Space News Archive - December 04, 2006

NASA researchers at Johnson Space Center, Houston have found organic materials that formed in the most distant reaches of the early Solar System preserved in a unique meteorite.

NASA wants to explore the Moon's polar regions for many reasons, not the least of which is that deep polar craters may contain ice. However, the instability of polar orbits poses a real problem for exploration and communication with Earth.

NASA may be going to the same old moon with a ship that looks a lot like a 1960s Apollo capsule, but the space agency said Monday that it's going to do something dramatically different this time: Stay there.

New images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show three additional NASA spacecraft that have landed on Mars: the Spirit rover active on the surface since January 2004 and the two Viking landers that successfully reached the surface in 1976.