Today marks the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and to celebrate, NASA has released a collection of 59 new Hubble images (under the fantastic title "Galxies Gone Wild!") that present galaxies in all of their volatile wonder.

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The small airplane is too dirty for an environmentally threatened world. That’s not the view from eco-activists, but from some of the leading lights in general aviation—the category encompassing small planes such as Cessnas flown by citizen pilots. “At some point, some environmental group is going to figure out that small aircraft fly leaded fuel,” said Mark Moore, NASA’s personal air vehicle program manager, to a meeting of engineers, aviation advocates and a billionaire corporate titan with his own private jet. Their goal, however, is not to bury private aviation, but to remake it as the greenest form of personal transit.

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The Winnebago isn’t exactly a marvel of technology. But there’s a good chance that NASA’s next generation of lunar travelers will live and work out of a two-piece system—a mobile robot and habitat combination that will allow astronauts to bring base camp with them—that has plenty in common with the humble RV.

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NASA has been catching some extra criticism in the past few days after The Houston Chronicle—Johnson Space Center's hometown paper—ran an expose on credit card abuses at the agency.

The paper reportedly reviewed 451,000 transactions, and among plenty of apparently legitimate purchases, found that NASA employees had also bought iPods, video games and jewelry. The first two you might be able to slide past accounting, if you were, say, an astronaut doing isolation chamber testing, and needed a few gadgets and games to pass the time.

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A German newspaper reported last week that 13-year-old Nico Marquardt corrected a few glitches in NASA's estimates regarding the chances of a certain asteroid colliding with Earth. NASA concluded that the Apophis space rock has only a 1 in 45,000 chance of knocking into us, but this school-kid announced that the space agency had missed a few zeros, suggesting that the probability is closer to 1 in 450. And while quite a few news reports backed him up, even claiming that NASA agreed Marquardt was correct, the space agency is sticking to its estimates.

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Yes, it ended well, but the rough-and-tumble landing that astronauts experienced recently as a Soyuz capsule on its way back from the International Space Station missed its landing target by 300 miles sure doesn't sound like something you'd want to do twice.

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The board that has been tasked with reviewing NASA's plans to build a craft that will return astronauts to the Moon apparently has too many insiders.

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A radar device aboard ESA's Mars Express orbiter has allowed scientists to peek beneath the surface from afar, and the success with this research is now prompting them to think up other spots in the solar system that would be ideal for this sort of examination.

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Setting a spacecraft down on Mars isn't exactly easy—just ask Beagle 2. NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, en route and due for a May 25 rendezvous with the surface, recently received a course adjustment from mission planners as they try to ensure that the craft doesn't drop down in a danger zone.

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