[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] A new generation of space vehicles capable of economically delivering payloads and researchers is coming on line beginning in 2010. These vehicles will revolutionize space access by providing frequent, low-cost access to space.

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[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] The STS-128 crew's day started about 1:00 p.m. EDT with "Indiana, Our Indiana," performed by the Indiana University Band, for Pilot Kevin Ford, born in Indiana and on his first spaceflight.

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[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] Developed by SpaceX, in collaboration with NASA, the unit allows for communication between the ISS, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, and ground-based mission control.

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[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] NASA has taken a major step toward building the next crew exploration vehicle by completing the Orion Project's preliminary design review, or PDR. Orion is being designed to carry astronauts to the International Space Station and other destinations.

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[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] Today, the Washington Post editorial board offered a strong endorsement of commercial spaceflight for cargo and crew missions to the International Space Station.

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[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] While satellites provide accurate and expansive coverage of ice in the Arctic Ocean, the records are relatively new. Satellites have only monitored sea ice extent since 1973.

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[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] Nebraskans will have the rare chance to touch a piece of a moon rock throughout the month of September in NASA's Driven to Explore mobile exhibit.

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[Tuesday, September 1, 2009] Challenger Center for Space Science Education announced today that astronauts Barbara Morgan and Richard Garriott and aerospace engineer Karolyn Young were elected to its Board of Directors.

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[Wednesday, September 2, 2009] XCOR Aerospace announced today that it has reached several significant milestones in the 5K18 rocket engine test program. This is the engine that powers XCOR's Lynx suborbital spacecraft.

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[Wednesday, September 2, 2009] Ice cores from Antarctica, Greenland and elsewhere in the world serve as a way for scientists to travel back in time to understand past climate.

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[Wednesday, September 2, 2009] Mission Specialist Danny Olivas and Expedition 20 Flight Engineer Nicole Stott completed the first spacewalk of the STS-128 mission at 12:24 a.m. EDT Wednesday. The astronauts began the spacewalk at 5:49 p.m. Tuesday.

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[Wednesday, September 2, 2009] NASA will hold the annual Desert "RATS," or Research and Technology Studies, field test in the Arizona desert this fall, hosting a media day for journalists on Sept. 15.

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[Thursday, September 3, 2009] Experts analyzing a conjunction between the space shuttle/space station and a portion of an Ariane 5 rocket body concluded it is not necessary to perform a Debris Avoidance Maneuver.

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[Thursday, September 3, 2009] Testing continues on Russia's Mini Research Module 1 (MRM-1 or the Docking Cargo Module) which is scheduled for launch othe International Space Station on STS-132 in May 2010.

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[Thursday, September 3, 2009] Students of the ISU have for the first time successfully conducted an experiment of their making on the International Space Station. Robert Thirsk, a CSA astronaut currently resident on the ISS, played an integral part in the experiment.

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[Thursday, September 3, 2009] Thousands of newly released images from more than 1,500 telescopic observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a wide range of gullies, dunes, craters, geological layering and other features on the Red Planet.

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[Thursday, September 3, 2009] At 6:12 p.m. EDT, NASA astronaut Danny Olivas and ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang began the second of three spacewalks scheduled during the STS-128 mission.

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[Thursday, September 3, 2009] ORBCOMM Inc. and SpaceX announce they have reached an agreement for SpaceX to launch 18 ORBCOMM Generation 2 (OG2) satellites to begin as early as the fourth quarter of 2010 through 2014.

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[Friday, September 4, 2009] The 13 crew members aboard Discovery and the International Space Station will enjoy off-duty time beginning about 3 p.m. before fielding questions from reporters during a joint crew news conference at 8:54 p.m.

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[Friday, September 4, 2009] NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and space shuttle astronauts will participate in live education webcasts on Sept. 8 at 2 p.m. EDT and Sept. 10 at 1 p.m.

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[Friday, September 4, 2009] A campaign for Mars exploration with coordinated components of supporting technology development, human research, demonstrations on ISS, Mars robotic missions, human preparatory missions with enabling commercial and international collaboration...

