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In 2004, an international team of astronomers had, for the first time, observed a stellar "survivor" emerge from a double star system involving an exploded supernova. Supernovae are some of the most significant sources of chemical elements in the universe, and they are at the heart of our understanding of the evolution of galaxies. In this artist's view, the red super-giant supernova progenitor star (left) is exploding after having transferred about 10 solar masses of hydrogen gas to the blue companion star (right). Image Credit: NASA

The Apollo 17 spacecraft, containing astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, and Harrison H. Schmitt, glided to a safe splashdown at 2:25 p.m. EST on Dec. 19, 1972, 648 kilometers (350 nautical miles) southeast of American Samoa. The astronauts were flown by recovery helicopter to the U.S.S. Ticonderoga slightly less than an hour after the completion of NASA's sixth and last manned lunar landing in the Apollo program. Image Credit: NASA

Astronaut Mark Lee tests the new backpack called Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (SAFER), a system designed for use in the event a crew member becomes untethered while conducting an EVA. The Lidar-In-Space Technology Experiment (LITE) is shown in the foreground. The LITE payload employs lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, a type of optical radar using laser pulses instead of radio waves to study Earth's atmosphere. Unprecedented views were obtained of cloud structures, storm systems, dust clouds, pollutants, forest burning, and surface reflectance. The STS-64 mission marked the first untethered U.S. EVA in 10 years, and was launched on September 9, 1994, aboard the Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery. Image Credit: NASA

Cygnus X hosts many young stellar groupings. The combined outflows and ultraviolet radiation from the region's numerous massive stars have heated and pushed gas away from the clusters, producing cavities of hot, lower-density gas. In this 8-micron infrared image, ridges of denser gas mark the boundaries of the cavities. Bright spots within these ridges show where stars are forming today. Credit: NASA/IPAC/MSX

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden speaks to attendees at the Banana Creek viewing area prior to the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. NASA began a historic voyage to Mars with the launch of the car-sized rover which lifted off at 10:02 a.m. EST. The mission will pioneer precision landing technology and a sky-crane touchdown to place Curiosity near the foot of a mountain inside Gale Crater on Aug. 6, 2012. Photo Credit: NASA/Paul E. Alers

The Atlantic Ocean provides a backdrop as the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket clears the tower at Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Sealed inside the rocket's protective payload fairing is NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft, beginning a 9-month interplanetary cruise to Mars. Liftoff was at 10:02 a.m. EST Nov. 26. MSL's components include a car-sized rover, Curiosity, which has 10 science instruments designed to search for signs of life, including methane, and help determine if the gas is from a biological or geological source. Image Credit: NASA/Darrell L. McCall

In the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians inspect under NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission aeroshell, where the wheels of the rover Curiosity can be seen. MSL's components include a car-sized rover, Curiosity, which has 10 science instruments designed to search for evidence on whether Mars has had environments favorable to microbial life, including chemical ingredients for life. The unique rover will use a laser to look inside rocks and release its gases so that the rover's spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth. Launch of MSL aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is scheduled for Nov. 26 from Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Image credit: NASA and Glenn Benson

Originally taken in July 2010, this photo shows NASA engineers installing six wheels on the Curiosity rover. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project will launch Curiosity on Friday, Nov. 26. Curiosity is scheduled for arrival at Mars in August 2012. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Originally taken in July, 2010, this photo shows NASA engineers installing six wheels on the Curiosity rover. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project will launch Curiosity on Friday, Nov. 26. Curiosity is scheduled for arrival at Mars in August 2012.

Russian support personnel work to help get crew members out of the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft shortly after the capsule landed with Expedition 29 Commander Mike Fossum and flight engineers Sergei Volkov and Satoshi Furukawa in a remote area outside of the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, at 9:26 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 21, 2011 (8:26 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011, Kazakhstan time). NASA astronaut Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Volkov and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Furukawa are returning from more than five months aboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 28 and 29 crews. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Mars' Claritas Fossae region is characterized by systems of "graben" running mainly north-west to south-east. A graben forms when a block of the planet's crust drops down between two faults, due to extension, or pulling, of the crust. This image was originally released July 13, 2011. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

