A NASA astronaut and his two Russian crewmates made the fastest-ever trip to the International Space Station on Thursday, arriving less than six hours after launch.

In the past, it's taken two days for Soyuz spaceships to make the trip from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. But mission planners worked out a more efficient procedure that made it possible for the Soyuz to catch up with the station in just four orbits, compared with more than 30 orbits under the previous flight plan.

Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin, along with NASA's Chris Cassidy, rocketed into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:43 p.m. ET Thursday (2:43 a.m. Friday local time). "The spacecraft is nominal, we feel great," Vinogradov, the spacecraft's commander, reported as the rocket ascended to orbit.

NASA launch commentator Josh Byerly hailed Thursday's flight, saying that the crew was "on the fast track" to the station.

The six-hour trip lasted roughly as long as an airplane flight from Seattle to Miami. NASA officials say the fast-rendezvous procedure minimizes the time that crew members spend in the Soyuz's close quarters and gets them to the much roomier space station in better shape. The down side is that the three spacefliers had to spend most of the trip sitting elbow to elbow in bulky spacesuits — which might strike a familiar chord for Seattle-to-Miami fliers.

The fast-track technique relies on a complicated round of orbital choreography that was tested three times over the past eight months, using unmanned Russian Progress cargo ships.

Last week, the space station raised its orbit by about a mile and a half (2.5 kilometers) to put it in the correct position for intercepting the Soyuz. The Soyuz had to be launched at just the right moment, to get into just the right orbit at just the right distance behind the station. To catch up with the station at the right time, the Soyuz had to execute a precisely timed series of thruster firings — a task that was made easier by an upgrade to the spacecraft's automated navigation system.

"From a technical point of view, we feel pretty comfortable with this," Cassidy said at a pre-launch news briefing. "All of the procedures are very similar to what we do in a two-day process, and we've trained it a number of times."

Despite all the training, there were some nail-biting moments. At one point during the Soyuz's approach, a Russian mission controller told Vinogradov, "You really need to stay calm and cool." Vinogradov followed through on the advice, guiding the Soyuz to its targeted position at 10:28 p.m. ET.

Two hours after docking, the hatches between the two spacecraft were opened, and the Soyuz trio floated through to greet three other spacefliers who have been living aboard the station since December: Canadian commander Chris Hadfield, NASA's Tom Marshburn and Russia's Roman Romanenko.

"Hey, is anyone home?" Vinogradov joked. The new arrivals received a round of hugs and congratulations, exchanged warm words with loved ones back on Earth via the station's communication link, and finally settled down for rest at the end of a long, long day.

Vinogradov has been on two previous long-duration space missions — to Russia's Mir space station in 1997-1998, and to the International Space Station in 2006. Cassidy, a Navy SEAL, has been to the station once before, during a mission on the shuttle Endeavour in 2009. This is the first spaceflight for Misurkin.

The new crew members will spend five and a half months aboard the orbital outpost. They'll take part in station upkeep as well as scores of scientific experiments. Up to seven spacewalks are planned during their stay, with the first one coming up next month. The next changing of the guard comes in mid-May, when Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko are due to return to Earth.

More about the Soyuz trip:

• Space station shifts orbit for fast trip
• Space trip offers speed, but not comfort
• Fast trip to station is like riding a train

This report includes information from The Associated Press.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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 Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:47 PM EDT

SpaceX said its robotic Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, bringing back more than a ton of cargo from the International Space Station.

"Welcome home!" the California-based company said in a Twitter update, heralding the Dragon's return to Earth after more than three weeks in space. SpaceX said its recovery crew watched the spacecraft descend to the sea at the end of its parachutes, and a ship headed to the site to haul the capsule aboard and bring it back to port.

"Time to go fishing!" the Canadian Space Agency said in a congratulatory tweet.

The on-time splashdown came at 12:34 p.m. ET, five and a half hours after the Dragon was released from the grip of the space station's robotic arm. "It looks both beautiful and nominal from here," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the station's commander, reported as the orbital outpost flew 256 miles (411 kilometers) above the Pacific.

NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn said he was "sad to see the Dragon go. ... Performed her job beautifully, heading back to her lair."

This marks the third time that SpaceX's commercial cargo craft has made a round trip to the space station. The first visit, in May 2012, showed NASA that the California-based company could deliver payloads safely. Last October, another Dragon took on the first of 12 cargo runs under the terms of a $1.6 billion contract with the space agency. This latest mission launched on March 1, carrying 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms) of supplies and equipment.

SpaceX had to cope with a post-launch glitch involving the Dragon's thruster system, but the mission went swimmingly after that. Astronauts unloaded the cargo soon after its was brought in for its berthing at the station, and then refilled it with 2,600 pounds (1,180 kilograms) of payload items due to be returned to Earth — including scientific experiments, station hardware and trash. Packaging brought the total weight past the 3,000-pound (1,360-kilogram) mark, SpaceX said.