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[Friday, September 4, 2009] Because no single Federal agency has overall responsibility for the Landsat Program, decisions about acquisition strategies were delayed, causing significant schedule delays, and thus challenging the goals and intent of the Act.

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[Friday, September 4, 2009] Each month, this newsletter will highlight the advancements of Nebula, NASA's cloud computing platform.

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[Friday, September 4, 2009] During analysis of four safe-mode events this year, engineers for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project have identified a vulnerability to the effects of subsequent events.

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[Friday, September 4, 2009] The New Horizons mission team has closed out a successful summer workout, putting its Pluto-bound spacecraft back into hibernation Aug. 27 after seven weeks of functional tests and system checks.

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[Saturday, September 5, 2009] NASA Internal Memo: LCROSS has rescinded its Declaration of Spacecraft Emergency

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[Saturday, September 5, 2009] Discovery's crew is now ready to go for Saturday's final spacewalk of the mission. With two spacewalks and more than half of their scheduled transfer work complete, the first half of the eighth day in space was set aside for off-duty time for its crew.

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[Saturday, September 5, 2009] Two NASA astronaut commanders have perspectives like no others on Twitter -- the views of twin brothers preparing on opposite sides of the world to command both the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

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[Saturday, September 5, 2009] At 4:39 p.m. EDT, NASA astronaut Danny Olivas and ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang began the third & final spacewalk scheduled during the STS-128 mission.

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[Saturday, September 5, 2009] One of the worth mentioning analytical techniques that are being tested during AMASE 2009 is a Raman spectrometer.

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[Sunday, September 6, 2009] The astronauts aboard the International Space Station and space shuttle Discovery turn their focus to final packing today. After nearly seven days of busy joint activities and three spacewalks, the shuttle crew will also get a half-day off.

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[Sunday, September 6, 2009] The H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) Demonstration Flight and the H-IIB Launch Vehicle are undergoing final launch preparations at the Vehicle Assembly Building waiting for their launch on Sept. 11

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[Sunday, September 6, 2009] The otherworldly footprint of black basaltic lava creates a striking landscape at Black Point Lava Flow in northern Arizona, seen in this photograph taken from the International Space Station.

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[Sunday, September 6, 2009] Humans might not be walking on Earth today if not for the ancient fusing of two microscopic, single-celled organisms called prokaryotes, NASA-funded research has found.

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[Tuesday, September 8, 2009] The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.

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[Tuesday, September 8, 2009] Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Astrium announce a contract for a SpaceX Falcon 1e to launch an Earth observation satellite designed by Astrium or its recently acquired subsidiary Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL).

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[Tuesday, September 8, 2009] Space shuttle Discovery undocked from the International Space Station at 3:26 p.m. EDT. Once safely separated from the orbiting complex by about 450 feet, pilot Kevin Ford conducted a flyaround of the space station.

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[Tuesday, September 8, 2009] IMAX Corporation, and Warner Bros. Pictures today announced that Hubble 3D will be released exclusively in IMAX and IMAX 3D theatres worldwide beginning March 19, 2010, with expansion to additional IMAX locations on April 23rd.

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[Tuesday, September 8, 2009] Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew are expected to return to Earth Thursday after a 13-day mission. Two landing opportunities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida are available at 7:05 p.m. and 8:42 p.m. EDT.

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[Tuesday, September 8, 2009] NASA has identified the spot where it will search for water on the moon. Reporters are invited to attend the announcement of the target location where the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite/

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[Wednesday, September 9, 2009] The Augustine Committee, in its summary report, stated, "commercial services to deliver crew to low-Earth orbit are within reach... [and] could provide an earlier capability at lower initial and lifecycle costs than government could achieve.

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[Wednesday, September 9, 2009] Women in Aerospace (WIA) is proud to announce the winners of its 24th Annual Women in Aerospace Awards.

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[Wednesday, September 9, 2009] Astronomers declared NASA's Hubble Space Telescope a fully rejuvenated observatory with the release Wednesday of observations from four of its six operating science instruments.

