Like pretty much every other agency in the government, NASA is likely to be hurting for money over the next few years. The end of the Space Shuttle program, which comes with Atlantis' final flight next month, will free up some cash. But at best, NASA's budget will be flat in 2012, and given the mood in Congress, "at best" isn't something to count on. And thanks to the cost overruns plaguing the yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space ...

If you want to make sure you get enough sleep on Tuesday night, you might have to get to bed earlier. You don't have to adjust your schedule by much: about 1.26 millionths of a second ought to do it. According to a NASA scientist's computer modeling, that's how much an Earth day should have been shortened by the subterranean upheaval that triggered the Feb. 27 earthquake in Chile. Some basic physics explains why. — in ...

For years, scientists have ridiculed NASA's claim that the International Space Station is a grand platform for groundbreaking research — and plenty of the science done there has just reinforced that attitude. Who can forget, for example, this classic opening sentence from a landmark 2006 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology: "During space flights, tadpoles of the clawed toad Xenopus laevis occasionally develop upward bended tails "? If we hadn't spent tens of billions of ...

You can think of NASA's Discovery program as a sort of outer-space American Idol: every few years the agency invites scientists to propose unmanned planetary missions. The projects have to address some sort of fundamental science question, and they have to be relatively cheap to pull off — say, half a billion dollars or so. Then the proposals go through a grueling competition before judges who aren't as nasty as Simon Cowell but who are every ...

Nobody does anniversaries quite like NASA. Launches and landings and all of the other things spacecraft do may be governed by nonnegotiable variables like orbital mechanics and weather, but in NASA's world, they seem to take a lot of fortuitous calendrical bounces too. The Viking 1 lander settled down on the surface of Mars on July 20, 1976 — the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The Pathfinder probe made its own Mars landing on ...

Controlling Mars rovers: there's an app for that What if, instead of pocket-dialing, you could pocket-send-a-Mars-rover-over-a-cliff? That was the goal of two programmers at EclipseCon 2010 (via Slashdot). A competition at the conference asked developers to either create an e4-Rover client or use one to move a demo robot over a model Mars landscape. Two participants, Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens, built the robot-controlling client into an iPhone application. Entrants could win the rover challenge at EclipseCon in one of two ways. ...

NASA launched its Ares I-X rocket Wednesday, after multiple delays over two days because of bad weather.

Space buffs can now keep up with NASA's mission launches by launching an app.

For the first time since September 11, 2001, America is having a vigorous national debate about how to succeed in Afghanistan. This debate is entirely worth having. Whenever America sends its citizens into harm's way, it must do so with eyes wide open.

NASA is set to launch the world's largest rocket Tuesday, conducting research to help return astronauts to the moon.