In this image from Friday, Dec. 17, space shuttle Discovery sat on Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as its external fuel tank was filled with more than 535,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen during a tanking test. Data from the ship’s 89 sensors were evaluated after the tank returned to ambient temperature. This morning, Discovery arrived at the Vehicle Assembly Building, completing the 3.4 mile trek from Launch Pad 39A, known as a rollback, that began at 10:48 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010.

There, technicians will take x-ray scans beneath the foam insulation of all 108 support beams, called stringers, on Discovery’s external fuel tank. They’ll also remove sensors on the external tank from last Friday’s tanking test and reapply foam to those areas.

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The Soyuz TMA-20 rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2010 (Dec. 16 in Kazakhstan), carrying Expedition 26 Soyuz Commander Dmitry Kondratyev of Russia, NASA Flight Engineer Cady Coleman of the U.S. and European Space Agency Flight Engineer Paolo Nespoli to the International Space Station.

They’re set to dock at the orbital outpost on Friday, Dec. 17.

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This image of space shuttle Discovery was taken as the craft began its nighttime trek, known as “rollout,” from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A.

It took the shuttle, attached to its external fuel tank, twin solid rocket boosters and mobile launcher platform, about six hours to complete the move atop a crawler-transporter. On STS-133, its final planned mission, Discovery will take the Permanent Multipurpose Module packed with supplies and critical spare parts, as well as Robonaut 2 to the International Space Station.

On Oct. 4, 2010, an accident occurred at the Ajkai Timföldgyar alumina (aluminum oxide) plant in western Hungary, when a corner wall of a waste-retaining pond broke, releasing a torrent of toxic red sludge down a local stream. Several nearby towns were inundated, including Kolontar and Devecser, where the sludge was up to 6.5 feet deep in places. Four people were killed immediately, several more were missing and dozens of residents were hospitalized for chemical burns.

On Oct. 9, 2010, the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite captured this natural-color image of the area.

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This mosaic of images from the navigation camera on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows surroundings of the rover’s location following an 81-meter (266-foot) drive during the 2,363rd Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity’s mission on Mars (Sept. 16, 2010).

The camera took the component images for this 360-degree panorama during sols 2363 to 2365. The terrain includes light-toned bedrock and darker ripples of wind-blown sand. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks in the right half of the image is about 1 meter (about 40 inches).

This view is presented as a cylindrical projection.

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NASA’s Desert RATS, or Research and Technology Studies, team made its 13th trip to the desert for another round of analog testing. The Desert RATS tests offer a chance for a NASA-led team of engineers, astronauts and scientists to conduct technology development research in the Arizona desert. The location offers a good stand-in for destinations for future planetary exploration missions. This year’s tests take place Aug. 31-Sept. 15. This image is a night-time shot of the rover and habitat unit.

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Is this one galaxy or two? Astronomer Art Hoag first asked this question when he chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag’s Object formed remains unknown, although similar objects have been identified and collectively labeled as a form of ring galaxy. Genesis hypotheses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and the gravitational effect of a central bar that has since vanished.

This image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in July 2001, reveals unprecedented details of Hoag’s Object and may yield a better understanding. Hoag’s Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of the Snake (Serpens). Coincidentally, visible in the gap (at about one o’clock) is yet another ring galaxy that likely lies far in the distance.

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This image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the floor of the moon’s Anaxagoras crater, including a portion of the crater’s anorthositic central uplift. The boulders perched on ridges are eroding out of densely fractured bedrock. This image was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, which consists of a pair of narrow-angle cameras and a single wide-angle camera. The mission is expected to return over 70 terabytes of image data.

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Hundreds of fires burned across western Russia on August 2, 2010, but it is the smoke that conveys the magnitude of the disaster in this true-color image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Dense gray-brown smoke extends across the width of this image, a distance of about 1,700 kilometers (1,000 miles). The smoke clearly continues both east and west beyond the edge of the image, and is visible in both previous and successive orbits of the Terra satellite. The smoke is so thick that it is not possible to see the ground beneath it.

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This gimbal rig, formally known as the MASTIF, or Multiple Axis Space Test Inertia Facility, was engineered to simulate the tumbling and rolling motions of a space capsule and train the Mercury astronauts to control roll, pitch and yaw by activating nitrogen jets, used as brakes and bring the vehicle back into control.

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