After 19 weeks in one place, NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity hit the road -- well, not so much road as Martian ground -- now that Mars' winter is over and the sun is shining on Opportunity's solar panels once again. This was Opportunity's fifth winter on the planet, and it spent the time on an outcrop called Greeley Haven in Mars' Meridiani region. Next up for the little robot? An area a few meters north with a "bright-looking patch," possibly dust. "We haven't been able to see much dust in Meridiani," explained Opportunity science-team member Matt Golombek. "This could be a chance to learn more about it." Above, a map of the rover's 21.4 miles of travel on the planet's surface so far.

Below, recent Pictures of the Day:

Image: NASA.

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Picture of the Day: NASA's Mars Rover Gets Back to Roving

ScienceDaily (May 16, 2012) Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids. The results reveal new information about their total numbers, origins and the possible dangers they may pose.

Potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are a subset of the larger group of near-Earth asteroids. The PHAs have the closest orbits to Earth's, coming within five million miles (about eight million kilometers), and they are big enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere and cause damage on a regional, or greater, scale.

The new results come from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission, called NEOWISE. The project sampled 107 PHAs to make predictions about the entire population as a whole. Findings indicate there are roughly 4,700 PHAs, plus or minus 1,500, with diameters larger than 330 feet (about 100 meters). So far, an estimated 20 to 30 percent of these objects have been found.

While previous estimates of PHAs predicted similar numbers, they were rough approximations. NEOWISE has generated a more credible estimate of the objects' total numbers and sizes.

"The NEOWISE analysis shows us we've made a good start at finding those objects that truly represent an impact hazard to Earth," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "But we've many more to find, and it will take a concerted effort during the next couple of decades to find all of them that could do serious damage or be a mission destination in the future."

The new analysis also suggests that about twice as many PHAs as previously thought are likely to reside in "lower-inclination" orbits, which are more aligned with the plane of Earth's orbit. In addition, these lower-inclination objects appear to be somewhat brighter and smaller than the other near-Earth asteroids that spend more time far away from Earth. A possible explanation is that many of the PHAs may have originated from a collision between two asteroids in the main belt lying between Mars and Jupiter. A larger body with a low-inclination orbit may have broken up in the main belt, causing some of the fragments to drift into orbits closer to Earth and eventually become PHAs.

Asteroids with lower-inclination orbits would be more likely to encounter Earth and would be easier to reach. The results therefore suggest more near-Earth objects might be available for future robotic or human missions.

"NASA's NEOWISE project, which wasn't originally planned as part of WISE, has turned out to be a huge bonus," said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Everything we can learn about these objects helps us understand their origins and fate. Our team was surprised to find the overabundance of low-inclination PHAs. Because they will tend to make more close approaches to Earth, these targets can provide the best opportunities for the next generation of human and robotic exploration."

The discovery that many PHAs tend to be bright says something about their composition; they are more likely to be either stony, like granite, or metallic. This type of information is important in assessing the space rocks' potential hazards to Earth. The composition of the bodies would affect how quickly they might burn up in our atmosphere if an encounter were to take place.

The WISE spacecraft scanned the sky twice in infrared light before entering hibernation mode in early 2011. It catalogued hundreds of millions of objects, including super-luminous galaxies, stellar nurseries and closer-to-home asteroids. The NEOWISE project snapped images of about 600 near-Earth asteroids, about 135 of which were new discoveries. Because the telescope detected the infrared light, or heat, of asteroids, it was able to pick up both light and dark objects, resulting in a more representative look at the entire population. The infrared data allowed astronomers to make good measurements of the asteroids' diameters and, when combined with visible light observations, how much sunlight they reflect.

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NASA survey counts potentially hazardous asteroids

NASA astronaut Stephanie D. Wilson, a veteran of three space flights who has logged more than 42 days in space, will be making her next touchdown at this year's eighth New Zealand International Science Festival taking place in Dunedin, from 30 June to 8 July 2012.

