Hasta La Gadget!

While the Mars Spirit rover is still stuck, its twin Opportunity has begun imaging a possible meteorite on the surface of the red planet. The chunk of iron isn’t the first one the two rovers have come across, but it’s the largest at about two feet wide and one foot high, according to Discover.

“When you’re driving around on relatively smooth, flat, boring plains for a long time, anything that looks like a decent-sized rock says, ‘Come get me!'” said rover team member Albert Yen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the article.

To study the possible meteorite, scientist are training the rover’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on it in order to study its composition, the report said. The goal is to gain insight as to what the meteorite saw–atmosphere and surface-wise–when it first landed on Mars however many eons ago.

With today’s tracking-enabled telescopes, digital cameras, and computer software, amateur astronomers are doing more useful work than ever before. Such was the case with Jupiter: it appears that a large object has just struck the surface of the planet. That’s similar to what happened in 1994 with comet Shoemaker-Levy–on the exact date of the 15th anniversary of that impact, in fact, not to mention the 40th anniversary of the Apollo landing.

Space.com reports that while NASA tracked the impact, the initial call came from Anthony Wesley of Murrumbateman, Australia, who told NASA he noticed a new dark “scar” suddenly appear on Jupiter early Friday between 6 a.m. and 12 p.m. EDT.

“I’d noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiter’s south polar region and was starting to get curious,” Wesley wrote on his observation blog. “When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thought likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions also improved, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.”

Wesley used a 14.5-inch reflector on an equatorial mount for his observations, as a separate New York Times article reports. NASA scientists are still studying the images to figure out what it was that hit Jupiter. (Image credit: Anthony Wesley)

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has spotted what appears to be huge geysers shooting out of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, suggesting a salty sea below the surface that could harbor extra-terrestrial life, according to AFP.

The new (and recently renamed) Mars rover Curiosity will get the largest heat shield ever crafted for a probe bound for the red planet, Space.com reports–a fitting device for a vehicle the size of a car.

“The Mars Science Laboratory aeroshell is the most complex capsule to fly to Mars,” said Rich Hund, program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., in the article. “The design had to address the large size and weight of the rover, the largest ever sent to Mars, and the requirement for landing at a more-precise point on Mars.”

The rover’s heat shield and conical backshell together make up its 15-foot wide aero shell, the report said. That’s not only larger than the 8.5-foot shields that surrounded the current NASA Spirit and Opportunity rovers, but also larger than the 13-foot shell used for manned Apollo missions to the moon.

Curiosity is currently set for a fall 2011 launch.

And here I was getting all excited about scientists working on warp drive: A different group of physicists in Italy have determined that such an engine could create a black hole that would kill everyone on a spaceship and then suck Earth into it, according to Discovery News.

“Warp drives are so far the best case scenario to attain faster-than-light travel,” said Stefano Finazzi of Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies in the article. This paper “makes it much harder to realize, if not almost impossible, warp drives.” There are two ways that humans could move faster than the speed of light (normally an impossibility). One would be a worm hole, but that’s tough to make in a backyard garage. The other, “more appealing option,” is to design a warp drive that, with enough energy, could propel space around a space ship to move faster than the speed of light.

Here’s the problem, according to the Italian physicists: a warp drive would create a bubble of energy behind the ship and a lack of it behind the ship, which the ship could then surf on. But maintaining the bubble would require a tremendous amount of dark energy (which we still know very little about). Once that energy ran out, the bubble would rupture, causing the temperature to rise to about 10^32 degrees Kelvin–and possibly collapse into a black hole, taking Earth with it. Otherwise, it shouldn’t be a problem.