The public is responding in novel ways to share its own enthusiasm. There's the annual Yuri's Night space party April 12, celebrating Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space April 12, 1961, and promoting space exploration. The Desert Wizards of Mars, a global group of scientists, designers, and builders, bring space education to Burning Man. The Facebook community Space Hipsters disseminate news about space issues, enthusiast meet-ups, and related personal anecdotes among its roughly 3000 members. (NASA's Jacobs drops in on occasion to say hi "and show that we're paying attention.")

NASA's newest spacecraft, Orion, will be launching into space for the first time in December 2014, on a flight that will take it farther than any spacecraft built to carry humans has gone in more than 40 years and through temperatures twice as hot as molten lava to put its critical systems to the test.

The hypnotic video-recorded through the crew module's windows-was among the first data removed from the unmanned Orion capsule after its Dec. 5 test flight that lifted off from Cape Canaveral, FL and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 4.5 hours later after traveling 3,600 miles above Earth. It was the farthest journey of a human-spaceflight vehicle since 1972, when the last of NASA's Apollo missions flew to the moon.

Unlike its real-time airing on NASA TV, this video shows all of the re-entry footage, beginning 10 minutes before splashdown, and including parts missed during the original downlink's blackout, when atmospheric friction caused peak temperatures of 4,000 ºF temperatures. As the capsule hurtles through the atmosphere at 20,000 mph, the resulting trail of plasma changes color from white to yellow to lavender to magenta as temperatures increase. The camera also captures the elaborate parachute deployment that slowed Orion's fall to a gingerly 20 mph for landing.

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been exploring the Martian surface for over a decade - that's an amazing ten years longer than the 3-month primary mission it began in January 2004. But with its great successes, inevitable age-related issues have surfaced and mission engineers are being challenged by an increasingly troubling bout of rover "amnesia."

Venus may have once possessed strange oceans of carbon dioxide fluid that helped shape the planet's surface, researchers say.

PLAY VIDEO
60 Billion Planets Could Harbor Life
For years, we've believed that around 2 billion planets in the galaxy are able to support alien life. But what if we were wrong? Anthony discusses how new knowledge of the 'Goldilocks Zone' could mean life on up to 60 billion planets.
Venus is often described as Earth's twin planet because it is the world closest to Earth in size, mass, distance and chemical makeup. However, whereas Earth is a haven for life, Venusis typically described as hellish, with a crushing atmosphere and clouds of corrosive sulfuric acid floating over a rocky desert surface hot enough to melt lead.

A Discovery News bit that details the rather amazing statistic that almost 60 BILLION Planets could harbor life. Explains how we come up with statistics like that by studying the Goldilocks zone.

An article on how mimicing the structures of animals can be useful in product development.

There are more than 140,000 species of butterflies and moths in the world, fluttering on every continent except Antarctica. Their wings contain countless patterns and colors, providing critical tools for camouflage, finding mates and scaring off predators.

A Bay Area professor is trying to learn more about how those colors develop and evolve - by going very, very small.

Nipam Patel, a professor in the Molecular & Cell Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, studies the thousands of tiny cells, known as scales, on butterflies' wings.

From a distance, the rows and rows of scales look like vivid patterns that decorate a butterfly's wings. But up close, each scale is like a dab of paint in a Pointillist painting or a tile in a mosaic; they represent an individual unit of color.

Evolution has produced some masterful solutions for animals to avoid predation. Look no further than the camouflage abilities of the dead leaf butterfly, the flower mantis, or the freaky vanishing octopus for proof.

But, a new study takes trickery to a whole new level. Researchers have discovered that the tropical harlequin filefish camouflages its scent by eating the coral it lives on, so as to blend into the olfactory background. It's the first time a vertebrate animal has been found to practice such smell-deception.

A lesson about every single element on the periodic table

Created by the Periodic Videos team using the TED-Ed platform.