NASA said the plant samples that were brought back from the station could help scientists enhance crop production on Earth and develop food production systems for future space missions. Other experiments carried by the Dragon could help in the development of more efficient solar cells, detergents and electronics. 

The returned cargo also included 13 sets of Lego toy blocks that went up to the station two years ago aboard the shuttle Endeavour. The blocks were used by the astronauts in educational videos to demonstrate how machines work in weightlessness. One of the kits, a 3-foot-long (meter-long) scale model of the space station, was so bulky that it would have collapsed under its own weight in Earth's gravity.

NASA via SpaceX

SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule separates from the International Space Station's robotic arm on Tuesday.

NASA TV via Spaceflight Now

A thermal imager on SpaceX's Dragon capsule captures a view of the International Space Station during Tuesday's departure.

SpaceX

SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule floats down to the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday.

Dragon's return was originally scheduled for Monday, but "fairly aggressive" seas at the intended splashdown zone forced a one-day postponement, NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said. The weather was better on Tuesday, and the splashdown target was a couple of hundred miles nearer to shore, at a point in the Pacific 214 miles (344 kilometers) west of Baja California.

SpaceX's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said the capsule was secured aboard its recovery ship without incident. "Cargo looks A ok," he reported in a Twitter update.

The ship is due to make a 30-hour voyage back to the port of Los Angeles, where time-sensitive biological samples will be offloaded. Then the Dragon and its remaining cargo will be trucked to SpaceX's facility in McGregor, Texas.

The next SpaceX cargo run is scheduled at the end of September. Another company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., is working on a second commercial delivery system that's due for its first test launch next month. But only the Dragon is capable of bringing significant amounts of cargo back to Earth.

NASA selected SpaceX and Orbital to help fill the gap left by the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. Russian, European and Japanese cargo craft also service the space station. For now, Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only spacecraft that transport people to and from the station, but NASA intends to have U.S.-built commercial spaceships — perhaps including an upgraded version of the Dragon — carrying astronauts within five years.

More about SpaceX:

• SpaceX's next-gen engine cleared for liftoff
• Grasshopper rocket takes its biggest hop yet
• NBC News archive on SpaceX

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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 Tue Mar 26, 2013 7:29 AM EDT

L. Calcada / N. Risinger / ESO

An artist's conception shows the planet Alpha Centauri Bb, orbiting one of the stars in a nearby triple-star system. A commercial venture known as Uwingu says it will use proceeds from a contest to give Alpha Centauri Bb a new name to support endangered educational and public outreach efforts.

NASA's plan to suspend educational and public outreach activities due to budget sequestration has sparked protests from some of the space agency's biggest fans, and a commercial venture known as Uwingu wants to help fill the gap. Uwingu says it will direct proceeds from its contest to name the closest exoplanet toward projects that are facing budget cuts.

The venture was set up last year to offer space-themed entertainment that would raise money for education and space science. Just last week, Uwingu kicked off an effort to come up with a "people's choice" name for Alpha Centauri Bb, an Earth-sized planet that was detected last year just 4.3 light-years away.

It takes $4.99 to nominate a name, and 99 cents to cast a vote. The contest closes on April 15, and the winner will be announced the next day. Some of the proceeds will go toward paying the company's expenses, but the target is to put at least half of the money into a fund to support research and education. 

Rough patch for NASA
When the company made its public debut, the founders said the Uwingu Fund could serve as a lifeline for scientists and educators if NASA's budget ran into a rough patch. Sequestration certainly qualifies as a rough patch: The automatic spending cuts will force NASA to scale back its budget by roughly $900 million for the fiscal year.

As part of its plan to comply with sequestration, NASA officials on Friday ordered the suspension of educational and public outreach activities, also known as EPO. Planetary scientist Alan Stern, Uwingu's CEO and a former NASA associate administrator, said the suspension has put educational and public outreach programs "under severe and sudden stress."

"At Uwingu, we believe that private and commercial funding of space-based initiatives — including research and EPO — is more important now than ever," Stern said in a statement Monday. "That's the purpose of The Uwingu Fund, which is fueled from people participating in the naming contest for Alpha Centauri's planet. Today we're announcing that Uwingu is taking action to combat the severe, adverse impact of sequestration on NASA EPO by directing all Uwingu Funds proceeds raised through this contest to grants to EPO professionals and projects."

In the grand scheme of things, education and public outreach aren't the most expensive things that NASA does. The continuing resolution that governed spending for the current fiscal year set aside $137 million for the agency's education account, and sequestration would trim that figure by $7 million. NASA budgets additional funds for public outreach on a mission-by-mission basis, but the expense is still a small proportion of NASA's $17.8 billion budget.

Outcry over outreach
Friday's move nevertheless sparked an outcry from many who rank education and public outreach among NASA's strongest suits. Over the weekend, more than 4,500 people signed onto an online petition urging the White House to "repeal" the EPO spending cuts.

