Nasa

How fitting the crew of NASA's final space shuttle mission will end almost 42 years to the day men set foot on the moon. On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to visit earth's closest neighbor in space. I'm fortunate to be able to recall that July evening in 1969 when the world held its breath as the Eagle landed on that airless world. Although Neil Armstrong and Buzz Armstrong planted the American flag on the lunar surface, I give credit to the Russians for making the "one small step for man" possible.

A commercial rocket launch that was scheduled for Wednesday but aborted has been pushed to Friday, at the earliest. The next attempt is "tentatively" set for Friday, assuming that issues forcing the delay are resolved, according to Orbital Sciences Corp., the Virginia company behind the launch. NASA hired Orbital Sciences to ferry supplies to the International Space Station via an unmanned spacecraft. The launch was scrubbed because of " a premature separation of a launch pad umbilical connection to the Antares upper stage used for data communications," the company said.

NASA is launching a rocket from Wallops Island, Va., Tuesday to test technology for future missions, and it could be visible in the early evening sky. Scientists will fire a payload 80 miles above the Earth and, at two different points, release two different types of vapor trails. Such vapors are used in other missions to study atmospheric patterns. The  mission will be shown live on Ustream  beginning at 4:30 p.m. at http://www.ustream.com/channel/nasa-wallops, and the flight center's visitors center will also be open.

Sen. Ben Cardin lamented snowballing damage from federal budget cuts in town hall meetings with federal workers and small-business leaders Friday, pledging to work toward an alternative budget solution by October. But he acknowledged that achieving a compromise between similar budget proposals from the Senate and President Barack Obama and another from the House of Representatives could be a challenge. He spoke to two dozen Howard County business owners and more than 50 employees at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

NASA successfully launched five rockets early this morning after nearly two weeks of delays, and here's what it looked like in case you missed it. The rockets released chemical tracers that allow scientists to study patterns of the jet stream. The launch took place at 4:58 a.m. from the Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia portion of the Delmarva. To see more images of the launch, visit the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's page on Flickr .

Richard Truly's ouster as head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration raises central questions about U.S. space policy. The vision espoused by former astronaut Truly may not, as one observer put it, have been "compatible with the realities of the world" as defined by the Bush administration, but he did put the space agency back on its feet after the 1986 Challenger disaster knocked it to its knees. A string of 20 successful shuttle missions on Mr. Truly's watch, including in-orbit rescue of experiments gone awry, speak well for his leadership and administrative abilities.

In recent days, some of those criticizing NASA's proposed budget have tried to paint a picture of an agency without a vision. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. NASA's far-reaching ambitions in space science have been, and will continue to be, truly inspiring. Just a few decades ago, cynical scientists used to say that there are only two facts known with certainty about the cosmos at large: that the sky is dark at night, and that our universe is expanding. This situation has changed drastically, and it has changed largely thanks to NASA's bold efforts in space science.

NASA awarded a contract Monday to Science Systems and Applications Inc. to help observe the atmosphere and the sun. The job is worth up to $103 million for the Lanham-based company. Science Systems will design and maintain technology orbiting the Earth to monitor atmospheric and solar conditions. It will also help NASA's earth science division perform satellite missions, prepare research proposals and support software engineering. The work will be performed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt from April 1 through April 30, 2017.

A full-size model of the James Webb Space Telescope, the tennis-court-length receiver that will be assembled in and operated from Maryland, is on display at the Inner Harbor through Oct. 26. "Webb will find the first galaxies in the universe," said NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. at the unveiling at the Maryland Science Center on Friday. The orbiting telescope, recently at the center of budget battles in Washington, will be the "most powerful that NASA has ever built," he said.

THE ALBATROSS known as the space station has scraped through another cycle of congressional skepticism, but only because of Washington's aversion to killing even misbegotten high-tech ventures. Congress is on the way to pruning the budget for the project, but the main effect is to render the space station anemic while it remains extremely expensive.The misfortune is that the costs of even a spartan space station hobble NASA's ability to pursue more promising ventures. In the grand tradition of elastic space accountancy, estimates of the ultimate price range from $7 billion to $37 billion.

Dennis H. McGinley Jr., a retired electrical engineer and model railroad enthusiast, died Tuesday of heart disease at Anne Arundel Medical Center. He was 73. The son of a Jersey Central Railroad yardmaster and a factory worker, Dennis Hayden McGinley Jr. was born and raised in Allentown, Pa., where he graduated in 1957 from Allentown Central Catholic High School. He served in the Air Force for four years until being discharged in 1961. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1970 in electrical engineering from Drexel University in Philadelphia, while working for Roeback Co. in Trevos, Pa. He also earned a master's degree in business administration in the 1980s from what is now Loyola University Maryland.