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NASA astronaut to attend Dunedin science festival

By Matt Smith, CNN

updated 8:29 PM EDT, Wed May 16, 2012

This image, taken by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission in 2000, shows a close-up view of the asteroid Eros.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- About 4,700 asteroids are close enough and big enough to pose a risk to Earth, NASA estimated Wednesday after studying data beamed back from an orbiting telescope.

The figure -- give or take 1,500 -- is how many space rocks bigger than 100 meters (330 feet) across are believed to come within 5 million miles (8 million km) of Earth, or about 20 times farther away than the moon.

"It's not something that people should panic about," said Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "However, we are paying attention to the issue."

NASA defines a potentially hazardous asteroid as one large enough to survive the intense heat generated by entry into the atmosphere and cause damage on a regional scale or worse. The figure released Wednesday is lower than a previous rough estimate had projected, but more are now thought to be in orbits inclined like Earth's, making them more likely to cross its path.

Read more space and science news at CNN.com's Light Years blog

Mainzer said asteroids in orbits pitched at a similar angle offer not only a hazard, but also an opportunity. They would be easier for spacecraft to reach.

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NASA estimates 4,700 'potentially hazardous' asteroids

The best time to do a little renovating is when everyone is out of the house -- something homeowners know and something NASA appears to appreciate too. The space agency is experiencing empty-nest syndrome in a big way, with the shuttles heading for museum retirement and the next manned American space vehicle not scheduled to fly until 2016 -- unless it's 2018 or 2025 or who knows when?

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NASA's massive renovation

ScienceDaily (May 16, 2012) NASA is lending the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, where the spacecraft will continue its exploration of the cosmos. In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, a Space Act Agreement was signed May 14 so the university soon can resume spacecraft operations and data management for the mission using private funds.

"NASA sees this as an opportunity to allow the public to continue reaping the benefits from this space asset that NASA developed using federal funding," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "This is an excellent example of a public/private partnership that will help further astronomy in the United States."

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer spent about nine years as a NASA mission, probing the sky with its sharp ultraviolet eyes and cataloguing hundreds of millions of galaxies spanning 10 billion years of cosmic time.

"This mission was full of surprises, and now more surprises are sure to come," said Chris Martin, who will remain the mission's principal investigator at Caltech. "It already has scanned a large fraction of the sky, improving our understanding of how galaxies grow and evolve. The astronomy community will continue those studies, in addition to spending more time on stars closer to home in our own galaxy."

The spacecraft was placed in standby mode on Feb. 7 of this year. Soon, Caltech will begin to manage and operate the satellite, working with several international research groups to continue ultraviolet studies of the universe. Projects include cataloguing more galaxies across the entire sky; watching how stars and galaxies change over time; and making deep observations of the stars being surveyed for orbiting planets by NASA's Kepler mission. Data will continue to be made available to the public.

"We're thrilled that the mission will continue on its path of discovery," said Kerry Erickson, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is like the 'little engine that could,' forging ahead into unexplored territory."

During its time at NASA, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer made many discoveries involving various types of objects that light up our sky with ultraviolet light. Perhaps the most surprising of these was the discovery of a gargantuan comet-like tail behind a speeding star called Mira. Other finds included catching black holes "red-handed" as they munch away on stars, spying giant rings of new stars around old, presumed dead galaxies, and independently confirming the nature of dark energy.

For astronomers, the most profound shift in their understanding of galaxy evolution came from the mission's findings about a "missing link" population of galaxies. These missing members helped explain how the two major types of galaxies in our universe -- the "red and dead" ellipticals and the blue spirals -- transition from one type to another.

"We were able to trace the life of a galaxy," Martin said. "With the Galaxy Evolution Explorer's ultraviolet detectors, we were able to isolate the small amounts of star formation that are the signatures of galaxies undergoing an evolutionary change. We found that galaxies don't have a single personality, but may change types many times over their lifetime."

The mission also captured a dazzling collection of snapshots, showing everything from ghostly nebulas to a spiral galaxy with huge, spidery arms. A slideshow showing some of the top images can be seen here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/galex/gallery-index.html .

