NASA

NASA contemplated setting up a lunar outpost like the one shown in this artwork back in 2007. Now House Republicans are reviving the idea of establishing a "sustained human presence" on the moon and Mars.

House Republican leaders want to push for outposts on the moon and Mars — and they want to push NASA's plan to snare an asteroid into the dustbin, according to a discussion draft of their space spending plan.

"It is the policy of the United States that the development of capabilities and technologies necessary for human missions to lunar orbit, the surface of the moon, the surface of Mars, and beyond shall be the goals of the administration's human space flight program," the GOP version of the NASA authorization bill states.

One of the goals would be "to develop a sustained human presence on the moon and Mars," according to the draft, which is expected to come under discussion at a House Science space subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. NBC News received a copy of the draft in advance — as did several other media outlets, including Politico and Space News.

Axing the asteroid mission
The draft bill would block the Obama administration's initiative to send a robotic probe to a near-Earth asteroid in 2017, with the aim of bringing back the space rock — or a substantial piece of it — for study by astronauts in the vicinity of the moon around 2021. On Tuesday, NASA touted the plan as part of an initiative that also includes a stepped-up program to identify potentially threatening asteroids and figure out what to do about them.

During a recent round of hearings, congressional Republicans were supportive of the asteroid-hunting effort, but sharply critical of the asteroid-grabbing mission. That's reflected in the draft legislation.

The draft would hold NASA's spending level at $16.9 billion, in accordance with the current sequestration situation, but it leaves the way open for increased funding if a deal is struck to loosen the budgetary purse strings. It would continue to fund NASA's major development projects, including the Orion crew capsule, the heavy-lift rocket known as the Space Launch System, and the James Webb Space Telescope. It also sets aside $700 million for supporting the development of crew-capable commercial spaceships — which is less than the administration's budget request of more than $820 million.

Debate over moon and Mars
The main point of debate is likely to be the thumbs-up for outposts on the moon and Mars, and the thumbs-down for the asteroid mission that has become the Obama administration's main focus for space exploration. NASA has said such a mission would help clear the way for exploration of Mars and its moons in the mid-2030s.

The idea of establishing a lunar base arguably played a role in the decline of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's fortunes in the 2012 presidential campaign. Gingrich's plan to have a moon base in operation by 2020 drew derision from Mitt Romney, who said he'd fire any employee who suggested spending hundreds of billions of dollars on such a venture.

Estimates for the cost of building a moon base have run from $40 billion to $500 billion, depending on whether the person doing the estimating wants to encourage or discourage the idea. In comparison, estimates for the total marginal cost of the asteroid redirect mission have been in the range of $1 billion to $2.6 billion.

The draft authorization bill doesn't address the long-term spending projections or schedules for missions to the moon and Mars. Rather, it advocates a step-by-step, "go-as-we-can-afford-to-pay" approach. That carries the risk of giving NASA an ambitious goal without adequate funding to get there — which was the fatal flaw in President George W. Bush's plan to send astronauts to the moon.

The bill is likely to join the Obama administration's budget proposal as one of the starting points for debate over the future of the space effort. Yet another starting point should come to light when Senate Democrats lay out their version of the NASA authorization bill.

More about space visions:

• Which way to Mars? Moon or asteroid?
• NASA touts plan to grab asteroid
• Private spaceflight study aims for moon

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

It doesn't take an Einstein to see that international differences can still crop up on the final frontier: Take the case of the European Space Agency's Einstein cargo craft, for example. Russian concerns about some potentially moldy cargo bags caused a holdup in the schedule for unloading seven tons of supplies.

The Albert Einstein Automated Transfer Vehicle linked up with the International Space Station on Saturday, delivering a payload that included scientific experiments, clothing, spare parts and an assortment of European-style goodies such as tiramisu and lasagne.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano couldn't wait to get at the cargo. "There is nothing like the promise of an Italian dinner that I will offer from my personal supply to entice my colleagues to work quickly and well!" he wrote on his blog.

It took longer than expected to start the job, however. A source at ESA told NBC News that the Russians were dissatisfied with the decontamination procedures as they applied to some bags of NASA gear in the shipment. That report was confirmed in NASA's daily status report for the space station, which said that "Russian management expressed concerns with suspected microbial growth on some of the cargo bags in the vehicle."

As a result, the hatch opening was delayed for a day while NASA and the Russians worked out the logistics for wiping down the bags with fungicide. Mission managers agreed to have the crew disinfect 21 cargo bags for possible mold, and Parmitano was finally given the go-ahead to open the hatch early Tuesday.

NASA

The European Space Agency's Einstein cargo craft docks with the International Space Station on Saturday.

NASA

Mold discolors a panel where International Space Station crew members hung their exercise clothes.

Fungi and other microbes are a real gross-out in orbit: All sorts of "microbeasties," including several dozen species of bacteria and fungi, were found on Russia's Mir space station in its latter years. The International Space Station hasn't been immune from mold, either: Here's a particularly yucky picture of a panel where space station astronauts hung their exercise clothes to dry.

