Mark your calendars! We're inviting 80 our social media followers to a two-day NASA Social Feb. 10-11, 2013, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, Calif., for the launch of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission.
 
NASA Socials are in-person meetings with people who engage with the agency through Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks.
 
Registration for the NASA Social opens at noon Wednesday, Dec. 12, and closes at noon Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2013. For more information, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/RYPlzL

NASA's Chandra team have discovered a mini-supermassive Black Hole in the middle of the spiral galaxy NGC 4178!

NASA astronaut Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin joined their Expedition 33 crewmates when the hatches between the Soyuz spacecraft and the International Space Station officially opened at 11:08 a.m. EDT. Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide and Yuri Malenchenko, who arrived at the station in July, welcomed the new crew members ...

The Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft docked to the International Space Station's Poisk module at 8:29 a.m. EDT. Aboard the space station, Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams of NASA and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Russia's Yuri Malenchenko will welcome Soyuz crew members Kevin Ford, Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin when the hatches between the two spacecraft are opened.

Watch the hatch opening and welcome ceremony live on NASA TV beginning at 10:45 a.m. (http://www.nasa.gov/ntv)

Aboard their Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft, NASA astronaut Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin are scheduled to dock to the International Space Station's Poisk module at 8:35 a.m. EDT. NASA Television coverage of the docking will begin at 8:00 a.m. NASA TV will resume at 10:45 a.m. to cover hatch opening between the two spacecraft and the welcome ceremony.

The Soyuz crew members will be greeted by Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams of NASA and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency, who have lived in the orbital laboratory since July.

Watch live on NASA TV: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Did you catch yesterday's launch of NASA's Kevin Ford and the Russian Federal Space Agency's Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin to the International Space Station? Check out the video of their launch aboard Soyuz TMA-06M from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They're set to dock to the space station tomorrow morning at 8:35 a.m. EDT. http://go.nasa.gov/RWnbp1

Ozone hole this year over Antarctica is smaller than in recent years.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/ozone-hole-2012.html

Astronomers have always wondered about the Infrared background glow in the sky. Now, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope team has an answer!

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, so when humans decided to build and inhabit a laboratory in the harsh environment of space, it was only natural that innovations would follow. Read more on microgravity research and the International Space Station: http://go.nasa.gov/P2CXRT