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NASA lends Galaxy Evolution Explorer to Caltech

NASA is lending the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex) ultraviolet space telescope to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, which intends to put the 9-year-old spacecraft back into service using private funds.

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NASA Loans Space Telescope to Caltech

After becoming the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in July 2011, NASAs Dawn spacecraft has spent the last 10 months orbiting said object - the giant asteroid Vesta. During that period it has captured more than 20,000 images of Vesta and a multitude of data from different wavelengths of radiation. What it reveals is an asteroid that in many ways shares more in common with a small planet or Earths moon than it does with another asteroid.

With a mean diameter of around 326 miles (525 km), Vesta is one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System and the second most massive after Ceres. Formed in a similar way to the terrestrial planets and Earths moon, Vesta boasts a geologic complexity that scientists attribute to a process that separated it into a crust, mantle and iron core with a radius of around 68 miles (110 km) some 4.56 billion years ago.

"Vesta has been recording the history of the solar system from the beginning," said Christopher T. Russell, a professor in UCLA's Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Dawn mission's principal investigator. "We are going back to the beginning of the solar system - more than 4.5 billion years ago. We're going back further than ever before on the surface of a body."

Deep gashes in Vestas surface observed by Dawn reveal a pattern of minerals that NASA says may suggest the asteroid was once molten inside and had a subsurface magma ocean, which occurs when a body undergoes almost complete melting and leads to layered building blocks that can form planets. Vestas iron core would have formed during this molten period at the dawn of the Solar System.

Data collected by Dawn also reveal that Vesta is the source of a distinct group of meteorites found on Earth. These meteorites, with signatures of an iron- and magnesium-rich mineral known as pyroxene, account for about six percent of all meteorites falling to Earth, making Vesta one of the largest single sources of Earths meteorites. Dawns mission also marks the first time a spacecraft has visited the source of samples after they were identified on Earth.

Vesta has also been found to have a topography that is quite steep and varied, and includes large mountains formed by a major impact on the asteroids surface the largest of which is more than twice the size of Mount Everest. While scientists had thought that, outside the south polar region, Vestas surface may be flat like the moon, some of the craters outside this region formed on very steep slopes and have nearly identical sides, with landslides often occurring.

NASA scientists were also surprised to discover that Vestas central peak in the Rheasilvia basin in the southern hemisphere is much higher and wider, relative to its crater size, than the central peaks of craters on bodies like our moon.

There are also similarities with other low-gravity worlds, such as Saturns small icy moons, and the light and dark markings on its surface dont match the predictable patterns seen on Earths moon. While Vestas surface contains bright spots of various sizes, there are also some areas that are dark as coal, with the light and dark markings forming intricate patterns that suggest the dominance of impact processes in creating mixed layers in Vestas regolith.

"We know a lot about the moon and we're only coming up to speed now on Vesta," said Vishnu Reddy, a framing camera team member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany and the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. "Comparing the two gives us two storylines for how these fraternal twins evolved in the early solar system."

Dawn will continue to examine Vesta until it departs the asteroid on August 26 headed for a 2015 study date with Ceres, the Solar Systems largest asteroid and only dwarf planet in the inner solar system.

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NASA’s Dawn spacecraft unlocks secrets of giant asteroid

With all of its satellites, telescopes, gizmos and gadgets, NASA collects thousands of data points every month. But what if NASA could present that all of that data in a clean, fun and useful way to the public?

The NASA Tournament Labhopes to find an answer to this question in its latest series of competitions that challenge students, teachers, game designers and interested civilians to build mobile or web-based applications using any of the more than 100 terabytes of information in the NASA planetary data system.

The space agency hopes that by encouraging the public at large to create interesting apps, it might be able to develop something that a coder from the agency would have never thought of. NASA has assembled a judging panel of prestigious scientists, researchers and an astronaut to declare winners of each competition.

Most competition winners will earn $7,000 and other prizes. The final round of the competition, called "the penultimate contest" by the agency, will award winners with $10,000. "The bar is higher here and judges will be looking for applications that showcase entirely new ways of thinking about PDS data," says NASA of the final competition.

