The program was named after the Greek god of light, music, and the sun by NASA manager Abe Silverstein, who later said that " I was naming the spacecraft like I'd name my baby.

The Skylab project, managed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Marshall Space Flight Center, was seen by the Manned Spacecraft Center ( later Johnson Space Center ) as an invasion of its historical role as the NASA center for manned spaceflight.

It was originally detailed in a research paper by NASA engineers Robert Zubrin and David Baker in 1990, and later expanded upon in Zubrin's 1996 book The Case for Mars.

He co-edited the 1980 NASA feasibility analysis of self-replicating space factories and later authored the first detailed technical design study of a hypothetical medical nanorobot, the respirocyte, ever published in a refereed medical journal.

* 1970 – NASA announces the cancellation of two Apollo missions to the Moon, Apollo 15 ( the designation is re-used by a later mission ), and Apollo 19.

Satellites have been launched and operated by NASA, ESA, Japanese Space Agency and the Soviet space program later succeeded by Roskosmos of Russia.

Three years later, NASA addressed the issue of planetary engineering officially in a study, but used the term " planetary ecosynthesis " instead.

The WMO's findings were later echoed by the NASA and the NOAA.

* April 9 – NASA announces its selection of seven military pilots to become the first U. S. astronauts ( later known as the Mercury Seven ).

However by July 1963 NASA discovered 14 out of the 16 astronauts could not fit themselves into the cabin and later cockpits were modified.

( After all, even in one later NASA account, the supposed " hyphen " is reported as missing from instructions at one point in the text, and from equations at another ).

This was a theory put forward by the former NASA scientist Addison Bain, and later tested in small scale by the scientific reality-TV show MythBusters with semi-inconclusive results ( it was proven not to be the fault of the thermite reaction alone, but instead conjectured to be a combination of that and the burning of hydrogen gas that filled the body of the Hindenburg ).

A NASA investigative panel later concluded that pilot error caused by poor visibility due to bad weather had been the principal cause of the accident.

NASA considered launching Apollo missions directly into lunar trajectories but adopted the strategy of first entering a temporary parking orbit and then performing a separate burn several orbits later onto a lunar trajectory.

It should be noted that many engineers involved in this and similar Avro designs were later heavily involved in NASA Projects Mercury Gemini, and Apollo.

MISTRAM ( MISsile TRAjectory Measurement ) was a high-resolution tracking system used by the United States Air Force ( and later NASA ) to provide highly detailed trajectory analysis of rocket launches.

" She wrote years later on her NASA application form: " I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate.

The nucleus for forming NASA was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics ( NACA ), with its 7, 500 employees and Ames Research Center ( ARC ), Langley Research Center ( LaRC ), and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory ( later LRC, then Glenn RC ) becoming the initial operations of NASA.

The first NASA launch facility there ( Launch Complex 39 ) was designed and operated by MSFC, then in on July 1, 1962, the overall site achieving equal status with other NASA centers and was named the Launch Operations Center, later renamed the Kennedy Space Center ( KSC ).

Eleven seconds later, Helios 2, a NASA probe, which was in orbit around the Sun, was saturated by the blast of radiation.

Products of the Marion Steam Shovel Company ( later Marion Power Shovel ) built the Panama Canal and in the 1960s, NASA contracted with Power Shovel to construct the crawler-transporters that moved the assembled Saturn V rockets, used by Project Apollo, to the launch pad.

" NASA later employed Nichols in a campaign to encourage African Americans to join the service.

On July 31, 2008, NASA announced that the Phoenix lander confirmed the presence of water on Mars, as predicted in 2002 based on data from the Odyssey orbiter.

* March 2 – NASA announces that the Mars rover MER-B ( Opportunity ) has confirmed that its landing area was once drenched in water.

On October 7, 2009, the presence of water ice was confirmed on the surface of this asteroid using NASA ’ s Infrared Telescope Facility.

Observations by the NASA / CNES TOPEX / Poseidon satellite confirmed the existence of oceanic Rossby waves.

The Phoenix Mars lander from NASA, which landed in the Mars Arctic plain in May 2008, confirmed the presence of frozen water near the surface.

By August 2008 the uncertainty in the frame-dragging signal had been reduced to 15 %, and the December 2008 NASA report indicated that the geodetic effect was confirmed to better than 0. 5 %.

The two optical telescope assemblies ( OTAs only, not full satellites ) offered to NASA from the NRO in January 2011 are suspected, but not confirmed, to be KH-11 series " extra hardware.

NASA and SNPO felt that the test " confirmed that a nuclear rocket engine was suitable for space flight application and was able to operate at a specific impulse twice that of chemical rocket system.

In July 1966, NASA confirmed J-2 production contracts through 1968, by which time Rocketdyne agreed to finish deliveries of 155 J-2 engines, with each engine undergoing a flight qualification firing at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory before delivery to NASA.

* March 2 – NASA announces that the Mars rover MER-B ( Opportunity ) has confirmed that its landing area was once drenched in water.

* April 13 – Michael D. Griffin is confirmed by the U. S. Senate as the next NASA administrator, succeeding Sean O ' Keefe.

" He said he investigated a NASA photographic expert's claim that at the Johnson Space Center's Building 8, images were regularly cleaned of evidence of UFO craft, and confirmed this, comparing the raw originals with the " processed " images.

In 2005 NASA admits that it examined the object.

In the United States, NASA has a congressional mandate to catalogue all NEOs that are at least 1 kilometer wide, as the impact of such an object would be catastrophic.

On 15 June 2012, scientists at NASA reported that Voyager 1 might be very close to entering interstellar space and becoming the first manmade object to leave the Solar System.

In 2011, David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA known for his work in risk assessment of near Earth objects, has written that confidence in the existence of an object like Nemesis has drastically diminished, since it is expected it should have been detected in infrared sky surveys before now.

( C ) Analysis of possible alternatives that NASA could employ to divert an object on a likely collision course with Earth.

This led to a US $ 3 million annual budget for programs like Spaceguard and the near-Earth object program, as managed by NASA and USAF.

In December 2005, just before the 40th anniversary of the Kecksburg crash, NASA released a statement to the effect that they had examined metallic fragments from the object and now claimed it was from a re-entering " Russian satellite ".

NASA experts studied fragments from the object, but records of what they found were lost in the 1990s.

The system uses data from the SIMBAD, the NASA / IPAC Extragalactic Database, the International Astronomical Union Circulars and the Lunar and Planetary Institute to identify papers referring to a given object, and can also search by object position, listing papers which concern objects within a 10 arcminute radius of a given Right Ascension and Declination.

Also returned are links to the SIMBAD and / or NASA Extragalactic Database object name databases, via which a user can quickly find out basic observational data about the objects analyzed in a paper, and find further papers on those objects.

In the first two seasons, he wears a trench coat ( said to be made by NASA ) from which he produces almost any object imaginable, apparently fixed inside with velcro.