered a new ground-based technique to study the atmospheres of planets outside our Solar System, accelerating our search for Earth-like planets with life-related molecules. Their work is reported today (3 Feb. 2010) in the journal Nature.