The next major day of competition is May 16, when two different projects will take place. The first competition is open to 13- to 18-year-old members of NNS. It challenges these members to build "the ultimate app." The second competition is a challenge to teachers and asks competitors to "develop and submit fabulous apps for leveraging PDS data in an educational setting." More details about the challenges can be seen on the official PDS Challenge page.

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"[The] approach, often termed 'crowd sourcing' or 'broadcast search,' lessens the effects of uncertainty in software development by searching for a problem's solution through multiple, parallel paths," said NASA in a written statement about the Tournament Lab. "Instead of relying on one individual or team, the researcher can access many, independent ideas, which increases the chances of a successful solution."

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NASA Challenges Public To Build Apps Using Planetary Data System

It looks like the commercial space race might be over before it's even really begun.

Last week, Congress approved a spending bill that demands NASA immediately choose one company for the commercial crew program, and this week they will be voting on it. Killing the private competition is meant to save money and speed up development, but more likely it will be devastating to NASA's already stretched budget.

ANALYSIS: Money: The Next Human Spaceflight Incentive?

Currently, NASA is providing subsidies to companies vying to develop a viable manned launch system. There are a lot of interesting and promising commercial programs under development right now. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos Blue Origin project is working on a launch vehicle, Sierra Nevada is working on the Dream Chaser orbital vehicle, ATK just announced its intention to add a spacecraft to its Liberty rocket, SpaceX has its Falcon 9 and Dragon, and Orbital Sciences has its Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft.

SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are the front runners, both planning flights to the ISS this year to demonstrate their capabilities. SpaceX is scheduled to launch this coming Saturday. But these missions are unmanned cargo flights; manned mission aren't expected until 2017. So why stop the competition before NASA has a viable commercial crew system?

The short answer is money.

Commercial crew projects fall under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program that was started in 2006 with the goal of easing the transition out of the shuttle era by having private companies take over the low Earth orbital launches allowing NASA to focus on its loftier goals of deep space manned missions on Saturn V-type powerful rockets. There's no money for the COTS program in NASA's 2013 budget. The bill will remove continued COTS costs and streamline the commercial launch effort by giving one company more money to develop its system faster.

ANALYSIS: NASA Deputy Administrator Faces the Tough Questions

The problem with the short answer is that it's short sighted. The layered approach with multiple companies vying for the contract to build a new space transportation system is exactly what NASA needs right now. The competition has yielded creativity and innovation. The rockets and spacecraft these companies have come up with has cost NASA millions instead of billions since the agency isn't alone in footing the bill, and there are clearly viable systems on the horizon.

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Might NASA be Forced to Kill the Commercial Space Race?

NASA is currently training astronauts to land on asteroids and hopes to send humans to one of the distant space rocks in about a decade, The Telegraph reported over the weekend. As in the movie Armageddon, one motivation for the endeavor is to figure out a way to destroy or deflect a large asteroid that could be on a collision course with Earth.

In June, a group of astronauts will begin learning how to operate vehicles and move about on asteroids, according to the U.K. newspaper, which interviewed a British astronaut who is participating in the training program.

Major Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, told The Telegraph that a manned mission to intercept an incoming asteroid would be a last resort but could prove necessary because even large space objects can be difficult to detect.

"With enough warning we would probably send a robotic mission to deflect an asteroid, but if something is spotted late and is big enough we might come into Armageddon type scenarios where we may have to look at manned missions to deflect it," the ESA astronaut was quoted as saying.

Peake, formerly a test helicopter pilot, told the newspaper that "an asteroid mission of up to a year is definitely achievable" with technology that's currently available or being developed.

Asteroids are primarily located in a belt beyond the orbit of Mars, but some "near-Earth" objects swing much closer to our planetsometimes even within 100,000 miles or closer, obviously, when they strike us. Still, The Telegraph noted that a mission to visit an asteroid would likely take space explorers much further from Earth than the 239,000 miles traversed by NASA's Apollo astronauts when they visited the Moon.