"This is something that hits extremely close to home, and not just because I may not have a position this summer as a result of this," Scott Lewis, media director for Astrosphere New Media Association, said in a Google+ posting. "NASA's education and public outreach is something that opens the eyes of thousands, if not millions of people, to the magnificence of science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

One of the ventures that could be affected by the budget cuts is CosmoQuest, an online educational project that sponsors virtual star parties, citizen-science projects and similar activities with NASA support. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University who is CosmoQuest's project director, said the effect on funding is not yet clear — but she's already preparing for cutbacks.

"I'm looking at multiple fundraisers," Gay, who is on Uwingu's board of advisers, said in a Google+ posting on Sunday. "While I'm less worried about CosmoQuest than I was yesterday, it is clear that many good people in the NASA EPO community are deeply in jeopardy. I continue to encourage you to help us seek donations so that I can recover as needed from any cuts we incur, and, as additional funding allows, work to contract people who do lose their jobs to help us build new and amazing things for CQX. I'm hoping you will help me build a safety net for our community."

Correction for 3:55 p.m. ET March 25: I referred to Scott Lewis as an astronomer at Citrus College — which prompted this email from Lewis, a.k.a. "The Bald Astronomer": "I'm not an astronomer at Citrus College, but a student there. I am, however, media director for Astrosphere New Media Association, on the education/public outreach team for CosmoQuest, owner of KnowTheCosmos.com, and an all-around attractive man. haha."

More about sequestration's effects: 

• Sequester keeps NASA officials from conference
• FAA to close 149 air traffic control towers
• Budget battles: What you need to know

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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 via Twitter

NASA says the tweets will continue despite a "pause" in educational and public outreach initiatives.

NASA is putting the brakes on its educational and public outreach efforts, due to the continuing standoff over the federal budget and the resulting sequestration of the agency's funds.

The cutbacks in NASA's activities, including social-media initiatives, were outlined on Friday in a pair of memos from NASA Headquarters in Washington. The independent SpaceRef website published both memos, including one that ordered a suspension and another that provided additional instructions for NASA's Communication Coordinating Council.

Automatic spending cuts are taking effect, at NASA and many other federal agencies, as the result of the failure by the White House and Congress to agree on a budget deal. Last month, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told lawmakers that sequestration would reduce NASA's overall budget from the $17.8 billion that Congress approved last year to $16.9 billion.

The space agency already has cut back on travel and training expenses. As a result, some of the space agency's scientists and executives had to pass up this week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. The new directives extend the cutbacks to online, multimedia and social-media initiatives as well as publications.

Operational websites and social-media accounts were excluded from the suspension, however — which means existing Twitter accounts, including @NASA and @MarsCuriosity, can stay in business. NASA has rapidly expanded its online presence in the past couple of years, winning recognition from the Emmys, the Shorty Awards and the Webby Awards. Just this month, the Mars Curiosity mission's social-media team won the South by Southwest Interactive Award for best social-media campaign. 

Waivers were also granted for mission announcements, media events and products, breaking-news activities and responses to media inquiries. In an emailed response to NBC News' inquiry, NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said additional guidance would be issued next week, addressing areas that would be exempt from the suspension.

"It's important to point out that it's a suspension, not a cancellation," Jacobs wrote. "The agency's budget for the fiscal year is more that $1 billion below the original request. We are taking prudent steps to ensure the resources expended on outreach activities are done so wisely.

"Mission activities and much of the existing news and information dissemination is not likely to be impacted, including our successful social media efforts," he said. "However, it is important in this constrained fiscal environment to pause and assess how the money is being spent on a wide variety of outreach activities, many of which are funded by independent projects and programs. We are not canceling anything yet. We are being financially responsible by pausing long enough to review activities before they go forward."

Update for 9 p.m. ET March 23: Folks have started a petition on the White House's "We the People" website, calling for a repeal of the sequestration cuts for education and public outreach. Although the sentiment is admirable, NASA's hands (and the White House's hands) may be tied by the rules that govern sequestration. It's important to note that all of the space agency's activities have to be cut back by the same percentage. It's just that in the case of education and public outreach, the memos that address the process for starting the cuts have now been made public. 

That being said, signing a White House petition is a great way to make your opinion known, and so is writing or calling your representatives in Congress.

More about sequestration's effects:

• FAA to close 149 air traffic control towers
• How science funding will be affected
• Budget battles: What you need to know

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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 Mar 22, 2013 10:00 PM EDT

Slideshow: Moon rocket engines recovered

Click through scenes from Bezos Expeditions' recovery of historic Saturn 5 rocket engines from the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Launch slideshow

Salvagers backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos have recovered components from the Saturn 5 rocket engines that powered NASA's Apollo moon missions off the launch pad, more than four decades after they hurtled down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Amazon.com's founder reported on the successful three-week sea salvage operation on his Bezos Expeditions website. "What an incredible adventure," he wrote.

"We've seen an underwater wonderland — an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," Bezos said Wednesday.

Almost a year ago, Bezos announced that deep-sea sonar scans had located the first-stage engines that were used for the historic Apollo 11 launch in 1969 — the launch that sent astronauts on their way to the moon's surface for the first time. The first stage of the three-stage Saturn 5 was jettisoned once its fuel was spent, and fell into the Atlantic.