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[Wednesday, September 9, 2009] A rocket experiment that may shed light on the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere will be conducted Sept. 15 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Canadian Space Agency President Steve MacLean signed a framework agreement Wednesday for cooperative activities in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] On Wednesday September 9th the LRO Completion of Commissioning Review was held and it was confirmed that would execute MOI and proceed to the 50km nominal mission orbit on September 15th , thus beginning the prime ESMD Exploration mission.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] Former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin apparently has sent a scathing memo to friends and supporters in Washington, lashing out at the work of the presidential committee.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] NASA and industry engineers lit up the Utah sky Thursday with the initial full-scale, full-duration test firing of the first stage motor for the Ares I rocket. The Ares I is a crew launch vehicle in development for NASA's Constellation Program.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] Reporters are invited to participate in a news conference at NASA's Ames Research Center at 10 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, Sept. 15, featuring Vivek Kundra, White House federal chief information officer.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] New methods for delivering medicine to cancer cells are among the results published in a NASA report detailing scientific research accomplishments made aboard the International Space Station during its first eight years.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] This image was taken by Lunar Orbiter III on 22 February 1967 at 5:24:14 GMT at an altitude of 54.27 km above the lunar surface. High resolution frame 3 clearly shows the Surveyor 1 spacecraft sitting on the lunar surface complete with a long shadow.

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[Thursday, September 10, 2009] After monitoring weather right down to the wire, Mission Control reluctantly told Discovery's astronauts that unstable conditions would not permit a landing Thursday at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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[Friday, September 11, 2009] On his way up the mountain Parazynski managed to capture two GigaPan panoramas - stunningly huge images that are likely to be the highest images of their kind ever taken on the surface of the Earth.

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[Sunday, September 13, 2009] Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew landed at 7:53 p.m. CDT Friday at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., capping off a 14-day mission.

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[Monday, September 14, 2009] NASA has selected a final destination for its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS.

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[Monday, September 14, 2009] The first of three images of ESO's GigaGalaxy Zoom project -- a new magnificent 800-million-pixel panorama of the entire sky as seen from ESO's observing sites in Chile -- has just been released online.

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[Monday, September 14, 2009] NASA is inviting eligible educational institutions, museums and other organizations to begin registering to screen potential space shuttle artifacts.

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[Monday, September 14, 2009] NASA invites the public to travel to Jupiter from the comfort of one of 38 Science On a Sphere theaters around the globe.

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[Tuesday, September 15, 2009] Why are we going into space with people and what will we do there. What are we trying to accomplish? We first need to look at our objectives, not the architecture.

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[Tuesday, September 15, 2009] Armadillo Aerospace, led by id Software founder John Carmack, successfully flew its lunar Lander rocket vehicle, "Scorpius," twice in two hours, flying between a pair of landing pads to qualify for the $1 million top prize purse.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] NASA will showcase new images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s seven instruments and provide updates about the topography of the moon’s south pole during a news conference at 1 p.m. EDT Thursday, Sept. 17.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] An industry survey has revealed that over 5,000 direct jobs, including 1,700 jobs in Florida, would be created over the next five years if the $2.5 billion Commercial Crew Program proposed by the Augustine Committee moves forward.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] A team of German scientists led by Mirjam Langhans, from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), will present first results of a global analysis of spatial patterns, occurrence and origin of river channels on Titan.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] A dark red area discovered on dwarf planet Haumea appears to be richer in minerals and organic compounds than the surrounding icy surface.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] Crater patterns on Vesta and Ceres could help pinpoint when Jupiter began to form during the evolution of the early Solar System.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] Scientist using the Cassini spacecraft's Magnetospheric Imaging instrument (MIMI) have detected a new, temporary radiation belt at Saturn, located around the orbit of its moon Dione at about 377,000 km from the centre of the planet.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] Studies of features in Jupiter's spectacular and rapidly changing aurorae have given new insights into the complex electromagnetic interactions between the giant planet and two of its innermost moons.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] Researchers are laying the groundwork for a new equation that could mathematically quantify a habitat's potential for hosting life, similar to how the Drake equation estimates the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] A powerful lightning storm in Saturn's atmosphere that began in mid-January 2009 has become the Solar System's longest continuously observed thunderstorm.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] Comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu was captured as a temporary moon of Jupiter in the mid-20th century and remained trapped in an irregular orbit for about twelve years.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] Scientists have assembled the first global geological map of the solar system's largest moon -- and in doing so have gathered new evidence into the formation of the large, icy satellite.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] In a break from its usual task of searching for distant cosmic explosions, NASA's Swift satellite has acquired the highest-resolution view of a neighboring spiral galaxy ever attained in the ultraviolet.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] Networks of giant polygonal troughs etched across crater basins on Mars have been identified as desiccation cracks caused by evaporating lakes, providing further evidence of a warmer, wetter Martian past.