Aside from getting about safely on the near-zero gravity conditions on an asteroid, landing on such small, fast-moving objects could prove thorny.

NASA is scheduled to officially announce details of its plan to land astronauts on an asteroid at the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting later this month, The Telegraph reported. The U.S. space agency reportedly hopes to send a robot probe to an asteroid by 2016 and begin sending manned missions to them beginning in the late 2020s.

The presentation in Japan reportedly details a manned mission that would "rendezvous with an asteroid up to three million miles from the Earth, taking around a year to make the entire round trip." The astronauts aboard that mission might stay on the asteroid for as long as month.

A group led by commercial spaceflight pioneers Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis recently formed a company, Planetary Resources, which will also attempt to visit asteroids by the end of the decade. Planetary Resources said last month that it planned to send robotic spacecraft to near-Earth asteroids to mine water and metals, which along with exploration and planetary safety could also be an objective of the NASA project.

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Report: NASA Training Astronauts for Asteroid Missions

NASA collects and publishes thousands of data points every month: images of lunar craters, spectrum analysis of far-away stars, rocket telemetry and so on. Now, the space agency wants to create apps that let people do a variety of things with those data, but first it wants to figure out exactly what people would want from NASA apps.

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NASA Wants You to Build 'The Ultimate App' Using its Data

11-05-2012 14:29 Activities for new Expedition 31 crewmembers, Soyuz Commander Gennady Padalka, NASA Flight Engineer Joe Acaba and Flight Engineer Sergei Revin include a pre-launch fit check in a Soyuz capsule at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the raising of flags outside the Cosmonaut Hotel crew quarters and launch to the orbiting laboratory to meet up with NASA Astronaut Don Pettit, Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Andre Kuipers of the European Space Agency. Also, SpaceX continues its preparations for the planned May 19 launch of the Falcon 9 rocket and unmanned Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, new findings about the asteroid Vesta by NASA's DAWN spacecraft and more!

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Latest Update on New Space Station Crew on This Week @NASA - Video

A NASA image released Friday shows a glimpse of a universe with an active black hole, the focus of a recent discovery much of which was made in Baltimore.

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NASA image shows galaxy with active black hole

11-05-2012 14:32 Daphne Dador joined NASA as a Legislative Affairs Specialist at the Office of Legislative & Intergovernmental Affairs (OLIA) at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, in September 2010. OLIA's mission is to provide executive leadership, direction, and coordination of all communications and relationships related to legislative issues between NASA and the US Congress, state and local government, and space-related associations and citizen's groups. As an active member of the space community, Daphne has volunteered with a variety of national and international space-related organizations such as Women in Aerospace, the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, the International Space University-DC-Alumni Group, the Space Generation Congress, and Yuri's Night. In 2004, she founded the George Washington University Space Society. Committed to representing the space community and its needs Daphne hopes to inspire the next generation of space professionals. She is a native northern Californian and a second-generation Filipino-American.

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NASA Asian-American History Month Profile -- Daphne Dador - Video

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2012) Its construction now complete, the science instrument that is the heart of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) spacecraft -- NASA's first mission dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide -- has left its nest at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and has arrived at its integration and test site in Gilbert, Ariz.

A truck carrying the OCO-2 instrument left JPL before dawn on Tuesday, May 9, to begin the trek to Orbital Science Corporation's Satellite Manufacturing Facility in Gilbert, southeast of Phoenix, where it arrived that afternoon. The instrument will be unpacked, inspected and tested. Later this month, it will be integrated with the Orbital-built OCO-2 spacecraft bus, which arrived in Gilbert on April 30.

Once technicians ensure the spacecraft is clean of any contaminants, the observatory's integration and test campaign will kick off. That campaign will be conducted in two parts, with the first part scheduled for completion in October. The observatory will then be stored in Gilbert for about nine months while the launch vehicle is prepared. The integration and test campaign will then resume, with completion scheduled for spring 2014. OCO-2 will then be shipped to Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in preparation for a launch as early as the summer of 2014.