This false-color mosaic from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the tail of Saturn's huge northern storm. In mid-September 2004, the Cassini spacecraft chronicled a similar, but smaller, storm in the southern hemisphere called the "Dragon Storm." The head of this storm is beyond the horizon in this view. Saturn's atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from 12 images taken in near-infrared light through filters that are sensitive to varying degrees of methane absorption. Red and orange colors in this view indicate clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Yellow and green colors, most noticeable near the top of the view, indicate intermediate clouds. White and blue indicate high clouds and haze. The rings appear as a thin horizontal line of bright blue because they are outside of the atmosphere and not affected by methane absorption. The oval in the upper left of this image that appears slightly blue is the same hole in the deep clouds of the planet's atmosphere that can be seen near the tail in a larger false-color mosaic, PIA14903. The blue color comes from the high haze overlying the hole. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ring plane. The shadow of the moon Enceladus is visible on the planet in the lower left of the image. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The images filtered at 890 nanometers are projected as blue. The images filtered at 728 nanometers are projected as green, and images filtered at 752 nanometers are projected as red. The images were taken on Jan. 12, 2011, over about one hour at a distance of approximately 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. The images were re-projected to the same viewing geometry, so that scale in this final mosaic is 76 miles (122 kilometers) per pixel. Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter science team released the highest resolution near-global topographic map of the moon ever created. This new topographic map shows the surface shape and features over nearly the entire moon with a pixel scale close to 328 feet. Although the moon is Earth's closest neighbor, knowledge of its morphology is still limited. Due to the limitations of previous missions, a global map of the moon’s topography at high resolution has not existed until now. With LRO's Wide Angle Camera and the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument, scientists can now accurately portray the shape of the entire moon at high resolution. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/DLR/ASU

Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong speaks to Congress at a ceremony that honored fellow astronauts John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. Each received a Congressional Gold Medals during the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda on Nov. 16, 2011. The Gold Medal, Congress' highest expression of national appreciation for distinguished achievements and contributions, was first given to George Washington in 1776. Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth, achieving the feat aboard Friendship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon, while Collins piloted Apollo 11's command module. Image Credit: NASA/Paul Alers

Helicopters and rotorcraft provide many useful civil and military functions without the need for airports and runways. However, accurately predicting vehicle performance and noise production is very challenging and requires a more accurate technical approach to understand the interaction between rotor blades and the rotor blade vortices. Scientists supporting NASA's Subsonic Rotary Wing Project are developing state-of-the-art simulation tools to more accurately predict these flowfields. Use of these tools provide new insight into the rotor wakes, and will help improve rotorcraft performance. This snapshot of a V-22 rotorcraft in hover shows a cross-section of the blade vortices and turbulent flow, where magenta is high vorticity (spin) and blue is low. The Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility has allowed scientists to greatly improve the prediction accuracy of rotor blade aerodynamics. These tools will allow engineers to develop faster and quieter rotorcraft with larger lifting capability. Image Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Neal Chaderjian and Tim Sandstrom

This montage of New Horizons images shows Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, and were taken during the spacecraft's Jupiter flyby in early 2007. The image of Jupiter is an infrared color composite taken by the spacecraft's near-infrared imaging spectrometer, the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array. The infrared wavelengths used highlight variations in the altitude of the Jovian cloud tops, with blue denoting high-altitude clouds and hazes, and red indicating deeper clouds. The prominent bluish-white oval is the Great Red Spot. The observation was made at a solar phase angle of 75 degrees but has been projected onto a crescent to remove distortion caused by Jupiter's rotation during the scan. The image of Io is an approximately true-color composite taken by the panchromatic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager with color information provided by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera. The image shows a major eruption in progress on Io's night side, at the northern volcano Tvashtar. Incandescent lava glows red beneath a volcanic plume, whose uppermost portions are illuminated by sunlight. The plume appears blue due to scattering of light by small particles within it. This montage originally appeared on the cover of the Oct. 12, 2007, issue of Science magazine. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Goddard Space Flight Center

The Soyuz TMA-22 rocket is seen on the launch pad during a snow storm the morning of the launch of Expedition 29 to the International Space Station at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Monday, Nov. 14, 2011. Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

The star-forming region, 30 Doradus, is one of the largest located close to the Milky Way and is found in the neighboring galaxy, Large Magellanic Cloud. About 2,400 massive stars in the center of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, are producing intense radiation and powerful winds as they blow off material. Multimillion-degree gas detected in X-rays (blue) by the Chandra X-ray Observatory comes from shock fronts -- similar to sonic booms --formed by these stellar winds and by supernova explosions. This hot gas carves out gigantic bubbles in the surrounding cooler gas and dust shown here in infrared emission from the Spitzer Space Telescope (orange). Image Credit: NASA