Hasta La Gadget!

Hold onto your hard drive: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been sending 461 gigabytes of images and other data back home every day, according to Slashdot. Interestingly, it’s using a 100 Mbps data pipe–specifically, a K-band transmitter called the Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier.

It’s a 13-inch long tube that uses electrodes in a vacuum tube to amplify microwave signals, the report said. L-3 Communications Electron Technologies and NASA’s Glenn Research Center built the device in tandem. 100 Mbps doesn’t sound all that impressive on paper, since wired Ethernet has had that for years–until you release the data is traveling almost 240,000 miles. Suddenly FiOS doesn’t seem all that fast.

(Want the latest LRO news and images? Head over to NASA’s dedicated landing page for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.)

Modern consumer cameras can manage almost anything you throw at them, but sometimes even the swankest DSLR just won’t do. In photography, when the conditions get crazy, the cameras get crazier.

Here are ten cameras designed to capture the kinds of images that humans by all means shouldn’t be able to see, and that you and I will probably never have the opportunity—or need—to shoot.

Astronomers have discovered a planet in another solar system 1,000 light years away that orbits its star opposite from the way the star rotates, making it the only planet ever discovered to do so.

The system was discovered by the UK’s Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory, according to Space.com. It’s also turning out to be quite a curiosity among the 350+ extrasolar planets known to date. The running theory is that the planet, dubbed WASP-17, had a close encounter with a larger one–and the resultant gravitational interaction slung WASP-17 onto its strange course.

“I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about,” said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery, in the article. “I think it’s extremely exciting. It’s fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away. There’s always theory, but there’s nothing like an observation to really prove it.” (Image credit: NASA/Extrasolar planet artist rendering)

NASA’s Kepler telescope launched in March and is still undergoing preliminary tests, but that hasn’t stopped it from making an early discovery.

The new telescope is sensitive to light changes enough that scientists were already able to determine that a planet orbiting a distant star has an atmosphere, only shows one side to the sun, and is so hot it glows, according to CNN. That sensitivity “proves we can find Earth-size planets,” said William Borucki, Kepler’s principal science investigator, in the report.

Over the next three and a half years, Kepler will survey thousands of stars in our galaxy in an attempt to find more Earth-sized planets, and get a better sense of how common they are. (Image credit: ESO)

After months of circling the planet and getting ever closer, a lost tool bag that belonged to one of NASA’s astronauts vaporized in a fiery burst as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up Monday, according to Space.com.

Last November, the astronaut accidentally lost the tool bag during a spacewalk. At the time, it slowly drifted away from the International Space Station, forever out of reach. Ever since, the tool bag has been orbiting earth–and monitored by the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center, which tracks over 19,000 other pieces of space junk in orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the report said.

The tool bag weighed about 30 pounds and contained a scraper tool, grease guns, and trash bags. It was about the size of a small backpack, according to the article. This would have been a perfect video clip for YouTube, if someone could have, well, orbited the Earth and filmed it before burning up with the bag. Guess that wouldn’t have worked out.

(Another pic after the break.)