It took months to plan the recovery expedition — and three weeks ago, Bezos and the salvage team headed out into the Atlantic on the Seabed Worker, a ship that has previously played a role in recovering sunken treasures.

"While I spent a reasonable chunk of time in my cabin emailing and working, it didn't keep me from getting to know the team," Bezos wrote. Much of his posting was given over to thank-yous for the team members. 

The chilly ocean waters preserved the hardware in "gorgeous" condition at a depth of more than 14,000 feet, Bezos said. He noted that it was difficult to make out the serial numbers on the hardware. Confirmation of the Apollo 11 connection will have to wait until the parts are more closely examined.

Remotely operated vehicles recovered enough components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines. Bezos said the ship was now on its way back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to offload the artifacts. Bezos Expeditions said the restoration would take place at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

"The upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion," Bezos said. "We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface. We’re excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Even before the expedition, Bezos and NASA worked out where the artifacts would be going. The first option would go to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs told NBC News in an email. The second engine would be offered to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, the hometown for Bezos and Amazon.com.

"While we have no role in the restoration, we are providing assistance to help identify the hardware through our various history offices and field centers," Jacobs said.

Although Bezos made his billions in the dot-com world, he's had a longstanding interest in spaceflight as well: His rocket venture, Blue Origin, has been working on a launch system for suborbital as well as orbital passenger flights with NASA's backing. Last year, Bezos donated a 5-ton Blue Origin lander prototype to the Museum of Flight.

In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden praised the recovery of the engines as a "historic find."

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff’s desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," Bolden said. "Jeff and his colleagues at Blue Origin are helping to usher in a new commercial era of space exploration, and we are confident that our continued collaboration will soon result in private human access to space, creating jobs and driving America’s leadership in innovation and exploration."

More space history:

• Timeline: NASA's Glory Days
• NASA tests engine from Apollo 11 rocket
• Moon looms again as future destination

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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.

Congress got the word from NASA on Tuesday about its options for dealing with the threats posed by asteroids and comets: Lawmakers can either provide adequate funding for detecting and characterizing near-Earth objects, and diverting them if necessary — or they can pray.

Threats from space are generally the stuff of science-fiction movies such as "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact," but members of the House Science Committee took a hard look at the realities during Tuesday's hearing, which came in response to the Feb. 15 meteor explosion over Russia as well as a close encounter that same day with a much bigger asteroid known as 2012 DA14.

The lawmakers didn't always like what they heard. The committee's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told the panelists more than once that the progress report they delivered was "not reassuring." But representatives from both parties were receptive to the idea of putting more resources into the effort to counter cosmic threats.

White House science adviser John Holdren noted that the funding devoted annually to cataloging potentially threatening asteroids has risen from $5 million to more than $20 million over the past couple of years. But even at that level, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden estimated that it would take until 2030 to catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth objects between 140 meters and 1 kilometer in width, as mandated by Congress.  

"Maybe we can help you out with the budget. Don't know," Smith replied. He said "we need to find ways to prioritize NASA's projects."

Holdren said the single most useful project would be to put an infrared-sensing telescope in a Venus-like orbit, like the Sentinel Space Telescope being developed by the nonprofit B612 Foundation. The telescope could look for asteroids that currently can't be spotted from the ground because they spend much of their time within Earth's orbit, where they're lost in the sun's glare. The 55-foot-wide (17-meter-wide) rock that blew up without warning over Chelyabinsk in Russia last month was just such an asteroid.

"It came from a direction where our [existing] telescopes could not look," Holdren said. "We cannot look in the sun." 

Don Davis

Artwork by Don Davis shows a meteor streaking across the skies over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. More of Davis' work is available at his website, DonaldEDavis.com.

Holdren estimated the cost of an asteroid-hunting space telescope at $500 million to $750 million, and said it could reduce the congressionally mandated survey time to six to eight years. Following through on the Obama administration's plan to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 would cost about $2 billion a year, Holdren said.

The automatic spending cuts known as sequestration will affect NASA's asteroid-hunting effort as well as the plans for human exploration, Bolden warned.

"The president has a plan. But that plan is incremental," Bolden said, referring to the Obama administration's budget proposal. "And if we want to save the planet, because I think that’s what we’re talking about, then we have to get together ... and decide how we’re going to execute that plan."

The idea of enlisting other countries as well as amateur astronomers to "crowdsource" the hunt for threatening asteroids struck a responsive chord with lawmakers. But Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., reminded Bolden that China couldn't be on the list of partners due to a congressional ban.

Congressional teach-in
The hearing served as a teach-in for some of the panel members. At one point, Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, asked whether the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope could be retrofitted to look for asteroids. "No, sir," Bolden replied. At another point, Gen. William Shelton, head of the Air Force Space Command, had to explain to lawmakers that the space-based surveillance system used for monitoring missile launches on Earth could not watch out for rocks coming in from deep space.

