Image above: The Crew Exploration Vehicle and lunar lander return to the moon. Credit: NASA/John Frassanito and Associates

Our Journey Continues

On January 14, 2004, President Bush put NASA on a new course into the cosmos.

The Vision for Space Exploration announced that day focused the agency on a bold new mission: landing humans on the moon before the end of the next decade, paving the way for eventual journeys to Mars and beyond.

Two years later, we're well on our way to turning the Vision into reality. We've unveiled the plans for our next generation spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which builds on the best of Apollo and shuttle technology. We've returned the space shuttle fleet to flight and celebrated the fifth anniversary of continuous crew operations on the International Space Station.

Human and robotic explorers will work together to reach future destinations, and NASA spacecraft are already paving the way. Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are going strong two years after landing on what was to be a 90-day mission on the red planet. A new mission, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives in March. The Cassini-Huygens mission is returning breathtaking images of Saturn and its moons, while space telescopes like Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra probe mysteries far beyond our own solar system.

On January 15, the Stardust spacecraft returns particles from a comet back to Earth. A similar mission, Deep Impact, slammed into a comet on Independence Day and recorded the impact. Later this month, NASA launches its latest planetary explorer, the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

These missions, like those that will follow, look to the cosmos for answers to questions as old as humankind. Now, as President Bush said, "let us continue the journey."

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