Somewhere dark and icy on a comet 320 million miles away, the history-making, comet-bouncing Philae spacecraft is sleeping. Its batteries are depleted and there isn't enough sunlight to recharge. But while the lander finished its primary job, collecting invaluable data on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Rosetta mission is far from over. For many scientists, the excitement is just beginning.

Cane toads in Australia have evolved to hop straighter and farther than ever before, Australia's ABC News reports. That means they're spreading faster than ever through Australia, sparking worries that they'll harm native species in places where they've never lived before. Twenty-six years after the debut of Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, it seems scientists are still struggling to control the large, poisonous toad.
Sugar growers released cane toads, which are native to Brazil, in Australia in 1935. They wanted the toads to eat cane beetles, a sugarcane pest. However, cane toads didn't eat cane beetles; instead they began killing off native species such as lizards and crocodiles, which would die after eating the toads. Sometime in the 1990s, a quirky documentary reporting on the cane toads' effects in Australia became popular-and made the chubby amphibians into the international poster children for what can go wrong with introduced species.

The New Horizons spacecraft, which launched in January of 2006, will get within 6,000 miles of Pluto on July 14, 2015.

Whatever the outcome, and the science returned, there will always be questions about the costs of such missions and whether they can be justified in the current financial climate.

On Twitter, Dr Taylor responded to just such a question by borrowing a catchphrase from the irascible BA Baracus character played by Mr T in the A-Team television show: "I pity the fool."

Thomas Reiter, director of human spaceflight and operations at Esa, acknowledged how the top line figure of 1.4bn euros appeared.

But he explained: "If you divide it by the 20 years that the development and the mission has cost, it's about cents per European citizen per year that was contributing to this new knowledge."

The Philae lander has attempted to drill into the surface of comet 67/P, amid fears that its battery may die in hours.

Researchers at Esa say the instrument is being deployed to its maximum extent despite the risk of toppling the lander.

Scientists hope they will also be able to capture some samples for analysis in the robot's onboard laboratories.

If the battery dies the results may not make it back to Earth.

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst performs a demonstration of how ESA's Rosetta mission will attempt to put a lander, called 'Philae' on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Alexander narrates the story of the Rosetta mission and performs a demonstration that visualises the difficulties of landing on an object that has little gravitational pull. Using the weightless environment of the Space Station, Alexander attempts to land 'Philae' (an ear plug) onto the surface of the 'comet' (an inactive SPHERES robot) with increasing levels of difficulty: a rotating comet that is not moving to one that is both rotating and moving.

This video is one of the six experiments and demonstrations in the Flying Classroom, Alexander will use small items to demonstrate several principles of physics in microgravity to students aged 10-17 years.

The Rosetta mission's lander, Philae, will be deployed on 12 November at 08:35 GMT/09:35 CET from a distance of 22.5 km from the centre of the comet. It will land about seven hours later, with confirmation expected to arrive at Earth at around 16:00 GMT/17:00 CET.

Final preparations are under way for what could be one of the most ambitious feats in space exploration.
On Wednesday, the European Space Agency will try to land a tiny spacecraft on a comet. This has never been attempted before.
The comet is about 300 million miles away (500 million km), far beyond Mars and is racing through space at about 34,000 mph (55,000 km/h).
Esa's Rosetta satellite has flown for 10 years in a four-billion-mile (6.5 billion km) series of loops around the Sun to pick up enough speed to fly alongside the comet, and it will now release a lander, called Philae, to try to touch down.
But the landing will be extremely challenging, as BBC Science Editor David Shukman explains.

Tonight, at 11:35 p.m. PST, Rosetta will release its 220-pound lander craft, dubbed Philae, which will slowly descend from a height of about 13 miles onto the landing site named Agilkia, a relatively flat spot on the duck's head. You can follow along here (above) as the landing unfolds on live webcast from the ESA's mission control starting at 11:00 a.m. PST/2:00 p.m. EST today. NASA TV is also providing live coverage starting at 6:00 a.m. PST/9:00 a.m. EST tomorrow.