Hasta La Gadget!

Iraqi insurgents were able to tap into raw satellite feeds of live video shot by U.S. Predator drones using $26 Russian software. Drones are unmanned planes controlled from afar by U.S. military officials.

The software, called SkyGrabber, is intended for downloading music, photos and video, but the insurgents used it to watch drone videos that were unencrypted, according to the Los Angeles Times. Officials told the paper that feeds were intercepted in Iraq, but there is no evidence that they were accessed in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The Pentagon has now encrypted those feeds, and the military said that there is no evidence that the insurgents saw footage that would be of much use to them.

Sean Carroll, our managing editor for software, spoke with John Knowles, editor of the Journal of Electronic Defense, and Knowles said the hack was not a hack at all.

NASA has revived the $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from its months-long slumber following a computer glitch, Space.com reports.

The MRO has unexpectedly rebooted several times over the past year. Back in August, the MRO fell into safe mode once again. But rather than rebooting it right away, NASA engineers spent the past several months figuring out what the root cause of the problem was. In the meantime, the craft’s safe mode preserved it from additional damage.

“The patient is out of danger, but more steps have to be taken to get it back on its feet,” said Jim Erickson, the spacecraft’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., in the article.

NASA repaired the orbiter by uploading a software upgrade that patched a “potentially mission-killing scenario” in the spacecraft’s computer: back-to-back reboots.

Virgin Galactic has taken the wraps off the first of five long-awaited SpaceShipTwo spacecrafts.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson were on hand to christen the spacecraft with the customary bashing of champagne bottles, National Geographic reports. Meanwhile, Sir Richard Branson’s daughter Holly announced the first ship’s name: V.S.S. Enterprise.

The 60-foot-long ship is based on the original SpaceShipOne, a reusable manned spacecraft that won the $10-million Ansari X Prize back in 2004. EVE, a twin-fuselage mother ship, carries the V.S.S. Enterprise to launch altitude at about 50,000 feet before it separates, the report said.

The ship is designed to carry two pilots and six passengers, who “will pay handsomely for two and a half hour flights into suborbital space,” to experience weightlessness and see the Earth’s curvature.

Astronomers have discovered a new kind of cosmic explosion that seems to have originated from an exceptionally massive star–one that’s over 200 times the size of our own sun, according to Space.com.

Scientists first discovered SN2007bi, the supernova in question, in 2007, and were immediately perplexed. It finally faded just recently. “It was much brighter, and it was bright for a very long time,” said researcher Paolo Mazzali, of the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, in the report. “We could observe this thing almost two years after it was discovered, where you normally don’t see anything anymore.”

The resultant explosion was about 50 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova–and rewrites what astronomers knew about star formation. 2N2007bi has turned out to be a pair-instability supernova, which releases protons so energetic that they create pairs of electrons and their anti-matter opposites, positrons, the report said. The two meet, annihilate each other, and cause the star itself to collapse, “igniting its oxygen core in a runaway nuclear explosion that eats up the whole star.” Sounds delicious. (Image credit: NASA/illustration)

Call it a miracle. CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, is once again circulating particle beams and has already crashed together its first particles.

Yesterday afternoon, researchers tuned beams to produce collisions in the ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb detectors. The first collisions occurred ahead of schedule, as CERN previously reported that they wouldn’t begin until early December.

“The tracks we’re seeing are beautiful,” said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin in a CERN statement. “We’re all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.”

The LHC will power up in stages; by the end of the year, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and should begin doing real science within the next few years–and possibly offer up some extraordinary discoveries about the universe. Now, back to cell phones…