Holdren and Bolden provided a status report on the asteroid search, reporting that about 95 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than a kilometer are being tracked. However, only about 10 percent of the 13,000 to 20,000 asteroids bigger than 140 meters have been detected. If an asteroid of that size were to strike land, it "could devastate the better part of a continent," Holdren said.

Looking on the bright side, Holdren added that such asteroids are thought to hit Earth only every 20,000 years or so.

Bolden said less than 1 percent of the space rocks in the 30- to 100-meter range have been found. Such asteroids may not be continent-killers, but they are bigger and more potentially destructive than last month's Chelyabinsk meteor.

Lawmakers repeatedly asked how much advance warning would be required to deflect a threatening asteroid, and were repeatedly told that it would take years. Shelton said that if time was limited, "probably nuclear energy is what we're talking about." But even a nuclear-armed mission to blast an asteroid, Bruce Willis-style, would require lots of lead time. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., asked Bolden about the strategy for dealing with an Earth-threatening asteroid that was discovered with three weeks' warning.

"If it's coming in three weeks ... pray," Bolden said. "The reason I can't do anything in the next three weeks is because for decades we have put it off."

More about threats from space:

• 'Marsageddon' comet adds to concerns
• The global plan to deal with asteroids
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

Ali Weinberg is an associate producer with NBC News in Washington.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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

This colorized view is part of a panorama produced by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo from NASA imagery. The picture shows NASA's Curiosity rover putting its drill to work at Yellowknife Bay on Mars. Click on the picture to see a larger version, and visit KenKremer.com for more from Ken Kremer.

Even as the scientists behind NASA's Curiosity rover mission announced that they found evidence of life-friendly chemistry inside a Martian rock, the $2.5 billion mission's engineers continued their efforts to get the rover back into full operation after a serious computer glitch.

The rover's scientific work in a spot known as Yellowknife Bay has been put on hold while the mission operations team rebuilds the memory for one of Curiosity's two redundant computers, known as the A-side. The A-side computer experienced a memory failure on Feb. 28, forcing controllers to switch over to the B-side backup brain. Since then, the team has been putting the A-side through a series of tests to make sure it's OK.

"We have been able to store new data in many of the memory locations previously affected and believe more runs will demonstrate more memory is available," Jim Erickson, the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Monday in a status report. A couple of software patches are due to be uploaded and tested this week, and then the team will reassess when to resume full mission operations, including the analysis of additional rock samples.

Engineers still don't know why the A-side failed, although they suspect it may have been due to a cosmic-ray hit. Such hits are thought to have affected Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the past. After the computer system returns to full redundant mode, the B-side will continue to operate as Curiosity's main computer while the A-side serves as backup, NASA spokesman Guy Webster told NBC News on Wednesday.

Mars is heading into a solar conjunction in April that will interfere with communications between Curiosity and Mission Control, and science operations will have to be suspended again during that hiatus. That means the rover won't drill out another sample of rock powder from Yellowknife Bay until May.

Scientists say Yellowknife Bay could have been a riverbed or lake bed in ancient times — just the right kind of place for figuring out what Mars was like billions of years ago.

"I have an image now of possibly a lake, a freshwater lake on a Mars with probably a thicker atmosphere, maybe a snow-capped Mount Sharp. Who knows?" said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate.

Curiosity's science team members are so intrigued by what they've been finding that they're willing to go slow with the rover's long-planned trip to Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) peak in the middle of Mars' Gale Crater. The layers of rock that make up that mountain, also known as Aeolis Mons, are thought to preserve Mars' geological record over billions of years.

"When we start driving to Mount Sharp, and you see us dragging our feet as we go along there and stop to look at a few things, that's because we'll be trying to figure out how the rocks we're at now, at Yellowknife Bay, relate to Mount Sharp," said Caltech's John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist.

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

Launch slideshow

Extra credit: The Mars Curiosity crew is coming in for more accolades. The Mars Science Laboratory Project, which is in charge of building and operating the rover, has been selected to receive the National Air and Space Museum's Trophy for Current Achievement at a ceremony next month. Meanwhile, the folks who manage Mars Curiosity's online persona have won the 2013 South by Southwest Interactive Award for best social media campaign. Congratulations to the "hive mind" behind @MarsCuriosity on Twitter.

More about Mars:

• Organics found, but are they from Mars?
• Radar reveals traces of huge Martian flood
• Cosmic Log archive on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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.

Powder drilled out of a rock on Mars contains the best evidence yet that the Red Planet could have supported living microbes billions of years ago, the team behind NASA's Curiosity rover said Tuesday.

"I think this is probably the only definitively habitable environment that we have described and recorded," said David Blake, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who is the principal investigator for Curiosity's CheMin lab.

The findings are in line with what the scientists hoped to find when they sent the 1-ton, six-wheeled laboratory to Mars' Gale Crater. "It wasn't serendipity that got us here. It was the result of planning," Caltech's John Grotzinger, the $2.5 billion mission's project scientist, told reporters at NASA Headquarters in Washington on Tuesday.

