If you're wondering just how the Stickney Crater on Phobos looks like in glorious next-gen 3D, you'll be happy to know that NASA has just granted your wish. In full color and in its full glory, the Stickney Crater is nine kilometers worth of pure astronomical terror. Check it out in the full article and see what it means to you.

NASA has devised a rather unconventional way of exploring the moon's South Pole. The space agency's latest mission involves crashing one of two lunar spacecrafts into a flat surface on the satellite's southern area. For more information on this new mission, check out the full article after the jump.

Now before you all start blowing extraterrestrial theories, please hear us out first: new information regarding the planet nearest the sun in our solar system were finally released during NASA's press conference, and the scientific community now had a clearer picture of the planet Mercury. NASA's Messenger, the spacecraft sent to gather new data from Mercury, transmitted images of a crater - yes, crater - now dubbed the "Spider". More of this mysterious find at the full story.

If you thought that once upon a time, happy dinosaurs were killed off by a giant, blazing rock with "death from above" written all over it, you may only be half right. According to the latest research, the impact probably killed the larger land creatures, but the smaller species could have succumbed to a more watery fate. Curious? read the full article for the skinny on it.

What you are looking at here is an actual shot of the International Space Station rapidly traversing before the lunar disk. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. The Earth's night sky was bathed with light from an almost full perigee Moon last October 6th. Taking advantage of this, observers from a site just outside of Tracy, California in the United States took a shot of this scene using six video frames.

The ISS, which merely looks like but a small bug on the moon's windshield, was about 260 miles away from the telescope/video camera setup. In the foreground of the picture is Tycho, the bright lunar ray crater. Tycho lies about a thousand times more distant than the ISS to the Earth.

Yeah, it sure makes us wish we were there, don't it?

The Mars rover Opportunity, NASA's "other main man" on Mars, is about to reach the rim of the crater known as Victoria. The crater, which is approximately half a mile wide and 230 feet deep, is one of Opportunity's major stop-overs on the Red Planet. The crater is named after one of the five ships of Ferdinand Magellan and the first ship to circumnavigate the Blue Planet.

"Victoria has been our destination for more than half the mission," said Ray Arvidson of St. Louis's Washington University, the deputy principal investigator for Opportunity and Spirit, another rover. "Examination of the rocks exposed in the walls of the crater will greatly increase our understanding of past conditions on Mars and the role of water."

NASA described the two rovers' accomplishments as equivalent to 10 prime missions. While the space agency could not predict the lifespan of Opportunity and Spirit, they have said that they intend to get the best possible data out of the rovers for as long as possible.

The rovers, which NASA considers as national treasures, have been on Mars since January 2004.

Gamers who like driving sims but are tired of all the same old race tracks - or are looking for new frontiers - will be interested in this one. NASA's new educational PC game, Lunar Racing Championship, is a virtual reality simulator offering players a chance to drive around the surface of the moon.

Using a 3D map created from the 1998 Clementine Mission, LRC will allow players to visit the site of the Apollo 11 Lander or the  Tycho crater - or most anywhere else on the Lunar surface. Players wear goggles that allow for stereo vision, and the player's movement is tracked using motion sensors.

The game features a high degree of realism, we are told.  Dan Rasky of NASA's Ames Research Center says that NASA engineers will even be using  it order to plan missions and solve design problems. The same "virtual" thrusters that  give the game's cyber- buggies a little extra high-speed traction may very well find their on onto the real thing, he says. Lunar Racing Championship is scheduled to be released sometime in October.

It has been said that there are many available solutions to any particular problem. And so goes NASA Chief Mike Griffin's message in the upcoming 20th Annual Conference on Small Satellites, set to begin on Monday at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

Griffin wanted to remind everyone that yes, there was a time in our history that all we could make are small satellites. But even though things are getting bigger and we are becoming more capable, we should not abandon these so called "smallsats". Should be asked, he actually prefers to have a network of smallsats doing the same work than a few big ones, calling it as the "distributed approach".

