National Aeronautics And Space Administration

After 19 years of service, during which time it has provided the most eye-popping images ever of galaxies, nebulae and, most recently, of a planet orbiting an alien star, the Hubble Space Telescope is suffering the pains of old age. It's unsteady, with only half its gyroscopes working, and several of its key science instruments are broken. To restore the ailing telescope to its former glory, NASA on Monday is set to launch the fifth and final repair mission to the orbiting telescope.

President Obama will name former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. as NASA administrator, according to three congressional sources. If confirmed by the Senate, the retired Marine Corps general would be the first African American to head the agency. The timing, the sources said, is keyed to the landing of the shuttle Atlantis, which remained in orbit Friday because of bad weather but will return today or Sunday.

NASA took the first concrete step toward returning human beings to the moon Thursday, successfully launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on a mission to find the best place to land and build Earth's first off-world colony. The 19-story-high, two-stage rocket and spacecraft launched at 2:32 p.m. Pacific time. As the huge first-stage Atlas V rocket roared to life at Cape Canaveral in central Florida, NASA spokesman George Diller called it "America's first step in a lasting return to the moon."

A special advisory committee on the future of America's manned spaceflight program delivered a report to the White House on Tuesday that could help launch the country on an Apollo-style adventure to Mars, but which also warned darkly that any ambitious program of exploration will require big infusions of cash. Without a significant boost in NASA's budget, not only will it be impossible to return to the moon by the current goal of 2020, but astronauts might not be able to go at all, according to the report by the Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

In the predawn hours Friday, while those on the West Coast still snooze, a rocket is scheduled to punch a 13-foot-deep hole in a crater at the moon's south pole that hasn't seen sunlight in billions of years. The purpose: to find out whether ice lies hidden there. NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which set out for the moon in June, made a late-course correction Tuesday to better position itself to steer the rocket into the 2-mile-deep crater Cabeus at 4:30 a.m. PDT on Friday.

Declaring Wednesday "the day we opened the door" to other worlds, NASA chief Dan Goldin promised to do whatever is necessary to confirm whether the microscopic worm-like structures found on a meteorite from Mars are really signs of life beyond Earth. That might include, he said, more missions to Antarctica to pick up stray pieces of the red planet, sending astronauts to dig deep into the Mars surface, or developing better microscopes to probe the samples already on hand.

In Los Angeles, one of the galaxy's true hubs of confusion and uncertainty, this latest puzzle ranks as a real blockbuster: Is there--or was there--life on Mars? And will scientists find the answers in a hunk of rock that whizzed down from the sky 13,000 years ago in . . . uh, Antarctica? Tourist Sebastian Puts, 11, of Canada, was one of untold thousands pondering those questions Wednesday, even while scientists were reporting possible evidence of cellular life in the ancient meteorite.

NASA scientists studying the Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1984 are relying heavily on chemistry in their attempts to prove that primitive life once existed on Mars. Unfortunately, each piece of evidence taken individually is ambiguous. Every chemical compound they have found in the meteorite could have been created by natural processes that don't involve life.

In Los Angeles, one of the galaxy's true hubs of confusion and uncertainty, this latest puzzle ranks as a real blockbuster: Is there--or was there--life on Mars? And will scientists find the answers in a hunk of rock that whizzed down from the sky 13,000 years ago in . . . uh, Antarctica? Tourist Sebastian Puts, 11, of Canada, was one of untold thousands pondering those questions Wednesday, even while scientists were reporting possible evidence of cellular life in the ancient meteorite.

In what some scientists say may turn out to be one of the most spectacular scientific discoveries since humans first gazed skyward at other planets in our solar system, NASA and Stanford University scientists say they have found evidence that life may have existed on ancient Mars. "This could be answering the question everyone's been asking since they first saw the planet Mars," said UCLA planetary scientist David Paige. "Could there be life there?"