Serendipity did, however, play a part in being able to find the evidence so soon, he said. Curiosity's handlers had planned to have the rover head for a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in the middle of the crater. But when the rover landed, the science team decided to send Curiosity on a detour to a geologically interesting area in the opposite direction, nicknamed Yellowknife Bay. Preliminary readings showed that the area had been a riverbed or lake bed in ancient times.

Last month, the rover finally got a chance to drill into a Martian rock that was named John Klein, after a member of the mission team who died in 2011. Curiosity fed tablespoons of the ground-up gray powder into its two onboard chemical labs: CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy) and SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars). The results were announced at Tuesday's news briefing.

Scientists said the powder contained the elemental ingredients of life — including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. More significantly, they found that clay minerals made up at least 20 percent of the sample. On Earth, these clays are produced when relatively fresh water reacts with igneous minerals such as olivine. The scientists also found calcium sulfate, which suggested that the water had a neutral or mildly alkaline balance.

Earlier NASA missions had found evidence that salty, acidic water was once present on Mars, but that extreme environment would have been challenging for today's Earth-type organisms. Curiosity's chemical analysis produced a different result: The water that was available during the formation of the rock at Yellowknife Bay, billions of years ago, could have supported the kind of life commonly found on Earth.

"We have found a habitable environment which is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around, and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," Grotzinger said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ames

A side-by-side comparison shows the X-ray diffraction patterns of two samples collected by Curiosity. The left side shows data from a sample collected from a drift of windblown dust, and the right side shows data from the powder drilled out of the John Klein rock. The John Klein readings show an abundance of phyllosilicate, a class of clay minerals called smectites that form by the action of relatively pure and neutral pH water on minerals.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / MSSS

The left image shows Wopmay rock in Endurance Crater, as studied by NASA's Opportunity rover. The right image shows Sheepbed in Yellowknife Bay, as studied by Curiosity. Scientists say both rocks were formed in the presence of water, but the water at Wopnay was highly acidic and salty, while the water at Sheepbed had a more neutral pH and lower salinity.

The scientists said they were surprised to find a mixture of oxidized and non-oxidized chemicals, allowing for the type of chemistry that earthly microbes use to generate the energy they need for survival. This partial oxidation was first hinted at when the drill cuttings were revealed to be gray rather than red.

"The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for microorganisms," SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy said in a NASA news release.

NASA said another drilled sample would be used to help confirm the chemical findings for several of the trace gases that were analyzed by the SAM instrument.

The current plan calls for Curiosity to conduct experiments in the Yellowknife Bay for weeks or months longer, and then begin a roughly 6-mile (10-kilometer) drive to the big mountain, known as Mount Sharp or Aeolis Mons. Scientists will look for further evidence of ancient organic chemistry hidden in the mountain's many layers of rock.

The primary aim of Curiosity's two-year primary mission is to find evidence of past habitability — in particular, organic carbon compounds that could have played a role in the chemistry of life billions of years ago. Grotzinger said Curiosity's scientists will focus on the systematic search for organic carbon now that they had "the issue of habitability in the bag."

NASA intends to follow up on Curiosity's findings with future Mars missions, including the $500 million MAVEN orbiter (due for launch this year), the $425 million InSight drill-equipped lander (set for 2016 launch) and another Curiosity-like rover that's scheduled to be sent out in 2020. 

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

Launch slideshow

More about Mars:

• Organics found, but are they from Mars?
• Radar reveals traces of huge Martian flood
• Cosmic Log archive on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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 Tue Mar 12, 2013 1:48 PM EDT

What better way to celebrate the glories of space exploration than to make a video about it? How about making a video about space exploration, and winning a trip for four to one of NASA's space centers? That's the top prize in the "Why Space Matters to the Future" video contest, sponsored by the centers in cooperation with the Coalition for Space Exploration.

Contest organizers are looking for videos up to two minutes in length that explain the values and benefits of space exploration, for this generation and future generations. The deadline for entries is April 7. The viewing public will get a chance to vote for their favorite, and a panel of judges will keep the people's choice in mind when they select the winner on April 17 — just after the global spaceflight celebration known as Yuri's Night.

The winning video will earn its maker a VIP trip for four to one of NASA's visitor centers: the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, Space Center Houston in Texas, or the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. Check the coalition's website or VisitNASA.com to check out the contest instructions, review the official rules and upload your video.

Another space-themed video contest is coming up on a deadline this week: The Golden Spike Company is asking its Indiegogo supporters to send in videos touting the potential benefits of lunar exploration. Golden Spike plans to offer expeditions to the moon with a price tag of $1.4 billion or so for two-person round trips. Its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign is aimed at raising $240,000 for public outreach and engagement efforts — and the video contest is meant as a perk for the venture's contributors.

Video entries for the first round can be submitted via email to Angelica@tntcommgroup.com through Friday. Selected videos will be posted to Golden Spike's YouTube channel and put up for a public vote. Winning entries will be eligible for prizes such as lunar-lander models. TNT Creative Group's Tina Lange explains how it all works in the video below:

More about space ventures:

• Meet the folks planning trips to the moon and Mars
• The moon looms again as future destination
• Five rationales for the next Space Age

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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.

