Program managers suggest using your full name, including your middle name, to distinguish you from others. Only English characters of the alphabet are accepted. Insiders recommend turning off any pop-up blockers you might run with your Internet browser.

The publicity campaign costs you nothing. In return you can print out a certificate to prove to friends that a piece of you is headed to space, digitally speaking. An included "Certificate number" reveals how many people have signed up at that moment.

Deep Impact is scheduled to launch in December and hit comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005.

The impact in which your name will disintegrate is designed to create a football-field-sized crater in the comet. The Deep Impact mothership will stand off at a distance and photograph the fireworks while also taking other readings. The mission will be the first to examine the inside of a comet, an effort to learn more about the formation of the solar system.

The event is expected to be visible in binoculars from Earth as the relatively nearby comet's surrounding cloud of dusty debris is enhanced by the impact. Comets are sometimes visible from Earth when sunlight reflects off the gas and dust that's kicked up from the surface by solar radiation.

January 20

Airbag Success Might Allow 'Boulder' Mars Targets

Scientists picked this mission's targets -- Spirit's Gusev crater and Opportunity's Meridiani Planum -- based in part on an expected lack of big rocks that might puncture an air bag. Many other considerations played into the decision, including of course the expected science return.

Apollinaris Patera. Click to enlarge.

Gregg would like to see a future mission land near a volcano, particularly one called Apollinaris Patera, adding that if the airbags are proved twice, such an objective might be possible. [Mars Rover News]

-- Robert Roy Britt

January 19

If we didn't have a reason to root for NASA's twin rover Mars missions before, we do now. The two robots could win free food for everyone in the United States if they can find evidence of ocean water on the red planet.

Officials with Long John Silver's, a national seafood restaurant chain based in Louisville, Kentucky, have told NASA they will provide free giant shrimp to customers if the space agency's two robotic rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, detect conclusive signs of Martian ocean water.

The Spirit rover is already on Mars and Opportunity is set to land on Jan. 24. Since both robots run on solar power, they would not enjoy any free shrimp.

"We have closely followed NASA's recent exploration of Mars and all of us are rooting you on to find ocean water on the red planet," wrote Long John Silver's president Steve Davis in a letter to NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe. "The free giant shrimp offer is our way of saying NASA's exploration of Mars and the discovery of ocean water would be 'one small step for man, one giant leap for seafood.'"

In his letter, Davis also told O'Keefe of his interest for Long John Silver's to become the first seafood restaurant on Mars once humans are living there permanently.

Should Spirit or Opportunity actually find evidence of ocean water on Mars before Feb. 29 of this year, Long John Silver's restaurants will provide free giant shrimp at on March 15 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. The seafood chain has taken out an insurance policy to cover the cost of free shrimp in the event they have to make good on their offer.

"If there's ocean water on Mars, that would be giant news," said Mike Baker, chief marketing officer for Long John Silver's. "And giant news calls for giant shrimp!"

Ready to Roar A modernization effort has put new life into an old rocket test stand. At Edwards Air Force Base, California, Rocket Test Stand 2-A was used for production testing of the Apollo program's F-1 engine, the massive motor used in the Saturn V booster.

The $18.5 million, 18-month overhaul has given the test stand a new lease on life. According to the Air Force, the price tag for the facelift is small compared to the five-year lead time and estimated $500 million in construction costs for a brand new test stand.

Test Stand 2-A is located at the Air Force Research Laboratory's research site at Edwards. It is the only Department of Defense stand capable of performing full-scale rocket thrust chamber development testing in the 750,000-pounds-of-thrust class.

On tap for Test Stand 2-A: Evaluating next-generation rocket engine components, designed to provide more reliable, lower-cost, and higher-performance booster motors.

PHILADELPHIA - We're supposed to run out of degrees here tonight, with a forecast low of 0 Fahrenheit. It's annoyingly frigid as some of the coldest air in decades settles over the northeastern United States. Highs in the low 20s today. It's worse of course in Boston, where today's high was about 7.

At least it's not as bad as Mars, right?

Despite the red planet's reputation for being cold -- it's half again as far from the Sun as we are and has much less atmosphere to hold heat in -- NASA's Spirit rover is enjoying comfortable afternoon temperatures right now compared to parts of the Northeast.

Wednesday in the early afternoon at the Gusev crater it was plus 12 degrees Fahrenheit (-11 Celsius), according to the rover's infrared instrument.

At 1 p.m. Wednesday in Syracuse, N.Y. it was -4 Fahrenheit. In Mt. Washington, N.H. it was -36.

Even a Canadian would not enjoy a night outside on Mars, though. After sundown the temperature plummeted to about -130 Fahrenheit (-90 Celsius) last night, said Michael Smith of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"For the Northeast, that record will be a little harder to break," said Keith Eggleston, senior climatologist at Cornell University's Northeast Regional Climate Center.

Few places on Earth do not support some type of life. Microbes thrive in the deserts, oceans and even under Arctic ice. But a team of scientists looking for signs of life in Mars-like soil in the driest part of Chile's Atacama Desert came up empty.

The researchers say the result could direct future Mars research by serving as an test site for robotic explorers.

The study, led by scientists at NASA, Louisiana State University and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, is reported this week in Science magazine. It involved experiments similar to the Mars Viking lander mission in the 1970s, which also came up empty in the search for life.

"The Atacama is the only place on Earth (from which) I've taken soil samples to grow microorganisms back at the lab and nothing whatsoever grew," said Fred Rainey, an associate professor in biological sciences at LSU. "Normally, when you take a soil sample from any environment and you plate it on nutrient media, you see many different bacterial colonies growing there after a few days. But, in the case of the soils collected in some areas of the core region of the Atacama Desert, no or very few bacterial colonies appear, even after 20 days of incubation."

Rainey and his colleagues conclude they've found region on Earth that represents the limits of microbial survival.

"In the driest part of the Atacama, we found that, if Viking had landed there instead of on Mars and done exactly the same experiments, we would also have been shut out," said Chris McKay, of NASA's Ames Research Center. "The Atacama appears to be the only place on Earth Viking would have found nothing."

Chile's Atacama Desert is bone dry and virtually sterile, the researchers said, because it is blocked from moisture by the Andes mountains on one side and by coastal mountains on the other. During the past four years, the team's sensor station recorded only one rainfall, which dropped just 1/10 of an inch of moisture. The team hypothesizes that it rains in the arid core of the Atacama on average of only once every 10 years.

-- SPACE.com Staff

NASA released an animated set of images showing its Stardust flying past a comet earlier this month.

The new animation includes several more images, all put roughly together to give a sense of what the spacecraft saw as it flew past the comet at a relative speed of 3.8 miles per second (6.1 kilometers per second) and kept its camera turning to stay focused on the target.

NASA scientists said the images are the best ever made of a comet.

Stardust also collected dust samples from the comet's coma, a cloud of debris kicked up from the surface of the frozen object by solar radiation. Those samples will be returned to Earth in 2006, and scientists expect them to reveal much about the composition of the comet.