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[Wednesday, September 16, 2009] NASA has concluded two weeks of technology development tests on two of the agency's prototype lunar rovers.

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[Thursday, September 17, 2009] The Hypersonic Thermodynamic InfraRed Measurements (HYTHIRM) team was again successful in obtaining spatially resolved thermal images of the space shuttle Discovery (STS-128) as it re-entered Friday evening, Sept. 11

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] NASA has assigned the crew for the last scheduled space shuttle mission, targeted to launch in September 2010. The flight to the International Space Station will carry a pressurized logistics module to the station.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and French Space Agency President Yannick d'Escatha signed four agreements in support of U.S. and French space cooperation during a ceremony Thursday at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] The Planck space observatory, ESA's mission to study the early Universe, has successfully completed its initial test survey of the sky.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] A computer system is under development that can automatically combine images of the Martian surface, captured by landers or rovers, in order to reproduce a three-dimensional view of the red planet.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] One of the seven instruments aboard LRO, the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, is making the first global survey of the temperature of the lunar surface while the spacecraft orbits some 31 miles above the moon.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, who will command the next International Space Station mission, is using Twitter, a blog and short video clips to provide a unique, behind the scenes insight into his training in Russia.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] Applications are being solicited for the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] Challenging conventional wisdom, new research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of changes in the Sun's impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.

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[Friday, September 18, 2009] he Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to announce its co-sponsorship of the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC), which is being organized in conjunction with SwRI and USRA.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] NASA applied funds from the ARRA of 2009 to work on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle Project. The total amount is $165.9 million. This is a modification to an existing contract with Lockheed Martin Corporation of Denver, Colorado.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] The Supersonics Project is a broad based effort designed to develop knowledge, capabilities and technologies that support all vehicles that fly in the supersonic speed regime.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] NASA is currently developing an architecture and concept of operations for communications and tracking on the lunar surface or other small planetary bodies.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] The Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project, developed by Southwest Research Institute, is an integral part of the LRO science investigation. LAMP uses a novel method to peer into the perpetual darkness of the Moon's so-called permanently shadowed regions.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] NASA reported Thursday that its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has successfully completed its testing and calibration phase and entered its mapping orbit of the Moon.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] Two sources of light illuminate the textured surface of the moon Enceladus. On the right of the image, sunlight bathes the anti-Saturn side of this geologically active moon.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] This Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) image, taken Sept. 18, 2009, shows a view of Saturn as it passes behind the sun, Cassini spacecraft in tow.

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[Saturday, September 19, 2009] Vertical ring structures created by the moon Daphnis cast dark shadows on Saturn's A ring in this image taken as the planet approached its August 2009 equinox.

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[Monday, September 21, 2009] Masten Space Systems unsuccessfully attempted a Level 1 flight on Sept. 16 as part of the Centennial Challenges - Lunar Lander Challenge at the company's test facility at California's Mojave Air and Space Port.

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[Monday, September 21, 2009] NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Sept. 23, to preview the third and final flyby of Mercury by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft known as MESSENGER.

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[Monday, September 21, 2009] The second of three images of ESO's GigaGalaxy Zoom project has just been released online. It is a new and wonderful 340-million-pixel vista of the central parts of our home galaxy as seen from ESO's Paranal Observatory with an amateur telescope.

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[Monday, September 21, 2009] A Europe-wide education event today links ESA astronaut Frank De Winne on the International Space Station with hundreds of schoolchildren in several European cities.

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[Monday, September 21, 2009] The topic of the press briefing will be a paper that will appear in this week's issue of Science magazine wherein results from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) aboard Chandrayaan-1 will be revealed.

