In Brief:

From staff reports

(CNN) -- NASA has selected a primary project proposal for a $200 million mission that will study the most energetic and violent events in the universe, the space agency announced this week.

The Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope satellite will explore the very high-energy component of gamma-ray bursts, one of the greatest mysteries of astrophysics.

GLAST will also investigate celestial phenomena at the extremes of mass and energy, like black holes, neutron stars and supernovas, using instruments 50 times more sensitive than those used on any previous gamma-ray mission, NASA said.

NASA will devote most of the mission hardware to the primary project, called "A Particle-Astrophysics Partnership to Explore the High-Energy Universe."

Selected from competing proposals, the investigation is an international effort involving Stanford University, the U.S. Department of Energy, France, Italy, Japan and Sweden.

NASA also selected four secondary investigations to support the primary project. GLAST should launch in 2005.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (CNN) -- Power converter problems will delay for at least three days the launch of a NASA satellite designed to study the Earth's magnetosphere, mission scientists said Wednesday.

The $153 million Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite should shed light on how the upper atmospheric layer protects the planet from powerful solar storms.

The orbiter was scheduled to lift off on March 15, but will most likely launch no earlier than March 18, according to the project Web site.

On February 28, mission scientists delayed the launch for one day because of concerns over power converters. Identical converters on two other satellites have experienced failures, according to NASA. On Wednesday, IMAGE engineers said they would need at least two more days to look closely at the converters

The Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas manages the IMAGE project and leads the IMAGE science investigation.

The Lockheed Martin-built satellite will go into a highly elliptical orbit after blasting into space aboard a Boeing Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

LAUREL, Maryland (CNN) -- An ancient space rock called Eros has a subtle but nearly uniform butterscotch hue, as seen in some of the first ever color photos of an asteroid.

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft captured the images on February 12, two days before it became the first artificial satellite to orbit an asteroid.

A faint butterscotch color seems nearly uniform across the surface of Eros in the visible light images, shot from a distance of 1,100 miles (1,800 km), according the NEAR project Web site. They show roughly how Eros would appear to the naked human eye.

But pictures taken two days later with an onboard infrared camera revealed much greater color variation at longer wavelengths. Differences in the surface's texture or composition could account for the variations, according to project manager.

Managed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, NEAR will continue to probe the color and spectral properties of Eros during its yearlong orbit. For much of March, the ship will circle Eros from an altitude of 120 miles (200 kilometers).

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