Only a year after President George W. Bush challenged America to begin work that will propel humankind back into space, NASA and other groups have seen amazing success that pushed the envelope of human ingenuity.

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers that landed on Mars have lasted longer than anyone at NASA ever expected and are still running strong more than a year later. The Ansari X Prize contest saw SpaceShipOne, a privately funded craft, reach space.

And Penn State, in conjunction with NASA and the Italian Space Agency, launched the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer to study some of the most powerful explosions in the universe.

This is only the beginning, though.

The president's proposal, which he made to NASA in a Jan. 14, 2004, speech, calls for researchers from the private sector, as well as universities, to participate.

Karl Reichard, research associate at Penn State's Applied Research Laboratory, said that NASA would be looking for new groups outside of the normal research channels to become involved in the mission and systems-specific research.

"It will be more integrated teams -- an equal sharing of work," he said. The team with the best resources would be the ones to work on or lead certain projects, he added.

"The initial funding for the president's plan will come from phasing out the shuttle," Reichard said. There will also be a lot of reorganization and reallocation of funds within NASA, he added.

Reichard's current research for NASA's Mars Science Lab project, slated for 2009, focuses on the health and condition of machinery and systems. He is working on a system that will tell how the system is degrading over time, he said.

If such a system had been installed on the either of the Mars rovers, the teams working on those missions would have a better idea of how much longer the systems in the rovers would function, Reichard said.

NASA is currently focusing on the excitement over the Titan mission findings. After the seven-year journey of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, the European Space Agency and NASA scientists were able in the last few days to observe some characteristics similar to those of a primitive Earth on Saturn's largest moon.

"Astronomy is an evolving science," Scott Miller, lecturer of astronomy, said. "Exploration is important because it gives us more insight into our own planet."

Similar research missions will be needed beyond the Moon and Mars missions before manned flights will be sent to any other planets, Reichard said.

In the past year, Penn State has received a number of NASA projects. This may be due to the fact that Penn State has organized the space research projects under one department -- the Center for Space Research Programs (CSRP), said Tom Taylor, program manager for CSRP, in an interview about the recent success of Penn State's Swift satellite.

CSRP is a fairly new and loosely coupled organization that was created to integrate the large amount of resources that all of the colleges at Penn State have to offer, Taylor said.

"The CSRP will help facilitate Penn State in gaining funding for space research," Taylor said.

Reichard's Mars Science Lab project, for instance, has already pulled in more than $115,000 in funding, and it is expected to exceed $5 million by its launch, according to the CSRP.

The major laboratories on campus have come together under the CSRP to focus on some highly technical and mission-oriented research for some of NASA's newest ventures, Reichard said.

This includes the Generation-X mission to develop an X-ray telescope that can see 1,000 times deeper into space than the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a NASA-Penn State endeavor that was launched in 1999, and NASA's Project Prometheus that aims to harness nuclear energy and convert it for use in space flight, along with many other projects.

"There has been a general excitement for research and projects that cut across the general lines of the different colleges," Reichard said.

Further information on space research at Penn State can be found at http://csrp.psu.edu.