NBC News space analyst James Oberg, who has been following the fungus ruckus over the past couple of days, says the tiff may have had more to do with how the original decontamination procedures were documented — but in any case, the snag reinforces a bigger lesson about the space effort's safety culture.

"It's a well-established principle of spaceflight safety that, under uncertainty, you don't 'assume the best,' you make sure the worst cannot be true," Oberg said. "And if you're not sure you decontaminated these items to rigorous standards, then you do it again, to make sure."

Buon appetito, Luca!

More about the space station mission:

• Albert Einstein bringing the goods
• Trio makes it to space station in record time
• How to shave your head in space

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

An artist's conception shows a robotic probe, powered by a solar electric propulsion system, closing in to corral an asteroid. NASA is aiming to send out such a probe in 2017.

NASA's latest "Grand Challenge" is a biggie: Can you think of better ways to find potentially threatening near-Earth asteroids and do something about those threats? Your ideas could become part of the space agency's vision for the next decade.

The Asteroid Grand Challenge was announced on Tuesday at NASA Headquarters in Washington, but a lot of the details still have to be filled in. For instance, what are the specific tasks to be covered by the challenge? How much money will it take to stimulate the required innovations? Over the next month, NASA is gathering ideas under the terms of a request for information, with the aim of setting up a game plan for the years ahead.

"The purpose of the Grand Challenge is a call to action to continue the awareness around the issue of asteroid threats," Jason Kessler, NASA's program executive for the Asteroid Grand Challenge, told NBC News.

The program complements NASA's initiative to identify and bring back an asteroid so that astronauts can study it in the vicinity of the moon. It also meshes with NASA's long-running program to identify near-Earth asteroids.

"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said in an agency news release. "This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."

All this interest in asteroids got an extra jolt in February when a meteor blast sent a shock wave sweeping over Siberia, injuring more than 1,000 people. The 55-foot-wide (17-meter-wide) space rock behind that flare-up was relatively small, as space threats go, but even somewhat larger rocks are difficult to detect in advance using current tools. The Grand Challenge is meant to stimulate the development of new tools and techniques, Kessler said.

For instance, the program might encourage the development of nanosatellites equipped with expandable pop-out mirrors that could do a better job of detecting dim asteroids. It could offer prizes for improving the software that models an asteroid's shape. Or it could establish school observation networks to bring the power of crowdsourcing to asteroid detection.

"I guarantee you there's a number of great ideas out there that I'd never come up with," Kessler said. "We're being very deliberate in not saying 'this is the way it's going to be,' except to say this is how it's going to be to promote, engage and solicit ideas from the myriad number of great thinkers."

The program is being supported with funds that are being set aside for asteroid detection, but it's too early to estimate how much money the Grand Challenge would get, Kessler said.

The Obama administration has proposed spending $47 million over the next fiscal year on the entire asteroid detection effort, with $7 million of that to be used specifically to prepare for the asteroid-grabbing mission and the Asteroid Grand Challenge. The current plan calls for a robotic probe to be sent out toward an asteroid in 2017, so that it can be brought back for study by astronauts around 2021. Although the target asteroid hasn't yet been identified, NASA has said it would be in the range of 7 to 10 meters wide. There's a chance that the probe might break off a piece of a bigger asteroid and bring it back as an alternative.

Update for 10:20 p.m. ET June 18: The B612 Foundation has been working for years to raise awareness on the asteroid threat, and is also trying to raise money for an asteroid-hunting space telescope. Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the foundation's CEO, issued this statement relating to NASA's Grand Challenge:

"This morning, the White House and NASA announced an Asteroid Grand Challenge, 'focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do with them.' This directly mirrors the mission of the non-profit private B612 Foundation and our Sentinel Mission, and we strongly applaud NASA and the Obama administration for their leadership in raising the visibility of this critical issue and for establishing detection of asteroids as a national priority. The administration has called for a team 'of the best and brightest' working on this together, and we look forward to increased collaboration and partnership.

"There are one million asteroids with the potential to impact Earth with energy large enough to obliterate any major city. We believe that the goal must be to find these one million asteroids — anything less, in our opinion, would not meet the intent of this Grand Challenge."

More about asteroids:

• Asteroid perils and profits draw interest
• Amateurs boost hunt for asteroids
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU

This panorama from NASA's Opportunity rover, made on June 1, shows Solander Point rising up on the Martian horizon. Mission managers plan to get the solar-powered rover to a north-facing slope on Solander Point by August, so that it can shelter there during the Martian winter.

Nearly 10 years after its launch, NASA's Opportunity rover has found its first evidence that Mars once had non-acidic water — the kind of water that could easily sustain the life we typically see on Earth.

"This is water that you can drink," Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, principal investigator for Opportunity's long-lived Mars mission, told reporters Friday.

The water isn't there anymore, but the minerals left behind bear an aluminum-rich chemical signature that suggests they were formed through interaction with neutral-pH water. That's different from the previous evidence that Opportunity found, pointing to more acidic water. Some extreme forms of life on Earth could tolerate that environment, but it wouldn't have been as friendly an environment for prebiotic chemistry — the chemistry that's thought to have given rise to life on Earth.

