Space shuttle Atlantis held the spotlight late on Wednesday night into early Thursday morning as it rolled out of Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Florida, on its way to the launch pad for what is planned to be its last flight.

The black-and-white winged-orbiter, mounted to an orange external fuel tank and twin white solid rocket boosters, left the voluminous building â€" the largest one-story building in the world â€" just before midnight atop a mobile launcher platform and crawler transporter tracked vehicle.

Atlantis' trip to the launch pad came just a day after the successful landing of its sister ship Discovery on Tuesday to wrap up a 15-day flight to the International Space Station.

NASA's Human Research Program and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, or NSBRI, of Houston will fund 11 proposals to help investigate questions about astronaut health and performance on future space exploration missions. The selected proposals, representing 10 institutions in eight states, will receive a total of almost $10 million over a three- to four-year period.

The Human Research Program provides knowledge and technologies to improve human health and performance during space exploration. The program also develops possible countermeasures for problems experienced during space travel.

NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun's dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

"These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics."

As the Hubble Space Telescope achieves the major milestone of two decades on orbit, NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI, in Baltimore are celebrating Hubble's journey of exploration with a stunning new picture and several online educational activities. There are also opportunities for people to explore galaxies as armchair scientists and send personal greetings to Hubble for posterity.

NASA is releasing a new Hubble photo of a small portion of one of the largest known star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Three light-year-tall towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble's classic "Pillars of Creation" photo from 1995, but even more striking.

Dayton Hamvention 2010 will be held at the Hara Arena Complex in Dayton, Ohio on May 14 - 16. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT) will both man exhibit booths at the event. Gould Smith, WA4SXM, AMSAT Project Manager for ARISSat-1, plans to give a presentation at the AMSAT Forum titled, "Getting ARISSat-1 Ready to Fly." The Dayton Hamvention is an internationally attended amateur radio convention that draws crowds of 25,000 annually. For more information on Dayton Hamvention 2010, go to: http://www.hamvention.org/

http://www.amsat.org/