"The OCO-2 instrument looks great, and its delivery to Orbital's Gilbert, Ariz., facility is a big step forward in successfully launching and operating the mission in space," said Ralph Basilio, OCO-2 project manager at JPL.

OCO-2 is the latest mission in NASA's study of the global carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide is the most significant human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. The original OCO mission was lost shortly after launch on Feb. 24, 2009, when the Taurus XL launch vehicle carrying it malfunctioned and failed to reach orbit.

The experimental OCO-2 mission, which is part of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program, will uniformly sample the atmosphere above Earth's land and ocean, collecting more than half a million measurements of carbon dioxide concentration over Earth's sunlit hemisphere every day for at least two years. It will do so with the accuracy, resolution and coverage needed to provide the first complete picture of the regional-scale geographic distribution and seasonal variations of both human and natural sources of carbon dioxide emissions and their sinks-the places where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored.

Scientists will use OCO-2 mission data to improve global carbon cycle models, better characterize the processes responsible for adding and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and make more accurate predictions of global climate change.

The mission provides a key new measurement that can be combined with other ground and aircraft measurements and satellite data to answer important questions about the processes that regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide and its role in the carbon cycle and climate. This information could help policymakers and business leaders make better decisions to ensure climate stability and retain our quality of life. The mission will also serve as a pathfinder for future long-term satellite missions to monitor carbon dioxide.

Each of the OCO-2 instrument's three high-resolution spectrometers spreads reflected sunlight into its various colors like a prism, focusing on a different, narrow color range to detect light with the specific colors absorbed by carbon dioxide and molecular oxygen. The amount of light absorbed at these specific colors is proportional to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists will use these data in computer models to quantify global carbon dioxide sources and sinks.

OCO-2 is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va., built the spacecraft and provides mission operations under JPL's leadership. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

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NASA's new carbon-counting instrument leaves the nest

NASA / JPL-Caltech

An artist's conception shows NASA's Curiosity rover zapping a rock during a sampling operation on Mars. Laser-zapping is not a requirement for the robots entered in a NASA-backed $1.5 million contest.

By Devin Coldewey

Mark June 16 on your calendar, interplanetary robot fans: Thats when autonomous rovers will face off in NASA's $1.5 million Sample Return Robot Challenge at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

The challenge, one of several that NASA is sponsoring, was announced back in July 2010 but a purpose-built autonomous robot isn't a simple thing to create, so it has taken nearly two years to collect and vet the entrants.

The challenge, in brief, is to create a compact (1.5 cubic meters, 175 pounds) robot that can navigate varied terrain, find and collect certain items, and return them safely to the base. But it must do this without the use of GPS or any "Earth-based" systems, such as a compass or Internet connection, which naturally would not be available on celestial bodies other than our own. Furthermore, the robot can't use air cooling, ultrasonic rangefinders or a number of other techniques that wouldn't be workable in an airless environment.

There are both private and public teams: Groups from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Waterloo have both made the final 11, and the rest are start-up companies such as SpacePRIDE from South Carolina and True Vision Robotics from Atascadero, Calif. Six of the teams are based in California, while the rest are scattered around the US and Canada.

The teams' robots will be unmanned and on their own once deployed, but they won't be going in completely blind. As would likely be the case on a real planetary mission, NASA is providing satellite imagery of the area, compete with topographic information and points of interest:

NASA / WPI

Topographic map of the competition's terrain

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NASA rover contest gets set for showdown

SpaceX on Friday confirmed that NASA has greenlighted May 19 as the launch date for the first privately funded cargo mission to the International Space Station following a series of delays.

The launch of a SpaceX Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is scheduled for 4:55 a.m. ET, a SpaceX spokesperson said. NASA Television will start broadcasting the event at 3:30 a.m., she added.

Already months behind schedule, a launch date scheduled for this past Monday was cancelled last week as SpaceX and the U.S. space agency raced to test the Dragon capsule's software systems. If the May 19 launch is again delayed for some reason, a backup plan is to lift off on May 22, a SpaceX spokesperson told PCMag earlier.