The newly announced findings, based on X-ray analysis of a rock nicknamed Esperance, add to similar evidence of neutral water that was found on the other side of the Red Planet by NASA's bigger and more capable Curiosity rover. Taken together, they flesh out the story of a planet that was friendly to life's conditions early in its existence but became colder, drier and less hospitable as it lost its global magnetic field and much of its atmosphere.

How Mars lost its mojo
The mission's deputy principal investigator, Ray Arvidsen of Washington University at St. Louis, sketched out a scenario in which Mars had a more Earthlike climate in the planet's early years. But as the planet wound down, the rains stopped, the oceans dried up, and more of the water that was available on Mars percolated up from the subsurface. That water picked up iron, sulfur and other elements, resulting in a more acidic pH.

The differences in the mineral signatures seen by Opportunity in older and newer rocks probably reflect "the transition from the early wet Mars to the cold dry Mars," Arvidsen said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU

NASA's Opportunity rover analyzed the composition of a rock called Esperance, highlighted in this Feb. 23 image, and scientists determined that the minerals found there were probably formed through interaction with neutral-pH water. That's in contrast to previous evidence from Opportunity pointing to acidic water on ancient Mars.

Arvidsen and Squyres were reluctant to talk about time frames for that transition, but Squyres speculated that the minerals seen in the Esperance rock were formed during the first billion years of Mars' 4.6 billion-year existence. He said the rock appeared to be older than the 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater where it was found, known as Endeavour Crater. 

Opportunity, which was launched from Cape Canaveral in July 2003 and landed on Mars in January 2004, has been at Endeavour Crater for almost two years. Squyres marveled at the fact that the rover found the evidence for neutral water so soon after Curiosity found the same thing.

"It's really striking to me how similar are the stories that are being told by the rocks that were recently investigated by Opportunity at Endeavour Crater, and the rocks that were recently investigated by Curiosity at Gale Crater," Squyres said. He said that the decisions on site selection "paid off on both sides of the planet, almost simultaneously."

Squyres ranked the find at Esperance among the nearly 10-year-long mission's top four or five discoveries.

Opportunity's next stop
Now Opportunity is heading for a new destination on the crater's rim: a rise called Solander Point, where the rover is due to spend the Martian winter. The rover team wants to position Opportunity on a north-facing, 15-degree slope, which will make it easier for its solar arrays to soak up power. While it's at Solander Point, Opportunity will study a rich range of geological layers that could provide further insights into the Red Planet's history.

"We consider it Sol 1 all over again for Opportunity," said John Callas, the Opportunity mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Sols" are Martian days: Opportunity is currently on Sol 3331 of what was originally expected to be a 90-sol mission on Mars.

Callas said the rover is still working fine, except for some "arthritis" in its mechanical joints and a potentially worrisome computer issue he called "flash memory amnesia." The temporary memory loss was last experienced about two weeks ago.

"Right now it's only an occasional annoyance," Callas said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / NMMNHS

This mosaic of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter traces the route taken by the Opportunity rover since its landing in 2004. The rover is currently at Cape York and is due to head for a spot called Solander Point, at the northern tip of Cape Tribulation on the rim of Endeavour Crater. Solander Point is more than 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) away, but mission managers expect the rover to complete the trip by August, around the time of Mars' southern autumnal equinox.

The Mars rover mission, which launched Opportunity as well as a second rover named Spirit toward the Red Planet in 2003, was originally budgeted at $800 million. Spirit lost its mobility and fell silent in 2010, but NASA is still funding Opportunity on maintenance mode to the tune of $14 million a year, Callas said.

Callas said he never expected the rover to last this long.

"This is like your car not lasting 200,000 miles, or even a million miles. You're talking about a car that lasts 2 million miles without an oil change," he said. "At this point, how long Opportunity lasts is anyone's guess."

Correction for 11:44 p.m. ET: I originally wrote that the Mars rovers' primary mission was supposed to last 30 sols, but it was actually 90 sols. Thanks for setting me straight, ToSeek!

More about Mars:

• Curiosity sets sights on Martian mountain at last
• 10 years after launch, Mars Express keeps going
• Opportunity breaks NASA's record for off-world driving
• Cosmic Log archive on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Asteroid 1998 QE2, a space rock big enough to wipe out civilization, sailed past our planet harmlessly on Friday — but not before stirring up attention at the White House and around the world.

There was never any chance that QE2 could hurt us. The closest it ever got was 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers) at 4:59 p.m. ET. That's 15 times farther away than the distance between Earth and the moon. "Its next pass, on July 12, 2028, will be at a very safe 45 million miles (73 mil km)," NASA said in a Twitter tweet giving the all-clear.

Even though this particular asteroid posed no threat, the fact that it's big enough and close enough to see through backyard telescopes captured the world's interest.

QE2's diameter of 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) makes it nine times the length of the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner (which it is not named after). That's big enough to create a civilization-ending catastrophe if it were to hit Earth.

Even its moon, discovered in radar imagery just this week, is formidable: It's 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide. In a worst-case scenario, a collision would devastate your typical statewide area and throw the world into chaos.

