James T. Kirk Goes to Mars

James T. Kirk is going to Mars or better said, the actor, who famously portrayed Capt. James T. Kirk in the original "Star Trek" TV series and a number of movies, is one of more than 2.4 million people who have signed up to send their names to Mars aboard NASA's InSight lander.

The signatures will ride aboard two microchips affixed to InSight, which is scheduled to launch toward the Red Planet in May 2018. The first microchip is already aboard; it has been engraved with 827,000 names, which were collected in 2015.

Cassini's Last few Moments

Cassini put up a good fight. 

The NASA Saturn probe fired its thrusters full bore for at least 91 seconds during its suicide plunge into the ringed planet on Sept. 15, battling hard to keep its antenna pointed at Earth for as long as possible, mission team members said.

"Given that Cassini wasn't designed to fly into a planetary atmosphere, it's remarkable that the spacecraft held on as long as it did, allowing its science instruments to send back data to the last second," Cassini project manager Earl Maize, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory  in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "It was a solidly built craft, and it did everything we asked of it." [