I'd forgotten all about the Long Duration Exposure Facility -- NASA's simple-yet-audacious project of launching a school-bus-sized thing up into orbit and just leaving it there for a while, then pulling it back in to see what hapened to the stuff that they'd festooned on its exterior.  (I followed the shuttle program fairly closely as a kid -- no surprises there -- and remember reading something about the shuttle's fixing the Solar Max mission satellite.  That shuttle flight also launched the LDEF.)

But I recently ran across this blog post featuring some gorgeous images of the LDEF that made me very happy indeed.  (Lots more images here, which is part of the official LDEF report site.)