Gathering the geeks
The White House used Friday's flyby as a teachable moment to talk about the potential threat posed by asteroids, as well as the potential for scientific discovery and economic exploitation. White House spokesman Josh Earnest was even asked about 1998 QE2 during Friday's regular news briefing.

"Scientists have concluded that the asteroid poses no threat to planet Earth," Earnest told reporters. "I never really thought I'd be standing up here saying that — but I guess I am."

The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy dwelled on the asteroid issue in greater depth during a "We the Geeks" webcast on Google+.

Among the geeks in attendance were NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver; Bill Nye the Science Guy, who's executive director of the Planetary Society; former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, who is chief executive officer of the B612 Foundation; Peter Diamandis, co-founder and co-chairman of Planetary Resources; and Jose Luis Galache, an astronomer at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.

Garver pointed out that NASA has quintupled its budget for asteroid detection over the past few years, to an annual level of $20 million. And in the wake of February's spectacular asteroid blast over Russia, the Obama administration has proposed boosting that figure to more than $40 million.

Meanwhile, the B612 Foundation is working to get its Sentinel Space Telescope launched as early as 2017. Lu said the infrared-sensitive telescope could spot as many as 200,000 near-Earth asteroids in the first year of operation. That will make it easier to spot potentially hazardous asteroids in time to turn them aside. "We are turning science fiction into science fact," Lu said.

Diamandis stressed that there's a bright side as well as a dark side to asteroids. Planetary Resources is developing its own fleet of space telescopes to scout out asteroids with the potential of yielding trillions of dollars' worth of resources. "We're having a blast — that's not a good term — we're having fun, and hopefully becoming part of the economy between NASA, B612 and others to help humanity explore, and exploit, and protect."

Seeing it online
Slooh Space Camera shared real-time images of 1998 QE2 from a telescope in the Canary Islands, via its website as well as its iPad app. The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0, based in Italy, also offered a flyby webcast.

If you have a respectable telescope, you can see the asteroid yourself on Friday night. For viewing tips, consult David Dickinson's guide on Universe Today.

NASA's Deep Space Antenna at Goldstone, Calif., is watching the asteroid on Friday night as well. "We will manage to get a little bit better resolution," said Marina Brozovic, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is leading the radar observation campaign. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico will join the campaign on June 6, when 1998 QE2 comes into its field of view.

Brozovic told NBC News that the discovery of 1998 QE2's moon was a surprise — but a welcome surprise, because close observation of the sizes and orbital movements of the two bodies will allow astronomers to calculate their masses and densities. Based on previous asteroid obervations, experts assume that "these objects are rubble piles," Brozovic said. The current radar campaign could determine that with greater certainty.

Will more revelations turn up over the next couple of weeks? Stay tuned ... and in the meantime, take a look at this hourlong program about 1998 QE2 that aired on NASA TV on Thursday:

More about asteroids:

• TODAY video: Asteroid (with moon) is flying by
• Radar reveals that 1998 QE2 has a moon
• QE2 generates wave of attention
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

For more asteroid updates, follow NASA's @AsteroidWatch on Twitter, or look for the hashtags #asteroidQE2 or #1998QE2.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Fri May 31, 2013 1:51 PM EDT

Asteroid 1998 QE2, a space rock more than nine times as long as the QE2 ocean liner, is due to sail past Earth on Friday — generating a huge wave of observations and online commentary.

The 1.7-mile-wide (2.7-kilometer-wide) near-Earth asteroid won't pose any threat to our planet: Its orbit will bring it no closer than 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers) at 4:59 p.m. ET. Nevertheless, it's sparking interest because it's big enough, and coming close enough, to serve as a valuable target for scientific study.

1998 QE2's passage is also stoking public interest because it's coming just three and a half months after a much smaller asteroid broke apart spectacularly over Russia. NASA and the White House are using Friday's event to turn the spotlight on planetary science as well as the space agency's plans to fend off potential cosmic threats and send astronauts to snag an asteroid in the 2020s.

"Let’s find the asteroids before they find us, and in the process learn more about the secrets of the solar system and other potential opportunities these space rocks present," Phil Larson, a policy adviser for space and aeronautics at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a blog posting.

The teachable moments begin Thursday. Here's what's you can look forward to:

See the asteroid on video: NASA Administrator Charles Bolden joins experts from JPL and the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in a video presentation that features live telescope images of 1998 QE2. You can watch the hourlong show starting at 1:30 p.m. ET Thursday on NASA Television, or on Ustream.tv with live chat capability. Tweet your questions to @AsteroidWatch.

Chat about the asteroid: Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama hosts an online chat from 8 to 10 p.m. ET Thursday.

White House gathers the geeks: The White House is hosting a "We the Geeks" Google+ Hangout about asteroids at 2 p.m. ET Friday, with OSTP's Cristin Dorgelo serving as moderator. Video guests include NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver; Bill Nye the Science Guy (who is executive director of the Planetary Society); former astronaut Ed Lu, who heads the B612 Foundation and its effort to build an asteroid-hunting space telescope; Peter Diamandis, who wants to turn asteroids into riches as co-founder and co-chairman of Planetary Resources; and Jose Luis Galache, an astronomer at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. The Hangout can be watched via the White House Google+ page. Tweet questions using the hashtag #WetheGeeks, or post them as comments on the Google+ page.