Research and deep space missions are often, if not always, given to smallsats. The NASA chief highlighted, for instance, the Reuven Ramaty High-Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) satellite and its delving into the secrets of solar flares. Similarly important smallsats are: Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) that has produced a new, more detailed picture of the infant universe by measuring the properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation over the full sky; Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) set to launch as a hitchhiker craft onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008, as well as future scout missions at Mars.

But probably the most important of Griffin's message, was the discussion on the budget reality of NASA and the infrastructure needed in solar system space. According to him, communication, navigation and other services can be handled by smallsats, which in turn can be afforded by entrepreneurial space firms. This Friday in fact, NASA will unveil its strategy with private space companies to provide commercial orbital transportation services (COTS), starting with a pump prime money of half billion dollars over the next four years.

Unfortunately, the NASA chief also declared that the plan is not a given. “There have been some entrepreneurial space successes, but by and large I think it’s only fair to point out that most of space entrepreneurship exists on viewgraphs,” Griffin said.

On a happy note though, he concluded that should NASA be able to put the money on the table, the time will be right for these space entrepreneurs to help and step up.

NASA has their telescopes pointed at the moon for some time now in their attempt to see just how many meteoroids and other objects hit the moon's surface. Astronomers were able to record a 10-inch wide meteoroid traveling at 38 km/s and hitting the Mare Nubium (Moon's Sea of Clouds) with a force equivalent to four tons of TNT.

A new crater has been formed on the moon that's 14 meters wide and 3 meters deep. The meteoroid actually hit the moon on May 2, 2006.

NASA has had its eyes set on the moon again (and on Mars, of course) because of the plans to have another astronaut walk on it. As the moon receives many hits of various space objects every day because it has no atmosphere, NASA is very cautious about the safety of human going back to the moon. Unlike the Earth, the moon has no atmosphere that will be able to protect it from space rocks.

You can click on to the link and watch the video of the meteoroid hitting the moon's surface. The video plays in 7x slow motion as it would be impossible to see the explosion in normal time.

Almost all of us are in the know when it comes to the possibility of Mars having had streams and rivers a long while back in its history. Sure, it's a very good thing to be as interested in this as the scientists and researchers involved in Mars explorations are, but maybe we should also be looking at the general picture.

Sediments found in craters just east of the Meridiani Planum give us more knowledge of the Red Planet's history. The craters (and everything inside them) confirm Mars' history of formation by impact, burial and exhumation by erosion, and the filling of sediments.

An unnamed crater 27 miles wide found near the large Schiaparelli crater shows many features proving it to be one of the oldest craters formed in Mars. It was supposedly formed during the Noachian period. With the help of the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on the Mars Odyssey orbiter, a false color image was formed to help determine what the crater could tell scientists about the planet.

Found inside the crater are dustier and sandier areas, and places with rock and hardened sediments at the surface. These prove that after the crater was formed, sediments filled the entire crater before erosion set in and brought it to its present state. The sediments stand about 3,300 ft higher than the crater's floor.

Analyzing the crater more using the false color image, one can see ridges divide and curve on the sediment stack. And yes, this might mean water flowed through what looks like former channels. Or these could just be the work of erosion on ledges in thin sedimentary layers.

Yardangs 800 to 900 feet apart were also found on the surface. These are cone-shaped hills formed by the wind. Some may think these may be volcanoes but they aren't as yardangs occur only in relatively soft materials.

Just around the edge of the sedimentary stack are dust-rich materials that show signs of depressions and small channels where - you guessed right - water might have flowed. (And we're back again to the topic "Was there water on Mars?".)

One good way to determine this is to compare the Red Planet to our own. If during climatic shifts the Earth's polar regions can warm enough to let lose water to the tropics, then maybe that could have happened to Mars too. Climate cycles in that planet could have left deposits of ice-rich and dusty material; and the depressions are actually scars of when the ground subsided after water or ice escaped.