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[Monday, September 21, 2009] Scientists once thought the rings were almost completely flat, but new images reveal the heights of some newly discovered bumps in the rings are as high as the Rocky Mountains.

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[Tuesday, September 22, 2009] New, three-dimensional imaging of Martian north-polar ice layers by a radar instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is consistent with theoretical models of Martian climate swings during the past few million years.

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[Tuesday, September 22, 2009] NASA is targeting Tuesday, Oct. 27, for the flight test of the Ares I-X rocket, pending successful testing and data verification. Senior managers made the decision after a meeting Monday at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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[Tuesday, September 22, 2009] A dramatic new vista of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory exposes new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center.

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[Tuesday, September 22, 2009] Next Step in Space, a coalition of businesses, organizations, and people working toward ensuring the future of human spaceflight in the United States, today issued a white paper.

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[Wednesday, September 23, 2009] Life aboard the International Space Station is hard work. Crewmembers have a multiplicity of complex tasks, potentially involving thousands of tools, components and other items.

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[Wednesday, September 23, 2009] Join Challenger Center for Space Science Education for a live interactive webcast, September 23rd at 1:00pm ET with Edna DeVore, SETI Institute. The interactive webcast is free and open to the public, and it will be broadcast live.

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[Wednesday, September 23, 2009] Three articles will appear in Science Magazine tomorrow. Three different spacecraft - three different instruments - all saying the same thing about the presence of water and other materials on the Moon.

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[Wednesday, September 23, 2009] The Boeing Company submitted a proposal to NASA on Sept. 22 to accelerate the development of commercial human space transportation as defined by NASA in its Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) announcement

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[Wednesday, September 23, 2009] NASA has selected nine scientific teams to work on future high-altitude balloon and sounding rocket payloads.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will host a media teleconference at noon PDT on Thursday, Sept. 24, to discuss new research results from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] The team of researchers used a NASA instrument called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper M3 for short housed on the Indian Chandrayyan-1 satellite, India's first lunar expedition, which was launched into orbit around the moon late last year.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] Brown University scientists have made a major discovery: The moon has distinct signatures of water.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] New data from the Deep Impact spacecraft and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument aboard India's recently ended Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, provide, for the first time, clear evidence that water exists on the surface of the Moon.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] A West Virginia high-school student analyzing data from a giant radio telescope has discovered a new astronomical object -- a strange type of neutron star called a rotating radio transient.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] NASA scientists have discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the moon. Instruments aboard three separate spacecraft revealed water molecules in amounts that are greater than predicted, but still relatively small.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft's observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] 28 times per second, engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center fire a laser that travels about 250,000 miles to hit the minivan-sized Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft moving at nearly 3,600 miles per hour as it orbits the moon

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] On 18 September 2009 Excalibur Almaz Ltd (EA), an international space exploration company, today held a series of events to mark its announcement of plans to provide commercial flights to and from outer space.

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[Thursday, September 24, 2009] The Presidents of 57 liberal arts colleges in the U.S., representing 22 states, have declared their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373) in an Open Letter released today.

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[Friday, September 25, 2009] NASA is still struggling to develop a solid business case needed to justify moving the Constellation program forward into the implementation phase. Gaps in the business case include:

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[Friday, September 25, 2009] The current 5-year CPAF contract, awarded to Caltech in November 2002, is valued at approximately $7.5 billion 2--$1.5 billion per year, including available award fees of $22 million.

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[Friday, September 25, 2009] Field researchers in Antarctica have returned with more than 17,500 meteorites over the 30-plus years that the extraterrestrial material has been collected from the frozen continent.

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[Friday, September 25, 2009] The Innovative Partnerships Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington is offering an opportunity for the public to help shape the prize challenges the agency offers to America's future citizen-inventors.

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[Saturday, September 26, 2009] NASA wishes to maximize the benefit to the public from NASA's R&D investments yielding new technologies and patents.

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[Saturday, September 26, 2009] Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announces the successful demonstration of a proximity sensor, called DragonEye, on NASA's STS-127 shuttle mission.