Train a telescope on it: Even at its closest, 1998 QE2 is too dim to see with the naked eye or binoculars. Its maximum visual brightness is expected to reach 11th magnitude, which could be within the range of respectable telescopes. Local midnight is the best time to look for the asteroid, but you have to know exactly where to look. David Dickinson provides plenty of guidance on the Universe Today website.

Slooh Space Camera

A May 28 image from the Slooh Space Camera Online Telescope shows 1998 QE2 in the center of the frame. Background stars show up as streaks because the telescope was moving to keep its focus on the asteroid.

Watch it online: Slooh Space Camera has scheduled an online viewing party starting at 4:30 p.m. ET Friday, which is a half-hour before the time of closest approach. A telescope set-up in the Canary Islands will deliver imagery of 1998 QE2 out via Slooh's website as well as its iPad app.

Watch for asteroid updates: It looks as if #asteroidQE2 and #1998QE2 are the favored hashtags for updates about the space rock's flyby. You'll also want to keep an eye on NASA's Asteroid Watch website and JPL's Facebook page. Even though the closest approach comes on Friday, radar astronomers will be observing 1998 QE2 through June 9 using NASA's 230-foot-wide (70-meter-wide) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., as well as the 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The radar imagery will be key to determining 1998 QE2's size and shape with greater accuracy, and you can expect NASA to share that imagery in the weeks ahead.

And about that name ...  1998 QE2 wasn't named after the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner. Instead, it follows the naming system used by the IAU for asteroids. The object was discovered on Aug. 19, 1998, by MIT's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program in New Mexico, also known as LINEAR. The "1998" in the provisional name denotes the year of discovery. The "Q" means it was discovered during the latter half of August. The "E2" is a code given to the 55th object discovered during the half-month. Wikipedia explains the system in greater depth. Eventually, LINEAR could propose a less wonky name for approval by the IAU. But there's no rush: The next time 1998 QE2 is due to come this close is in the year 2221.

More about asteroids:

• Radar reveals that 1998 QE2 has a moon
• It's bigger than an ocean liner and flying past Earth
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log pageto your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA won't be printing out pizzas on Mars anytime soon, but the space agency is paying out $125,000 to study the use of 3-D printing technology for food preparation in space.

"We will be building the components for a prototype" over the grant's six-month period, David Irwin, principal investigator for the project at Texas-based Systems and Materials Research Consultancy, told NBC News.

The ideas is to use a 3-D printer to turn generic mixes of starch, protein and fat into textured foodie-type elements, and then add flavorings with an inkjet device. The result? Theoretically, you could have a warm slice of crusty-type starch material topped with fake cheese, sauce and pepperoni.

SMRC's Irwin was reluctant to discuss the project in detail, in part because the contract with NASA for a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant had not yet been signed. But he was optimistic about the long-term prospect: "We're going to do great things," he said.

NASA spokesman David Steitz said the contract was finally signed on Wednesday. The project is part of the space agency's effort to widen the menu options for future space travelers when they head out to Mars or a near-Earth asteroid. Right now, astronauts are eating mostly pre-packaged, pre-processed, shelf-stable foods. But that won't work for a trip to the Red Planet.

"The current food system is not adequate in nutrition or acceptability through the five-year shelf life required for a mission to Mars, or other long-duration missions," Steitz said in an email.

Steitz stressed that the Phase I study is just one small step in what's likely to be a years-long effort to build a 3-D space food printer. "There's a lot between this and a pizza," he told NBC News.

Hello, 'Star Trek'
3-D printing technology could open the way toward the kinds of food synthesizers you've seen in 45-year-old episodes of "Star Trek." Basic unflavored ingredients could be kept in long-term storage — up to 30 years, according to a report on the project published by Quartz. The 3-D printer could build up different blends of the basics with different textures. Food-specific flavorings could be sprayed onto the components of synthetic food. Thus, the same device could turn out pizzas on one day, and tacos on the next.

"It has some merit as a way to avoid some of the problems that are currently experienced with the limited shelf life of the pre-prepared foods that are used by the astronauts," said Jean Hunter, a space food researcher at Cornell University who isn't involved with the 3-D-printing project. "One of the keys to having a good food system is to have a lot of variety."

SMRC's proposal to NASA says that "the biggest advantage of 3-D printed food technology will be zero waste, which is essential in long-distance space missions."

One small step: a cookie
As an initial experiment, SMRC researcher Anjan Contractor produced a chocolate-covered cookie using a 3-D printer, and Quartz quotes him as saying a 3-D-printed pizza is his next objective. If the project turns out the way Contractor and his colleagues hope, we may be seeing a cornucopia of food printouts on Earth as well as in outer space. SMRC says the technology could offer an alternative to the current ready-to-eat meals served up by the military, and even a solution to the world's future food woes. 

"With the anticipated world population of 12 billion by the end of the century, the current infrastructure of food production and supply will not be able to meet the demand of such a large population," the company says in its NASA proposal. "The conventional technologies can only provide marginal efficiency, which is not enough in keeping food prices at affordable level for the population growth. By exploring and implementing technologies such as 3-D printing, this may avoid food shortage, inflation, starvation, famine and even food wars."

