It only skippered the seas of space for a mere three months, but just as Gilligan's "three-hour tour" has continued on in syndication for decades, a salty satellite launched to study the oceans 25 years ago this week by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., is living on through the many missions it has spawned.

Thanks to cloud-penetrating radar flown on NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), more than 340 million residents of the fourth largest continent have access to the same level of high-resolution topographic data North America and much of Europe have taken for granted.

On a night when the medium was the message, NASA was recognized among the world's best on the World Wide Web.

A NASA-Department of Energy jointly funded study concludes the Earth has been greening over the past 20 years. As climate changed, plants found it easier to grow.

Exhaust from NASA's space shuttle, which is almost 97 percent water vapor, can travel to the Arctic in the Earth's thermosphere where it forms ice to create some of the Earth's highest clouds that literally shine at night, according to a new study led by the Naval Research Laboratory and jointly funded by the Office of Naval Research and NASA.