Last week's historic flyby of Mercury by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft gathered 500 megabytes of data and more than a thousand high-resolution photos covering nearly six million square miles of previously unseen terrain.

A cutting-edge laboratory has opened in Alabama. Its mission: to combat diseases ranging from asthma to malaria to stroke using data from NASA satellites. Space scientists and public health officials are working together to train the doctors of tomorrow in this far-out approach to medicine.

Images from NASA telescopes are jewels of the space program, marvelous to behold. But how do you behold them when you can't see? The answer lies between the covers of a new NASA-funded book written in Braille, Touch the Invisible Sky.

At a pivotal moment of the solar cycle, the NASA/ESA Ulysses spacecraft is flying over the sun's mysterious North Pole.

Hang on to your cell phones, a new solar cycle is underway. Solar Cycle 24 began last week with the appearance of a magnetically "backward" high-latitude sunspot.

NASA is bringing high-tech satellite images and visualization tools to bear on the unique environmental problems of Central America.

NASA-funded astronomers are monitoring a Tunguska-sized asteroid that will pass within 30,000 miles of Mars on Jan. 30, 2008. Based on data currently available, the space rock has a 1-in-75 chance of actually hitting Mars and blasting a crater more than half-a-mile wide.

Consider it an early Christmas gift: On Dec. 24th the Moon and Mars are putting on a beautiful late-night sky show.

A powerful jet from a supermassive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy and possibly causing profound problems for planets in the jet's path.

The solar physics community is abuzz this week. No, there haven't been any great eruptions or solar storms. The source of the excitement is a modest knot of magnetism that popped up on the sun, possibly heralding the start of a new solar cycle.

NASA's fleet of THEMIS satellites have made some surprising new discoveries about outbursts of Northern Lights and the source of their power. The discoveries include giant magnetic ropes that connect Earth to the Sun and explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field.