What do you think? Is 3-D printing the technology that will feed us on Mars, and on Earth? Will it become a future fast-food fad? Or will the novelty eventually go stale? Feel free to register your opinion using the informal survey above, or add your comments below.

More about the food frontier:

• Burritobot is a precision tortilla-filling machine
• The wild possibilities of printing food
• NASA builds menu for Mars mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

An artist's conception shows NASA's Kepler space telescope observing a planetary transit.

NASA is getting plenty of advice — and sympathy — as it assesses whether its Kepler planet-hunting telescope can be revived after the failure of its reaction-control system. The reactions from scientists and engineers range from repair tips to an Audenesque elegy. Here's a sampling:

How to fix Kepler
The reason why the $600 million Kepler spacecraft can no longer search for planetary transits is that two of its four gyroscopic reaction wheels can no longer spin. Mission managers say Kepler needs at least three of those wheels in working order to hold its position still enough to stare at alien stars.

The most recent part to fail is known as reaction wheel 4. The mission's deputy project manager, Charlie Sobeck, told reporters that the Kepler team could try putting some reverse torque on that wheel in hopes of freeing it up.

Two other possibilities were raised by Scott Hubbard, who headed NASA's Ames Research Center during the development of the Kepler mission and is now a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University.

One option would be to try turning on reaction wheel 2, which failed last July. "It was putting metal on metal, and the friction was interfering with its operation, so you could see if the lubricant that is in there, having sat quietly, has redistributed itself, and maybe it will work," Hubbard said in a Stanford Q&A.

"The other scheme, and this has never been tried, involves using thrusters and the solar pressure exerted on the solar panels to try and act as a third reaction wheel and provide additional pointing stability," he said. The mission's principal investigator, Ames' Bill Borucki, said on Wednesday the thrusters couldn't hold the spacecraft stable enough for planet-hunting. Nevertheless, it might be one of the options under consideration.

For the time being, Kepler has been put into a holding pattern that should minimize its thruster fuel consumption and give the Kepler team several months to weigh all the options, the costs and the potential scientific benefits.

Going beyond Kepler
Even if the Kepler spacecraft can't be revived, Borucki says that only half of the data collected so far have been fully analyzed. He estimates it'll take another two years or so to complete the analysis.

Meanwhile, NASA has just given the go-ahead its next planet-hunting satellite: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. That $200 million project would put a telescope array in space in 2017 to perform an all-sky survey, looking for exoplanets in orbit around the nearest and brightest stars. That strategy is markedly different from the one used by Kepler, which stared at a relatively small patch of sky straddling the constellations Cygnus and Vega.

This October, the European Space Agency plans to launch a space probe called Gaia to conduct a census of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way. Gaia could detect thousands of distant planetary systems, and measure their orbits and masses using a technique known as astrometry.

ESA is working on another planet hunter called the Characterizing Exoplanets Satellite, or CHEOPS, which is due for launch in 2017. CHEOPS would conduct high-resolution transit observations of stars that have already been found to host planets. 

The $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA bills as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, could conceivably analyze the atmospheres of alien planets. It's currently due for launch in 2018.

Paying tribute to Kepler
NASA's associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, said it's too early to consider Kepler "down and out." But many astronomers fear that Kepler's planet-hunting days are finished.

"I think 'The mission is not over' means 'the mission is over,'" Caltech's Mike Brown said in a Twitter update on Wednesday. "Might be other things it can do. But, kids, I think the mission is over."

Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who's part of the Kepler team, was similarly downbeat. In an email sent to AAAS MemberCentral, he called this week's setback a "disaster":

"I am afraid that the loss of this second reaction wheel effectively means the partial loss of Kepler's main science goal: determining the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting their stars at distances such that liquid water could occur on the planets' surfaces. Kepler has taken an outstandingly impressive four years of data, but we still need another three or so years of outstandingly impressive data to be certain of the frequency of Earth-size planets. Right now we have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, but that is not the same as actually determining that number. Kepler was planned to do that for us. There is no other mission in sight that can reproduce for us what Kepler was in the process of doing. The upcoming (2017) NASA TESS Mission will help to push the exoplanet field forward, but it is not designed to find Earthlike planets around sunlike stars, like Kepler was."

"This is one of the saddest days in my life. A crippled Kepler may be able to do other things, but it cannot do the one thing it was designed to do."

Another Kepler team member, Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, told KQED that he felt dizzy and teary-eyed over the spacecraft's situation. "It’s a loss for our species," he said. "That sounds dramatic, but we pride ourselves as a species of exploration, seeking answers beyond the horizon, answers about our place in the universe. And Kepler was answering those questions."

Marcy went so far as to tweak W.H. Auden's poem "Funeral Blues" to pay tribute to Kepler. Here's the astronomer's elegy to a spacecraft:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the Internet,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let jet airplanes circle at night overhead
Sky-writing over Cygnus: Kepler is dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of doves,
Let the traffic officers wear black cotton gloves.