Though much remained unknown about the suspect in the shootings near the University of Maryland's College Park campus, a picture emerged Tuesday of a quiet, studious young man who had completed several high-profile summer internships with NASA. Dayvon M. Green, 23, a graduate engineering student, had studied industrial and systems engineering at Morgan State University. He was a 2010 and 2011 summer intern at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, close to the College Park campus, according to NASA.

NASA is launching a rocket from Wallops Island, Va., Tuesday to test technology for future missions, and it could be visible in the early evening sky. Scientists will fire a payload 80 miles above the Earth and, at two different points, release two different types of vapor trails. Such vapors are used in other missions to study atmospheric patterns. The  mission will be shown live on Ustream  beginning at 4:30 p.m. at http://www.ustream.com/channel/nasa-wallops, and the flight center's visitors center will also be open.

The first images of Earth as seen from space, appearing as a swirly blue marble, were groundbreaking. Now NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have published photos of Earth by night using infrared imaging technology via satellite. The images show what is now a fairly familiar view of clusters of city lights, but what is different is it shows those twinkling lights from afar across the entire globe. You can see the darkened planet at various vantage points, as well as in an animated video, at NASA's Earth Observatory website . You can also view them in a gallery in the Sun's Darkroom photo blog . They were gathered through a partnership between NASA and NOAA.

Scientists, including members of two Maryland-based teams, believe they have found ice inside craters near Mercury's poles, a discovery they say could reveal more about the "building blocks" for life on other planets. Though the small planet is closest to the sun, Mercury rotates nearly upright, meaning some areas on its poles never see sunlight. Using evidence of reflectivity, surface temperatures and the presence of excess hydrogen gathered by NASA's Messenger spacecraft, the scientists have concluded that there are deposits of ice and other organic material accumulated in dark areas of Mercury's surface.

Maryland stands to miss $5.4 billion in federal research funding under automatic budget cuts slated to begin in 2013, according to a study. Businesses and institutions in the state would receive $2.5 billion less in health-related spending and $2.1 billion less in defense spending from 2013 through 2017, according to estimates of research advocacy group Advancing Science, Serving Society. Other federal programs also would not receive expected funding. Overall, the state would receive 8.1 percent fewer federal research dollars each year than it would have without the cuts, according to a report the group released Thursday.

THE National Aeronautics and Space Administration has enjoyed four decades of marvelous successes with only occasional failures. The American public has loyally supported NASA, and mostly still does, for it was NASA that took us to the moon and beyond. But just as there is a point in an investment where the return on the dollar becomes marginal, so has NASA, at the end of the century, reached a point where the return on planetary exploration is marginal. The difficulty lies not in the recent series of mishaps in the exploration of Mars, even those rooted in human errors such as mismatched measuring systems.

It was altogether fitting that last month's discovery of the first solid evidence for the existence of black holes -- incredibly dense remnants of collapsed stars whose gravity is so powerful not even light can escape -- was also the first major scientific contribution made by the Hubble Space Telescope. The discovery more than vindicated NASA's most optimistic hopes for the orbiting telescope, as well as the time and money expended in repairing its flawed main mirror last year. The deft handling of the repair mission and Hubble's superb performance have finally restored the agency's tarnished image to something like the luster it enjoyed during the glory days of the Apollo Moon landings.

I still remember - although details are somewhat cloudy now, the gist of it is still clear as bell - the night when my teen and toddler brother and sisters, my father, some workers on the farm and I sat around a fire, on a somewhat cold night, in the middle of a jungle, and, with an occasional roar of a panther in the background, listened to a decrepit old radio. It was the late 60's in Western India, on my father's farm, and we were all very excited. We were trying very hard to listen, amid heavy static, to the live broadcast of a NASA capsule splash-landing in the ocean, after a journey around the moon.

Description: Two 110-million-year-old footprints that a massive plant-eating dinosaur and, perhaps, its offspring left behind has been uncovered on the campus of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. That age dates it to the Cretaceous Period, the last of the Mesozoic Era. NASA Goddard facilities officials are not revealing the exact location of the footprint but said it isn't going anywhere — moving it would violate laws protecting archaeological and paleontological artifacts found on federal lands.