Chris Hadfield / CSA / NASA via Twitter

SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule is held by the International Space Station's Canadian-built robotic arm in advance of its berthing on Sunday. "A Dragon, snared and tamed," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote on Twitter.

The commercial SpaceX rocket venture has launched Dragon cargo capsules to the International Space Station three times in the past year, and every time there's been a problem. Should NASA be upset?

Not really.

The fact that glitches have cropped up — and have been solved, with no impact on the multimillion-dollar cargo resupply missions — isn't a black mark against the California-based company. Rather, it's a sign that the designs for SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 are resilient in the face of the inevitable glitches associated with spaceflight. It's also a sign of things to come.

"We may see more mission aborts, where the cost of a mission may be a fraction of the cost of a 'perfect' spacecraft," says James Oberg, NBC News' space analyst. "For the same cost, you could launch three or four, or even eight or 10 'not-perfect' vehicles, with a success rate of 90 to 95 percent. and as a result, for the same starting cost launch many times more missions."

Rand Simberg, a former rocket engineer who now writes about spaceflight for a variety of publications, made a similar point in a PJMedia piece touting SpaceX's latest "successful failure": a problem with the Dragon's thruster system that was resolved when SpaceX's engineers issued commands to cycle the system's valves and clear out the lines with a blast of pressurized gas.

"It was a valuable failure in that it identified a potential problem with either the design or operations but didn't cost them the mission," Simberg wrote. After the system reset, the Dragon's thrusters performed without a hitch. The capsule was brought in for its berthing at the space station on Sunday, just a day later than originally scheduled.

"They did everything exactly right about the vehicle," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told reporters after the thruster system was fixed. 

The snags that cropped up during the previous two Dragon launches were similarly resolved without major consequences for SpaceX or NASA:

• Last May, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lit up its engines for launch, but immediately shut them down when the flight computer detected an excessive pressure reading in one of the engines. Engineers found and fixed a problem with the engine's turbopump valve, and a few days later, the Falcon 9 launched the Dragon on a historic demonstration mission to the space station. In August, a NASA panel said it was satisfied with SpaceX's handling of the glitch and its aftermath.
• Last October, one of the nine engines on the Falcon 9's first stage shut down during the ascent, due to a flaw in the sheathing that surrounded the engine. The other engines automatically adjusted their thrust to make up for the shutdown, and the Dragon successfully reached orbit. However, the Falcon wasn't able to put an Orbcomm telecommunications satellite that was carried as a secondary payload in its proper orbit. As a result, the satellite was lost. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company tracked down the problem and beefed up its procedure for non-destructive evaluation of the Merlin rocket engines. Since the satellite loss, Orbcomm and SpaceX have renegotiated their launch contract.

SpaceX's communication director, Christina Ra, told NBC News that there the investigation of last week's thruster problem has already begun. "But I am hesitant to give you any commitment on whether or not we can give more detail, and what the timing would be," she wrote in an email, "because it does take time, the information is shared with and approved by multiple parties, and at the end of the day, regulated by ITAR."

That last acronym refers to the International Trade in Arms Regulations, which strictly limit the transfer of aerospace technology to foreign countries. SpaceX fears that the unauthorized disclosure of information about a rocket anomaly would get the company in ITAR trouble with the federal government, and maybe even get someone put in jail. "I don't look good in horizontal stripes," Shotwell joked.

Dealing with anomalies may well be a more frequent option for future spaceflight, even when humans are involved. Oberg noted that the subject came up when millionaire Dennis Tito was discussing his plan to send private-sector astronauts on a 501-day trip past Mars in 2018. "He described how his two-human crew to Mars would be occupied servicing, repairing and coaxing their life support systems, which would be designed to be fixable, not to be 'perfect,'" Oberg said in an email.

This is why SpaceX and NASA's other commercial partners are devoting so much attention to the development of launch abort systems for crew-capable spaceships. Those systems might actually have to be used someday.

"With a commercialized crew taxi that doesn't 'overspend' on unattainable perfect reliability, but accepts the occasional mission failure, you'll fly many more successful missions. You don't have to pay for it in crew safety, just in mission completion rates. And the high flight rates can shake out hardware to enhance reliability far more than flying a vehicle once or twice a year, as with space shuttles." Oberg said.

"If there isn't a commercial crew mission abort at some point in the first 10 missions, I'd suspect they spent too much on reliability. I'm not talking about somebody getting hurt — we need to build robust and reliable escape systems — but just having to come home without accomplishing the purpose of the launch."

Does that sound scary? It shouldn't. The key to success in space may well be to make sure failure is an option that can be dealt with — as SpaceX demonstrated last week.

More about commercial space ventures:

• Spaceship ventures plan flights as early as 2015
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race
• Cosmic Log archive on commercial space ventures

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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 / SpaceX via Twitter

A video view from the International Space Station shows SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule in the grip of the station's robotic arm, with Earth below.