"SpaceX and NASA are nearing completion of the software assurance process, and SpaceX is submitting a request to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for a May 19 launch target," SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham said earlier in the week. "Thus far, no issues have been uncovered during this process, but with a mission of this complexity we want to be extremely diligent."

In what will be the second demonstration launch for SpaceX in NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. Once in orbit, the automated Dragon capsule, carrying cargo for the orbiting space lab, will berth with the ISS if it passes a systems check.

"The primary objectives for the flight include a flyby of the space station at a distance of approximately 1.5 miles to validate the operation of sensors and flight systems necessary for a safe rendezvous and approach," Brost Grantham said. "The spacecraft also will demonstrate the ability to abort the rendezvous. Once these capabilities are successfully proven, the Dragon will be cleared to berth with the space station."

Fourth Time's the Charm?

The unmanned test flight was originally scheduled for April 30, then pushed back to May 3 before NASA and SpaceX settled on a date a few days later in May. SpaceX, run by PayPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk (pictured), plans to conduct manned flights to the ISS by 2015 as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.

After the May 7 date was cancelled, the company's launch plans were constrained because the Russian space agency is scheduled to take three new ISS astronauts to the space station on May 15. Any attempt by SpaceX to send its Dragon capsule to the ISS after this Thursday must wait for the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to safely dock at the space station.

If and when the ISS rendezvous does happen, crew aboard the space station will use the space station's robotic arm to dock the capsule, which will be carrying about 1,150 pounds of cargo for delivery to the orbiting lab. Then the SpaceX Dragon is supposed to take on a 1,455-pound payload to bring back to Earth.

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NASA Greenlights SpaceX ISS Visit for May 19

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2012) NASA's Space Launch System is on track to give America the launch vehicle it will need to send humans deeper into space than ever before, the program's manager said May 8.

Speaking to the National Space Club during a luncheon near NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Todd May, SLS program manager, said an uncrewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft in 2014, SLS mission in 2017 and a 10- to 14-day mission with astronauts going to the moon and back in 2021 will leave the nation in a position to explore as far as it wishes.

"By that point, you'll have the capability to go anywhere in the solar system people want to go," May said. May leads a team of engineers and designers at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "The ultimate goal is to put human boots on Mars."

Kennedy designers also are at work to make a place for the SLS to be assembled and launched from. Launch Pad 39B has seen significant changes and the Vehicle Assembly Building is undergoing modernizations to host the 36-story-tall SLS. Also, the mobile launcher that will hold the rocket and its servicing connections already has conducted a test at the pad.

A test version of the Orion capsule is inside the Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy and the spacecraft that will make the first test flight into space is expected in a couple of months. It will undergo final assembly at Kennedy before being mounted atop a Delta IV rocket for a mission without astronauts aboard to test the spacecraft's systems and heat shield.

There's a lot going on," said Scott Colloredo, chief architect of the Ground Systems Development and Operations Program. "Whenever you see hardware moving in the direction of the launch pad, that's always significant."

Many elements of the SLS itself already are in testing, including the engines and solid rocket boosters that will give the rocket about 8 million pounds of thrust at launch, 10 percent more than the Saturn V.

NASA already has an inventory of space shuttle main engines that will be used to power the core stage. "The propulsion elements are in really good shape," May said. "Sixteen space shuttle main engines, that's a good head start."

The SLS also will use solid rocket boosters like the shuttle, but the SLS versions will be five segments instead of four.

The core stage, which will hold the fuel tanks for the main engines, is early in its design but still is on schedule. Like the space shuttle external tanks, the core stage will be built at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana. The SLS stage is about 15 feet longer than the shuttle's external tank, and it will be shipped to Kennedy on the Pegasus barge, another element shared with the shuttle.

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NASA's Space Launch System carries deep space potential

NASA pulled the plug on its last powered space shuttle today (May 11), 20 years after it flew its first mission.

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Endeavour Unplugged: NASA Powers Down its Last Space Shuttle