Opportunity Rover traverses Mars for signs of life. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.) NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has made perhaps the biggest discovery of its nearly 10-year career, finding evidence that life may have been able to get a foothold on the Red Planet long ago. The spotted clay minerals in an ancient rock on the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater, suggesting that benign, neutral-pH water once flowed through the area, scientists said. "This is water you could drink," Opportunity principal investigator...

China's astronauts from left, Wang Yaping, Zhang Xiaoguang and Nie Haisheng wave as they leave the Jiuquan satellite launch center near Jiuquan in western China's Gansu province, Tuesday, June 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) BEIJING – China's latest manned space capsule docked with an orbiting space station Thursday, and the three astronauts climbed aboard what will be their home for the next week, state media reported.Automated controls guided the Shenzhou-10's docking with the space lab, the Xinhua News Agency said....

This is probably the most unique eclipse image ever released by NASA, but it's not all it seems. The picture is not based on images from Earth, or from a single spacecraft, but two separate NASA missions. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center stitched together images from the missions — the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SRO) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbitor (LRO) — to get this breathtaking result. The team used mission data to create a 3D model of the...

Okovango River, Africa Northern Namibia and southern Angola is pictured in this Kompsat-2 image. The Okavango River forms the border between Namibia to the south and Angola to the north. In the upper left corner, dots of white and other bright colors near a road show rural settlements. (KARI/SEA) Every day, NASA's satellites capture awe-inspiring images of Earth from miles above our planet's surface. Depending on where the satellites fly, the photographs they send back may be of scenes as...

Nicole Aunapu Mann, 35, Major, U.S. Marine Corps, originally is from Penngrove, Calif. She is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Stanford (Calif.) University and the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, Patuxent River, Md. Mann is currently serving as an Integrated Product Team Lead at the U.S. Naval Air Station, Patuxent River. (AP Photo/NASA) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA has eight new astronauts - its first new batch in four years. Among the lucky candidates: the first female fighter...

For the first time since 1975, a NASA spacecraft has captured fresh images of Mercury, shedding new light on a planet that's mostly been in the dark because of its close proximity to the sun. (MORE: Go Inside the Space Shuttle Atlantis) (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington) Thanks to the MESSENGER spacecraft, the first to orbit Mercury, , according to an io9.com report. The article also states the craft intends to take another 80,000 photos or...

This close-up look at an active region taken on July 9, 2010, shows a hotbed of magnetic activity, including a small solar flare bursting out into space. (NASA Solar Dynamics Laboratory) Our sun keeps us going, but in this age of advanced technology, it could also cripple our electronic devices. According to SPACE.com, the sun is approaching the peak of its 11-year cycle, and , creating temporary radio blackouts and shutting down GPS navigation. However, this would require the coronal...

NASA's audacious plan to grab an asteroid and park it near the moon is short on candidate space rocks at the moment, one researcher says. It's possible that not a single known object meets the current criteria of NASA's asteroid redirect mission (ARM), astrodynamical consultant Dan Adamo said during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group on Wednesday. To pull the mission off in a timely fashion, Adamo added, it may be necessary to mount a dedicated, space-based...

The supermoon sets near the Statue of Liberty, Sunday, June 23, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) Look up this weekend -- the moon is getting closer and bigger. The most super of all supermoons spotted over the course of the year will peak this Saturday and Sunday, June 22 and 23, when the moon makes its closest pass to Earth of 2013. It's known as the , according to EarthSky, and it's the largest of the half-dozen-or-so supermoons...

BEIJING -- A Chinese space capsule with three astronauts landed safely Wednesday on the country's northern grasslands after a 15-day trip to a prototype space station, marking the latest success for China's manned space program as it enters its second decade. The Shenzhou 10's descent module landed by parachute in the vast territory of Inner Mongolia early Wednesday with the three crew members smiling and waving on live television after wriggling through the blackened capsule's narrow hatch. "Space is our...

NEW YORK -- PayPal wants to explore space - or at least begin to figure out how payments and commerce will work beyond Earth's realm once space travel and tourism take off. PayPal, which is eBay Inc.'s payments business, says it is launching an initiative called PayPal Galactic with the help of the nonprofit SETI Institute and the Space Tourism Society, an industry group focused on space travel. Its goal, PayPal says, is to work out how commerce will work...

In this artist's rendering released by NASA, the Voyager 1 spacecraft explores a new region of space at the edge of the solar system. (AP Photo/NASA) LOS ANGELES -- New research pinpoints the current location of NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft: It's still in our solar system. Since last summer, the long-running spacecraft has been exploring uncharted territory where the effects of interstellar space, or the space between stars, can be felt. Scientists don't know how thick this newfound region in...