Sometimes books are not the best place to look for information. When there is a great new discovery or a radical change in thinking, it usually takes time for such changes to filter through the publishing world into a library. A good example of this is space science. NASA and other science agencies are discovering new things every week. And for a student to write a report on Mars, books will not give them the most current data. The Internet is the perfect place to find brand new information.

The best single source for information and images from outer space is the Jet Propulsion Laboratories web page. (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/) They have pages on all the past, current and future missions NASA and other space agencies are conducting. Some of the biggest planetary space probe missions are going on right now.

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn was in the news recently because a little probe was dropped on Saturn’s moon Titan. A joint endeavor of the European Space Agency, NASA and the Italian space agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), Cassini-Huygens is a sophisticated spacecraft being sent to the ringed planet to study the Saturnian system in detail over a four-year period. Both the ESA and NASA have wonderful web pages full of images and movies of Saturn for people to look at.
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

Another fantastic mission NASA performed was the two Mars Rovers that landed on the red planet a little more than a year ago. The rovers names are Spirit and Opportunity and their primary mission was to analyze the Martian surface and look for evidence that water once was flowing on Mars. By using various tools and sensors, the rovers are still exploring the surface even after their planned life expectancy has been long past.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mars/

The Hubble Space Telescope has been in service for over ten years now and has been taking photographs of some of the strangest, most distant objects we have ever seen in space. For the best images of deep space objects, the Hubble is a treasure trove of pictures. Searchable by type of object or year, with many different retrieval formats, the Hubble web page is definitely worth looking at.
http://hubble.nasa.gov/index.php
http://hubblesite.org/

Other cool missions are the SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) project designed to examine our Sun.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been examining our universe using x-rays. Though the images are not as “beautiful” as those by Hubble, the science the observatory is doing is invaluable.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/
The Galileo mission was not perfect, but there were some wonderful new discoveries about Jupiter and its moons. Ending in September 2003 by crashing into the planet. Galileo has sent us the most detailed pictures of the Jovian System.
http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/