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On 26th November 2011 at 15:02 , NASA launched its Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Don't be fooled by the innocuous name--Curiosity,

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA engineers have produced a material that absorbs on average more than 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that hits it -- a development that promises to open new frontiers in space technology.

As NASA prepares to launch its new Curiosity Mars rover, we look back at some of the highlights--and the misfires--in more than 50 years of Mars missions [More]

University students via for a chance to install their instruments on the next NASA science balloon [More]

Tractor beams -- the ability to trap and move objects using laser light -- are the stuff of science fiction, but a team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept for remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles and delivering them to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis.

Credit: Wikipedia/NASA NANTES, France--Makemake may well have the most exotic name of the dwarf planets, and it now looks to be just as unusual on its surface. [More]

Out in space, NASA's Kepler mission keeps watch on more than 150,000 stars. Its job is to see if those stars dim ever so slightly--because of the presence of an orbiting planet. Kepler has already found more than 20 distant worlds that way

An unmanned Russian cargo ship carrying tons of supplies for astronauts on the International Space Station suffered a major malfunction after launching today (Aug. 24) and ultimately crashed back to Earth, NASA officials say

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazine Planetary scientists thought they knew what to expect when NASA's Dawn spacecraft returned the first close-up portrait of the giant asteroid Vesta last month. [More]

We knew Virgin Galactic had hopes of using its capacious SpaceShipTwo-class reusable spaceplanes for more than just joyrides into zero-g, but NASA's new contract with the fledgling space company is a milestone for the entire business, as well as Richard Branson's wackiest venture. As Virgin notes, "this arrangement marks the first time that NASA has contracted with a commercial partner to provide flights into space on a suboribtal spacecraft." The decision came out of NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, source of some of the most paradigm-changing pieces of news from NASA recently, and it's technically a further step in a program that's already seen NASA technology flights on low-altitude rockets

NASA's space shuttle fleet will never fly again, but the agency believes it still has plenty to learn from the iconic vehicles. [More]

A NASA spacecraft orbiting the huge asteroid Vesta is beaming home images that reveal the giant space rock like never before, showing its battered and pockmarked surface in stunning detail. [More]

WASHINGTON -- It's official: NASA's next Mars rover has a landing site, and it's a giant crater called Gale. NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission is slated to launch in late November, and will drop a car-size rover named Curiosity at the Gale crater. [More]

NASA's 30-year space shuttle program came to an end on July 21st, 2011. To mark the occasion, the Nature Video team have produced this tribute which features footage from every shuttle flight and is set to a rockin' soundtrack