Kepler was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week, no weekend rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talks, my song;
I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are still wanted now; let's honor every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing will ever be this good.

With thanks to W.H.Auden.

For a video rendition of "Funeral Blues," check out this clip from "Four Weddings and a Funeral."

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

You'd think that traveling at warp speed to the planet Nibiru would be the coolest thing in outer space, but for the Hollywood types who made "Star Trek Into Darkness," talking with a real astronaut on the International Space Station was way more awesome.

"I'll just act like this is a perfectly normal thing to be happening," Damon Lindelof, a writer and producer for the just-released movie, told NASA's Chris Cassidy during a Google+ Hangout presented on Thursday by the space agency and Warner Bros. "We are literally tickled pink to be talking to you right now."

The other "Star Trek" actors in on the Hangout — Chris Pine (who plays Captain James Kirk), John Cho (Sulu) and Alice Eve (who gets a healthy dose of screen time as Dr. Carol Marcus) — were just as taken. They laughed and hooted like fanboys when Cassidy let go of his microphone and took an upside-down spin in zero-G.

Pine said he loved the idea of mashing up fictional and real-life spaceflight: "It's great that our worlds can meet at some point in the middle and hopefully inspire people to do good things, and to explore."

The feeling was clearly mutual: Astronaut Mike Fincke, who served as space station commander in 2008-2009, said the "Star Trek" TV shows and movies have long inspired scientists, engineers and spacefliers. "We fall for it every time here at NASA," he said.

Fincke appeared in the final episode of the "Star Trek: Enterprise" TV series, and on Thursday he joked that he'd rather be in Hollywood: "Ever since I was 3 years old, I wanted to be a director and writer, but I failed director-writer school. Then I tried acting, and that didn't work out. So now I go on spacewalks." 

If Lindelof has anything to do with it, Fincke won't be the last astronaut to make the crossover to Hollywood. He promised Cassidy that he'd be welcome to a cameo role in a future "Star Trek" movie. "Maybe you could class up the joint a bit," Lindelof said.

Cassidy said the "Star Trek" crew would be welcome aboard the space station as well. He noted that there were currently a couple of vacancies in the U.S. segment of the station — due to the fact that one batch of crew members has just returned to Earth, and their replacements aren't due for launch until May 28. "We got two open beds," Cassidy joked. "The first two here get 'em."

You can watch the whole 56-minute Hangout while you're waiting for the next showing of "Star Trek Into Darkness," but here are a few of the highlights:

• When asked about last week's ammonia coolant leak at the station, Cassidy said he was surprised to see how quickly mission managers were able to plan a spacewalk to fix it. "It's not like you can rescue Spock from a volcano and push a button. It doesn't happen that way up here," he said. Cassidy said the episode illustrated how useful it is to have "garage-tinkerer" types aboard the station.
• Cassidy said ammonia contamination was one of the three emergency threats that the space station crew had to be prepared to deal with, along with an onboard fire or rapid decompression. That led Lindelof to warn the astronaut about the latest "Star Trek" super-villain. "You should watch out for Benedict Cumberbatch," he said. "He's very threatening, I understand."
• Cassidy said the thing that gets him the most about "Star Trek" and other space movies was the ease with which everyone walked around on spaceships, as if artificial gravity was nothing special. Even though weightlessness has its drawbacks, floating around in zero-G would make the movies much more interesting. "Trust me, it's a pretty cool thing to do this anytime you want," Cassidy said.
• The astronauts talked around a question that asked them to name their favorite "Star Trek" captain, but Fincke said his favorite name for a starship would be Enterprise (natch!). Fellow NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren went with the Starship Endurance, which pays tribute to the ship for Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic ordeal in 1914.
• Life aboard the space station tends to give astronauts the same optimistic view of the future that runs through the "Star Trek" saga, Cassidy said. From space, Earth seems so tranquil and peaceful. "There are no borders down there," Cassidy said. "You can't see a little yellow line painted on the green part."
• One of the questions sent in during the Hangout focused on a more mundane aspect of spaceflight: How do spacewalkers handle a sneeze? Cassidy admitted that could be a problem. "Once the helmet goes on, any schmutz that goes on there is just an impediment to seeing clearly," he said. The solution is to incline your head downward before the sneeze, so that the schmutz is directed below the face plate.

More about 'Star Trek' and spaceflight:

• Astronauts get a sneak peek at film
• Warp speed! It may actually be possible
• Gallery: Reality check for 'Trek' tech

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

An artist's conception shows NASA's Kepler space telescope observing a planet making a transit across an alien star. (Star and planet not to scale.)

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope suffered a second failure in its reaction-wheel control system, forcing a suspension of its search for alien planets while the space agency determines whether the four-year mission is truly finished.

"It's certainly not good news," Charles Sobeck, deputy project manager for the $600 million mission at NASA's Ames Research Center, told reporters Wednesday.

But Sobeck and other mission managers emphasized that there was still a chance that the probe could be revived. "I wouldn't call Kepler down and out just yet," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters.

