Hasta La Gadget!

Two astronauts will leave the International Space Station and step into free space today, for the first of three spacewalks to deliver spare parts, Space.com reports.

The two spacewalkers will spend about six and a half hours floating outside. Here’s the to-do list: install a spare communications antenna for backup, grease the station’s robotic arm and rail car attachment point, and install new cables and a handrail for a future ISS expansion mission.

The shuttle Atlantis launched mission STS-129 Monday and arrived at the ISS Wednesday with a total of six crewmembers. The entire round trip will last 11 days, barring unforeseen weather issues the day of landing. (Image credit: NASA TV)

NASA’s announcement on Friday that the LCROSS moon probe discovered significant water ice at the lunar south pole is fueling colonization hopes, Space.com reports. The idea is that someday humans could either colonize the moon, exploit it as a source of minerals, or use it as a launch pad to stage further space missions unhindered by Earth’s atmosphere.

For now, scientists are just concentrating on where they can find more than the equivalent of a dozen 2-gallon buckets of ice water already found, the report said. But in turn, it’s leading to a private moon race similar to the existing one for reusable spacecraft.

It’s all-systems-go for the Large Hadron Collider, just a week after a bird threatened to gum up the proceedings with a piece of bread.

The world’s largest particle accelerator has been under repair for over a year due to an electrical failure back in September 2008, but it’s now gearing up to resume operations, according to CNN.

The 17-mile collider will circulate high-energy proton beams beginning later this month, according to Steve Myers, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology. The goal: to explore questions about the origins of the universe.

Myers said in the report that the full scientific program for the LHC will probably last over 20 years, though scientists hope to discover new properties of nature in short order–possibly as early as 2010. (Image credit: CERN)

The $1 million race to build a lunar lander is heating up, as–unexpectedly–Masten Space Systems’ Xoie rocket prototype has taken the lead. MSNBC reports that the Masten team’s remote-controlled rocket had a successful test flight, just one day after a damaging fire on the launch pad and two days after communications glitches derailed two earlier launch attempts.

Level 2 of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge requires that a remote-controlled aircraft makes a complete round trip between one launch pad and a boulder-strewn pad about 164 feet away, according to the report. Each leg of the flight needs to last at least three minutes, and the rocket has to rise up 50 meters from the ground–all within a 135 minute time period.

Armadillo Aerospace–backed by id software’s John Carmack–first qualified to win last month. Since more than one team has now qualified for the prize, judges will decide who to award it to based on the accuracy of the flight. (Via Slashdot)

Researchers figured out how to simulate a miniature black hole in a lab–though fortunately for us, it’s not going to eat the Earth, as Space.com reports.

“The device we created is not a real black hole, but only a device to mimic the black-hole effect,” said researcher Tie Jun Cui, a professor at Southeast University in China, in the article. “Actually, the device can trap and absorb the electromagnetic waves which hit the device. Hence we call it as the Electromagnetic Black Hole.” Essentially, the pseudo black hole sucks in light, but not mass.

The team “built the black hole” (I love my job) out of circuit board, by linking 60 concentric circular layers etched with copper patterns, the report said. In turn, the patterns interact with electromagnetic waves. That means the device, as a result, absorbs any incoming light that’s in the microwave range of the spectrum–but not any mass. (Image credit: Cheng/Cui/Arxiv)