Space shuttle Endeavour lit up the predawn sky above Florida's Space Coast on Monday with a 4:14 a.m. EST launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle's last scheduled night launch began a 13-day flight to the International Space Station and the final year of shuttle operations.

NASA: Recent drives by the Spirit rover from Jan. 14 to Feb. 4, 2010 (Sols 2145 to 2165) moved the center of the rover approximately 13.4 inches (34 centimeters) backwards. Since Jan 26 (sol 2157), drive commands have concentrated on placing Spirit into a favorable tilt toward the sun as the Martian winter approaches.

ESA: This Envisat image features the city of Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Vancouver, the third largest city in Canada, is the Host City of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games from February 12-28. Larger images
 

Image: Christian Sidor collects fossils in the Allan Hills in 2005, where he and fellow scientists discovered the first 245-million-year-old fossilized burrows -- some of the first such finds in Antarctica. He recently co-authored a paper that suggests Antarctica served as a climate refuge during a mass extinction event during the same time period.

Arabidopsis seedlings on seed cassette baseplate. Image Credit: Tom Trower/NASA

NASA scientists hope to better understand exactly how and why plants grow differently in space in an experiment named, Tropi. Future astronauts may be able to grow plants as part of life support systems on long-duration space missions to the moon or Mars.

Dr. Josh Willis, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory oceanographer: The change in the world's sea level between 1993 and 2008. Black areas are land; colored are the oceans. Yellow and red regions show rising sea level, while green and blue regions show falling sea level. White regions are missing data during parts of the year. Nearly everywhere, sea level is rising, and the global average is clearly rising fast. But the patterns of sea level change (the regional variations) are complicated. Credit: Altimeter data products include data from TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and Jason-2 and other satellites. Data products come from Ssalto/Duacs, distributed by Aviso, with support from CNES.