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[Saturday, September 26, 2009] NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft known as MESSENGER will fly by Mercury for the third and final time on Sept. 29.

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[Saturday, September 26, 2009] The ALMA astronomical observatory has taken another step forward. One of its state-of-the-art antennas was carried for the first time to the 5,000-meter plateau of Chajnantor, in the Chilean Andes, on the back of a custom-built giant transporter.

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[Saturday, September 26, 2009] A plant that lives along muddy waterways in Asia has inspired a NASA team to develop a special coating to prevent dirt and even bacteria from sticking to and contaminating the surfaces of spaceflight gear.

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[Saturday, September 26, 2009] Researchers have used NASAs Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) to compose the most comprehensive picture of changing glaciers along the coast of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

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[Saturday, September 26, 2009] Linking the twin, 10-meter telescopes in Hawaii, astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory discovered an extended, double-layered dust disk orbiting 51 Ophiuchi, a star that is 410 light-years from Earth.

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[Sunday, September 27, 2009] It has been a few days since the revelations concerning the Moon water results. There has been much discussion and debate, some of it heated, between those who think that this changes the arguments of lunar versus Martian exploration by humans.

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[Monday, September 28, 2009] The Northrop Grumman Foundation is kicking off the fourth year of its Weightless Flights of Discovery Program, flying a total of 120 science and math teachers on four microgravity flights over the next two weeks.

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[Monday, September 28, 2009] The third image of ESO's GigaGalaxy Zoom project has just been released online, completing this eye-opening dive into our galactic home in outstanding fashion.

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[Monday, September 28, 2009] "You bet, I'm really excited about this flyby," said William C. Feldman, a Senior Scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute and Cognizant Co-Investigator for the Neutron Spectrometer flying aboard the MESSENGER spacecraft.

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[Monday, September 28, 2009] NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission (LCROSS) based on new analysis of available lunar data, has shifted the target crater from Cabeus A to Cabeus (proper).

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[Tuesday, September 29, 2009] A team of Universite de Montreal researchers, led by physics PhD student Olivier Daigle, has developed the world's most sensitive astronomical camera.

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[Tuesday, September 29, 2009] Planning a trip to Mars? Take plenty of shielding. According to sensors on NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft, galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high.

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[Tuesday, September 29, 2009] The Arecibo Observatory provides "unmatched precision and accuracy" in detecting asteroids or comets that could hit the Earth, says a report by the National Academy of Sciences. That statement could help secure the observatory's future.

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[Tuesday, September 29, 2009] Shortly before 5:55 p.m. EDT, MESSENGER skimmed 228 kilometers (141 miles) above the surface of Mercury in its third and final flyby of the planet.

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[Wednesday, September 30, 2009] Flight Engineers Jeffrey Williams and Maxim Suraev of the 21st International Space Station crew launched in their Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:14 a.m. EDT Wednesday to begin a six-month stay in space.

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[Wednesday, September 30, 2009] The 2009 Astronaut Glove Challenge is now scheduled, and teams that wish to compete may now register.

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[Wednesday, September 30, 2009] With a simple press on his shirt insignia, the captain of the Star Ship Enterprise could send and receive messages. Now, thanks to the efforts of a Finnish company supported by ESA, this futuristic communication may not be limited to fiction.

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[Wednesday, September 30, 2009] During MESSENGER's approach to Mercury yesterday, the NAC acquired a high-resolution, 62-image mosaic of the sunlit crescent planet.

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[Wednesday, September 30, 2009] Yesterday, as the spacecraft approached Mercury for the mission's third flyby of the Solar System’s innermost planet, MESSENGER captured this striking view.

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[Wednesday, September 30, 2009] Dawn is celebrating the second anniversary of leaving Earth by engaging in the same function it has performed most of its time in space: with the utmost patience, it is using its ion propulsion system to gradually modify its orbit around the Sun.

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[Wednesday, September 30, 2009] Completing an 18-month mission orbiting the Earth more than 6,000 times on-orbit the ISS, the Optical Reflector Material Experiment (ORMatE-1) returns NRL's Electronics Science and Technology Division to begin experiment testing and analysis.

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