"Sleepy Hollow," a shallow depression in the Mars ground near NASA's Spirit rover, may become an early destination when the rover drives off its lander platform in a week or so. That possible crater and other features delighted engineers and scientists examining pictures from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's first look around. "Reality has surpassed fantasy. We're like kids in a candy store," said Art Thompson, rover tactical activity lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We can hardly wait until we get off the lander and start doing fun stuff on the surface." A clean bill of health from a checkout of all three science instruments on Spirit's robotic arm fortified scientists' anticipation of beginning to use those tools after the rover gets its six w

And Yet The Moon Still Maintains Its Allure... SpaceDev has completed the first phase of a privately funded study to design a low cost robotic return to the Moon. The study was performed for Lunar Enterprise of California (LEC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Space Age Publishing Company), and follows an earlier SpaceDev Lunar orbiter mission and spacecraft design project funded by Boeing. The current study analyzes mission and spacecraft options for a Lunar Dish Observatory to be placed near the south pole of the Moon. "With Europe on the way to the Moon, Japan lunar missions set for 2004 and 2005, and India as well as China preparing to send a series of robotic missions to the Moon culminating in a manned lander mission, and with renewed interest by our

Behind every Shuttle crew, there is a team of five to eight astronauts who serve as the crew's point of contact between NASA-Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas and NASA-Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on the Florida coast. These astronauts are the eyes and ears to the Shuttle vehicle. They are the Astronaut Support Personnel (ASP). But because of their frequent trips to NASA-KSC, they're better known as the Cape Crusaders.