The problem has to do with the reaction wheels that are part of Kepler's fine-pointing system. The space telescope identifies worlds in far-off solar systems by watching for the telltale dips in starlight when the planet's disk passes over its parent sun. But in order to make those observations, Kepler has to hold itself in a precise position with the aid of four gyroscopic reaction wheels. One of the wheels failed last July, but Kepler could still do the job with the other three.

On Sunday, however, the spacecraft put itself into safe mode when it couldn't stay in its proper orbit around the sun, 40 million miles (64 million kilometers) from Earth. When the mission team did its regular check-up with Kepler on Tuesday, they found that a second reaction wheel wasn't working. In a mission update, NASA said the problem was probably caused by "a structural failure of the wheel bearing."

That forced an end to Kepler's planet quest. "We need three wheels in service to give us the pointing precision to make this work," the mission's principal investigator, William Borucki of NASA Ames, told NBC News.

Sobeck said the spacecraft itself could remain stable as long as it had fuel for its thrusters, but the thrusters aren't capable of providing the precise pointing that Borucki and his colleagues need. Over the next several months, members of the Kepler team will assess their technical options, and gauge what kind of science could be accomplished using those options, said Paul Hertz, astrophysics director at NASA Headquarters. 

There's still a chance that the reaction-wheel system could be restored — for example, by trying to spin the wheel backward and forward, just as you might spin the wheels of a car that's stuck in a snowdrift. Sobeck said it might even be possible to revive the wheel that was shut down last July. "When we turn it on, it just might start spinning, we don't know," he said.

But mission managers also acknowledged that Kepler's planet-hunting days may be over. Hertz pointed out that the spacecraft outlasted its 3.5-year primary mission, and was currently into an extended mission costing $20 million a year.

Even if the spacecraft's control system can't be revived, it will still take another couple of years to analyze the trillions of bits of data already collected, Borucki said. The mission has already identified 132 confirmed planets and 2,740 additional candidates yet to be confirmed. Some of those worlds are thought to lie within the habitable zones of their planetary systems.

"The prime reason for the existence of this mission is to determine whether Earths are common or rare in our galaxy," Borucki said. So far, the evidence suggests that there are billions of Earth-size planets in the Milky Way. Scientists have not yet identified an Earth-size planet in an Earthlike orbit around a sunlike star, but Borucki voiced confidence that the crucial evidence was tucked away somewhere in the readings that have already been beamed down from Kepler.

"I am really delighted, frankly, with what we've accomplished," he said.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

A mosaic of images captured by NASA's Mars Curiosity rover on Sol 262 of its mission on Mars (May 2) shows its robotic arm in the foreground and Mount Sharp in the background. Two drill holes can be seen on the surface of the bedrock visible below the robotic arm's turret.

NASA's Curiosity rover is back at work in Yellowknife Bay, a rocky area inside Mars' Gale Crater — and if it takes good care of itself, it just might still be at work when humans hit the Red Planet.

At least that's the sentiment voiced by Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, during this week's Humans to Mars Summit in Washington. "I anticipate the first astronaut we send can go and shake Curiosity's hand," he told Monday's audience at George Washington University. If that astronaut is able to come within hand-shaking distance, the gesture would serve as a thank-you for years of service by the nuclear-powered robot, Meyer said.

Last week, Curiosity resumed contact with controllers back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after a weeks-long gap that was scheduled due to solar interference — and JPL has just finished upgrading the rover's software.

Images sent back on May 2 show the rover's robotic arm and its instrument-laden turret poised over Yellowknife Bay's bedrock. Scientist-writer Ken Kremer and his Italian colleague, Marco Di Lorenzo, assembled 13 images ("a Martian baker's dozen") into the sepia-toned panorama you see above.

"She's back and flexing!" Kremer wrote in an email. 

Within a week or so, the rover will be drilling into Martian bedrock to flesh out its scientific findings about the habitability of ancient Mars. Then it'll start heading toward Mount Sharp (a.k.a. Aeolis Mons), a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in Gale Crater. Scientists are hoping that the layers of rock on that mountainside have recorded billions of years' worth of geological changes.

Because Curiosity is powered by a plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generator, the rover could keep going for decades — assuming that there aren't any mechanical breakdowns, of course. That's what fuels Meyer's hope that there'll be a human-machine handshake someday.

More than 70 percent of Americans are confident that humans will go to Mars by 2033, according to a survey conducted in February by Phillips & Company for the Boeing Co. and Explore Mars, the nonprofit group sponsoring this week's summit. But one of the summit's headliners, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, said that sending astronauts to Mars can't be done without technological innovation and financial support.

"I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready," The Washington Post quoted Bolden as saying. "I don’t have the capability to do it. NASA doesn’t have the capability to do that right now. But we’re on a path to be able to do it in the 2030s."

Will humans ever shake Curiosity's hand? When? Register your opinion in our unscientific survey above, and voice your views in the comment section below.

More about sending humans to Mars:

• Thousands want to take one-way trip to Mars
• Mars flyby in 2018? It's so crazy it just might work
• NBC News archive on Mars

You can follow the Humans to Mars Summit via streaming video. Check out Explore Mars' channel on Livestream for on-demand videos from Monday's sessions, plus live coverage of Tuesday's sessions.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.