Since I'm on this little science kick of late, here are a couple other things you might have missed.
NASA, rather disappointingly, has decided to forego the final scheduled shuttle mission to service the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which was to have taken place next year. Evidently, NASA chief Sean O'Keefe has considered all the input from Hubble supporters as to its ongoing value, and the assessment of risk inherent in the mission from the astronauts' office, and has concluded that on balance it's not worth saving.

If you've never seen the famous Hubble Deep Field photograph, you should go check it out before even proceeding with the rest of this discussion. The Deep Field is a view nearly all the way to the end of the visible universe, in an average slice of sky near the Big Dipper which is no wider than the apparent size of a pencil eraser held at arm's length. And, for context, you might consider this comparison between the best ground-based photograph of the colliding galaxies NGC 4038/4039 and an image of the same from Hubble.

O'Keefe's decision is disappointing, of course, given all that Hubble has allowed us to learn over the past decade. With a fresh set of batteries, new gyroscopes for pointing and a new camera, HST could continue producing effective scientific research for another decade. Hubble never was expected to last forever, of course, but its replacement--formerly known simply as the Next Generation Space Telescope, now the James Webb Space Telescope--won't be ready for launch until 2011 at the soonest. And, as the new space telescope project will cost an unholy fortune, and with NASA now pinching pennies so as to enable the moon base and Mars shot (both discussed here previously), it is far from certain that the Webb Telescope will ever actually see first light. I can readily see a scenario, with the inimitable logic of government, where NASA is told on the one hand that this new Webb Telescope is far too expensive, what with us preparing to go to Mars and all, while HST is still operating; and on the other hand, that upgrading Hubble is an expensive and unaffordable luxury what with the Webb Telescope coming shortly online and all. It's possible we could talk ourselves into a situation where we are without any space telescope operating at visible light wavelengths at all, just a Mars program. And as excited as I am about the Mars program, orbiting telescopes allow some really fantastic science to be done and are just indispensable.

This decision to allow HST to kind of wither on the vine is also somewhat controversial, as a couple of NASA engineers have leaked an anonymous report to CNN arguing that a Hubble service mission is no riskier than any of the remaining 40 scheduled Shuttle missions required to complete the ISS. O'Keefe has asked for a second opinion, which he no doubt hopes will affirm his original decision (otherwise he's in no less an ambiguous situation than he's in now). There's been something of an outcry among interested members of the public, which I guess I'm contributing to here, even among non-scientists impressed by the fantastic images gleaned from HST over the years. The website SaveTheHubble.org claims over 18,000 signatures on their online petition to Congress and NASA not to scrap the telescope. Check it out and add your own if you'd like.

In happier news, as we expected, JPL has announced that the Spirit rover is back in business. Evidently its computers had some sort of Windows 95-era memory management issue, and Bill Gates was able to talk them through how to fix it. With two healthy rovers scrounging on Mars, we should be getting some exciting results from the missions.