American Monuments on Display With the opening of the space shuttle Atlantis' permanent exhibit in Florida on Saturday (June 29), the last of NASA's retired space planes will be officially on display for the public to enjoy, but you'll have to go state-hopping to see all four of the iconic spacecraft. From Los Angeles to New York, the space shuttles have made their homes around the country. If you're looking for a good summer vacation destination, try visiting one (or...

MOSCOW -- A Russian booster rocket carrying three satellites crashed shortly after launch at a Russian-leased cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Tuesday. The Proton-M booster unexpectedly shut down the engine 17 seconds into the flight and crashed some 2 kilometers (over a mile) away from the Baikonur launch pad, the Russian Space Agency said in a statement. (MORE: ) News channel Rossiya-24 broadcast the launch live on Tuesday morning. The footage showed the rocket tilt to one side shortly after the launch,...

This image from a 2011 rocket launch campaign shows the liftoffs of a Black Brant V and Terrier-Orion sounding rocket. Similar rockets will be used to launch NASA's Dynamo mission to study Earth's ionosphere in July 2013. (NASA Photo) NASA is hoping to celebrate the Fourth of July with some fireworks if its own today with a double rocket launch from Virginia's Eastern Shore. After a series of weather delays, scientists at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.,...

If Earthlings decide to go planet-hopping in the future, scientists believe there will be plenty of safe landing spots that sustain life. (MORE: ) In this handout illustration made available on December 5, 2011 by NASA, the Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star is digitally illustrated. (Ames/JPL-Caltech/NASA via Getty Images) There could be as many as 60 billion habitable planets , according to a SPACE.com report. Using data collected by the...

PASADENA, Calif. -- Jason-1, a satellite that for more than a decade precisely tracked rising sea levels across a vast sweep of ocean and helped forecasters make better weather and climate predictions, has ended its useful life after circling the globe more than 53,500 times, NASA announced Wednesday. The joint U.S. and French satellite was decommissioned this week after its last remaining transmitter failed, according to a NASA statement. Launched on Dec. 7, 2001, Jason-1 was designed to have a...

The Parkes radio telescope located four brief but powerful bursts of energy from other galaxies. In this image, the telescope is superimposed on an image of the gas in the Milky Way. (Swinburne Astronomy Productions, vr.swin.edu.au) A team of international astronomers has detected four explosive events, known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), above the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Lasting only a few thousandths of a second, these sources send powerful signals across the universe, traveling billions of light-years...

This photo released by NASA shows a photo stitched together from nearly 900 images taken by the NASA rover Curiosity showing a section of Gale Crater near the Martian equator. (AP Photo/NASA) LOS ANGELES -- Martian mountain, here Curiosity comes. The NASA rover has officially kicked off its long-delayed road trip to Mount Sharp, a trek that involves rolling over rocky landscapes. Since July Fourth, the six-wheel rover has driven 190 feet to the southwest, leaving behind the spot where...

A sketch of the design for NASA's 2020 Mars rover. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) LOS ANGELES -- Explore an intriguing spot on Mars. Hunt for ancient signs of Martian life. Bag a bunch of rocks and leave them on the surface for a future mission to possibly return. That's what the next rover to Mars should strive for, a NASA-appointed team said Tuesday. The scientists released a 154-page report outlining ambitious science goals for a red planet mission that NASA wants to launch...

This image shows a diagram of the sun, the white dot in the center of the circle which represents the inner heliosphere encompassing the entire solar system. A tail of particles flows to the right of the heliosphere. (AP Photo/NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center) (NASA) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA can prove it now. Our solar system has a tail, just like comets. Scientists revealed images Wednesday showing the tail emanating from the bullet-shaped region of space under the grip...

Astronomers making visible-light observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have deduced the actual color of a planet orbiting another star 63 light-years away. The planet is HD 189733b, one of the closest exoplanets that can be seen crossing the face of its star. Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph measured changes in the color of light from the planet before, during and after a pass behind its star. There was a small drop in light and a slight change in the...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Chalk up one more moon for Neptune. (MORE: ) NASA announced the discovery of Neptune's 14th moon Monday. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the moon as a white dot in photos of Neptune on the outskirts of our solar system. This diagram provided by NASA shows the orbits of several moons located close to the planet Neptune. NASA announced the discovery of Neptune's 14th moon on Monday, July 15, 2013. (AP Photo/NASA) The new moon -...

LOS ANGELES -- A strange glow in space has provided fresh evidence that all the gold on Earth was forged from ancient collisions of dead stars, researchers reported Wednesday. Astronomers have long known that fusion reactions in the cores of stars create lighter elements such as carbon and oxygen, but such reactions can't produce heavier elements like gold. Instead, it was long thought that gold was created in a type of stellar explosion known as a supernova. But that doesn't...