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NASA is aiming to launch a rocket to an asteroid in five years and grab a boulder off of it — a stepping stone for an eventual trip sending humans to Mars.

The Chinese national taken into custody on an airplane waiting to take off for home had pornography and illegally downloaded movies on his NASA computer, not government secrets, reports say. He is now set to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of violating NASA computer rules. A felony charge of allegedly lying to FBI agents has been resolved, reports say, but it is not immediately clear if it is being dropped outright. Reports do indicate the lying charge is not going forward.

NASA is blaming Congress for the need to pay $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space.

NASA's Curiosity rover results confirm that Mars has lost most of its atmosphere, on its way to becoming a cold, dry planet. In experimental results reported Monday at a European geoscience meeting in Vienna, Austria, a look at the Martian air by the $2.5 billion rover finds evidence that as much as 90% of the original atmosphere there has dissipated into space over the planet's lifetime. "It was still red, but it means that Mars once was a warmer, wetter world," says rover team scientist Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan. "It was also a more habitable world, essentially four billion years ago."

NASA is planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator revealed Friday.

More than 35 years after it launched on a mission to explore the cosmos, NASA's unmanned Voyager spacecraft appears to have left the solar system and is in a "new region" of space, said a study Wednesday.

The FBI said Tuesday it is actively investigating a Chinese man arrested Saturday with a one-way ticket out of U.S. -- a scientist potentially carrying highly confidential military secrets and rocket technology from NASA labs.

NASA scientists say tests on a Mars rock show the planet could have supported primitive life. The analysis was done by the rover Curiosity, which drilled into the rock, crushed it and tested a tiny sample. The rover was the first spacecraft sent to Mars that could collect a sample from deep inside a rock.

ISS is only able to communicate with ground control every 90 mins. as the station passes over ground stations in Russia. This is not an unprecedented event, but any loss of communications not good. American, 2 Russians on the station.

The Mars rover Curiosity drilled into the Martian surface for the first time as part of an effort to learn if the planet most like Earth in the solar system ever had conditions to support microbial life, NASA said on Saturday.