Marshall also manages the Michoud Assembly Facility, a state-of-the-art facility in New Orleans, La., where critical hardware components for the space shuttle and exploration vehicles are manufactured for Marshall and other NASA field centers.

U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service has designated five Marshall Center facilities as National Historic Landmarks: the Redstone Test Stand, Propulsion and Structural Test Facility, Saturn V dynamic Test Stand, Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, and the Saturn V on display at the United States Space and Rocket Center.

Marshall’s contribution to the Apollo lunar landing program included development of the Lunar Roving Vehicle for transporting astronauts on the lunar surface.

Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was the first director of Marshall Space Flight Center.

Marshall Space Flight Center developed the Delta series of rocket boosters.

Marshall Space Flight Center is located on the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville Alabama.

Besides water, the suite of LCROSS and LRO instruments determined as much as 20 percent of the material kicked up by the LCROSS impact was volatiles, including methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The instruments also discovered relatively large amounts of light metals such as sodium, mercury and possibly even silver.

Scientists believe the water and mix of volatiles that LCROSS and LRO detected could be the remnants of a comet impact.

LRO images have been obtained of all six Apollo landing sites.  LRO was also able to image the Russian Lunokhod 1 robotic rover, lost on the Moon for 40 years.

One of LRO''s observations from the past year goes beyond cool to absolutely frigid. Diviner, LRO's temperature instrument, found a place in the floor of the moon's Hermite Crater that was detected to be -415 degrees Fahrenheit (-248 Celsius) making it the coldest temperature measured anywhere in the solar system.

The LRO instruments return global data, such as day-night temperature maps, a global geodetic grid, high resolution color imaging and the moon's UV albedo.

At 5:32 p.m. EDT, June 18, 2009, an United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket roared off the launch pad at Launch Complex 41 to begin the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite missions to the moon.

 In 1976, Congress revised the Space Act to give NASA authority to carry out stratospheric ozone research, formalizing the agency’s movement into the Earth sciences.

When NASA was first created by the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, it was given the role of developing technology for “space observations,” but it wasn’t given a role in Earth science.

NASA also sponsors field experiments to provide "ground truth" data to check space instrument performance and to develop new measurement techniques.

Instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites have provided the first global measurements of aerosols in our atmosphere, which come from natural sources such as volcanoes, dust storms and man-made sources such as the burning of fossil fuels.

NASA provides information on solar activity, sea level rise, the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans, the state of the ozone layer, air pollution, and changes in sea ice and land ice.

In 2004, NASA's spending on climate science exceeded all other Federal agencies, combined. NASA spent $1.3 billion on climate science that year, out of a $1.9 billion total.

Glenn reseacrh Center is distinguished by its unique blend of aeronautics and spaceflight experience.

Almost every space shuttle science mission has had an experiment managed by Glenn, and they have conducted a wide array of experiments on the International Space Station.

Glenn leads NASA's research in the fields of fluids, combustion, and reacting flow systems, including gravity variation.

NASA Glenn is the lead for managing the Orion service module and spacecraft adapter development and integration, providing oversight and independent analysis of the prime contractor's development of these segments.

Plum Brook Station, located 50 miles west of Glenn, offers four large, world-class facilities for space technology and capability development on a 6,400-acre installation.

Glenn Research Center's main campus is situated on 350 acres adjacent to the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. It has more than 140 buildings that include 24 major facilities and over 500 specialized research and test facilities.