Imax / NASA

Click for Imax interactive: The movie "Hubble 3D" and similar efforts bridge the gap between cosmic sights and earthly audiences. Click on the image to see a Flash interactive model of the Hubble Space Telescope on the Imax Web site.

As the Hubble Space Telescope nears its 20th birthday, its value for research and the public understanding of science is reaching an unprecedented peak. Few celebrities have been the subject of so many biographies and movies by the time they turn 20.

The best of the bunch, in print and on the big screen, is arguably hitting the market right now, less than a year after a major upgrade left Hubble in the best shape it's ever been.

P. Simon (U. of Bonn) and T. Schrabback (Leiden Obs.) / NASA / ESA

This image shows a smoothed reconstruction of the total matter distribution in the COSMOS field based on telescope data. The color coding indicates the distance of the foreground mass concentrations, as inferred from gravitational lensing distortions. Structures shown in white, blue and green are typically closer to us than those indicated in orange and red. Click on the picture for a larger version.

A 3-D scan of hundreds of thousands of galaxies has confirmed the view that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, due to a mysterious factor called dark energy. The galaxy survey, described in a study set to be published by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, serves as one more line of evidence for dark energy's existence.

Mandel Ngan / AFP - Getty Images

Click for interactive: Skulls of early Homo sapiens (right) and a Neanderthal (left, in background) sit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Scientists say a third hominin group may have co-existed with those two groups 40,000 years ago. Click on the image to learn more about human evolution, in the past and perhaps in the future.

A DNA sample taken from an ancient pinky bone suggests that a previously unknown group of human ancestors mixed it up with Neanderthals and modern humans 40,000 years ago. Was it a completely different species? Too early to say, but it might depend on what your definition of "species" is.

EMC2 Fusion Development Corp.

Plasma shines brightly inside EMC2 Fusion's WB-7 device, which was built to validate earlier experiments in inertial electrostatic confinement fusion.

There's more than one way to do fusion energy research: Some approaches rely on applying well-accepted physics, at a cost of billions of dollars, on a timeline that could stretch out for decades. Other approaches follows unconventional paths that could get to the goal much more quickly, for much less money

Mark Greenberg / Virgin Galactic

The SpaceShipTwo rocket plane is attached between the twin fuselages of its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane, as seen from below during Monday's test flight from California's Mojave Air and Space Port.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane took to the air for the first time this morning from California's Mojave Air and Space Port.

The craft, which has been christened the VSS Enterprise, remained firmly attached to its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane throughout the nearly three-hour test flight. It will take many months of further tests before SpaceShipTwo actually goes into outer space. Nevertheless, today's outing marks an important milestone along a path that could take paying passengers to the final frontier as early as 2011 or 2012.

	JAXA
	An artist's rendering shows Japan's Ikaros solar sail in flight.

As Japan gears up to send the first working solar sail into deep space in a couple of months, the Planetary Society is moving ahead with its own solar-sail project. You can put your name on both sails … if you act now.

Sunday is the deadline for adding your name to the list for Japan's Ikaros spacecraft, due to piggyback on the May 18 launch of the Venus-bound Akatsuki orbiter aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket. More than 25,000 people have signed up already using the Planetary Society's "Sail Away" Web page - and when those are added to the Japanese list, the tally goes up to 60,000 names.