Astronauts used the International Space Station's robotic arm to grab SpaceX's Dragon capsule on Sunday after the unmanned spacecraft made a dramatic recovery in orbit. The grapple operation reached its successful climax an hour ahead of schedule, proving that the unmanned capsule had fully recovered from a post-launch glitch that affected its propulsion system.

NASA and California-based SpaceX decided to go ahead with Sunday's rendezvous after the Dragon made a series of orbital maneuvers that demonstrated the craft's thrusters were operating normally. When the Dragon closed in to a distance of 33 feet (10 meters), the Canadian-built robotic arm reached out and latched onto an attachment on the cargo ship.

The robotic-arm grapple was originally scheduled to take place at 6:31 a.m. ET, but it occurred instead at 5:31 a.m., as the station was flying 253 miles (407 kilometers) over Ukraine.

NASA's Mission Control and the space station's astronauts exchanged congratulations. "That was a brilliant capture," NASA astronaut Kate Rubins told space station commander Kevin Ford from Mission Control.

Ford passed along his thanks to NASA's controllers in Houston as well as to SpaceX's mission control at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. "It's not where you start, but where you finish that counts, and you guys really finished this one on the mark," Ford said. "You're aboard, and we've got lots of science on there to bring aboard and get done. So congratulations to all of you."

As the crew watched, the robotic arm's remote operators in Houston issued commands to pull the Dragon in for a hookup with the station's Harmony module. "The Dragon is ours!" Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote in a Twitter update. "Maneuvering it now on Canadarm2 to docking port, will open hatches. Look forward to new smells."

The capsule was berthed at 8:56 a.m. ET, and within a few hours, the station's astronauts hooked up the electrical connections, opened up the hatch from the Harmony module and took their first look inside the Dragon.

"Happy Berth Day," SpaceX exulted on Twitter. 

How a glitch was fixed
The cargo craft was launched on Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The ascent to outer space was trouble-free, but minutes after the Dragon reached orbit, SpaceX's controllers noticed that only one of the craft's four thruster pods was working. The thrusters control the Dragon's position in space, and at least three of the pods had to be operational to get NASA's clearance for the berthing.

It took several hours to resolve the glitch and get full thruster functionality. That caused SpaceX to miss its opportunity for a Saturday rendezvous. SpaceX's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said it looked as if there was a stuck valve or a blockage in the thruster's oxidizer lines. Recycling the valves and sending a blast of pressurized helium through the line cleared the system, he said.

The maneuvers that followed gave NASA and SpaceX the confidence to go ahead with the hookup on Sunday. "The station’s Mission Management Team unanimously agreed that Dragon’s propulsion system is operating normally along with its other systems and ready to support the rendezvous," NASA said in a statement Saturday.

NASA said SpaceX voiced "high confidence there will be no repeat of the thruster problem during rendezvous, including its capability to perform an abort, should that be required." Fortunately, not a single hitch arose during the Dragon's approach.

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Sub-Saharan Africa provides a backdrop for SpaceX's Dragon capsule in a photo taken from the International Space Station during the cargo ship's approach.

NASA TV

A video view from the International Space Station shows the SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule coming in for Sunday's berthing.

NASA TV

A view from one of the International Space Station's cameras shows the Dragon cargo capsule berthed to the Harmony module.

What's in the Dragon?
The Dragon is carrying more than 2,300 pounds (1,050 kilograms) of cargo, including experiments to study the growth of plants and mouse stem cells in zero-G. There are also spare parts for the station's air-recycling system, grapple bars for the space station's exterior, and a research freezer for preserving biological samples. The crew is getting clothing, personal items and food, including fresh fruit from an orchard owned by the father of one of SpaceX's employees.

The Dragon also is bringing the first copy of "Up in the Air," a single recorded by the band Thirty Seconds to Mars. That song will figure in a public-relations push later this month.

Once the space station's astronauts have finished unloading the cargo, they'll fill the Dragon back up with more than 3,000 pounds (1,370 kilograms) of stuff destined for return to Earth. The cargo craft is due to be set loose on March 25 for its splashdown in the Pacific.

This is the second of 12 resupply flights to be conducted under NASA's $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX. The first flight took place last October. SpaceX and another company, Orbital Sciences Corp., were granted the contracts to help fill the gap left by the space shuttle fleet's retirement in 2011. Orbital's cargo delivery service is expected to start later this year.

SpaceX is one of three companies receiving support from NASA under a separate program to develop crew-capable spacecraft for the space agency's use beginning in 2017 or so. SpaceX is working to upgrade its robotic Dragon capsule with extra safety equipment for crewed flight. The other two companies — the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp. — are developing completely new spaceships. In the meantime, NASA is paying the Russians about $60 million per seat for rides to and from the space station.

More about SpaceX:

• 'Frightening' glitch fixed on Dragon capsule
• SpaceX's press kit for the March 1 mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other 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 Sat Mar 2, 2013 5:40 PM EST