Hasta La Gadget!

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has entered into a flawless orbit around the moon, and is now getting ready to snap images from a distance of about 31 miles above the surface, according to Slashdot.

Among the expected findings will be high-resolution, close-up images of the Apollo landing sites from 1969 through 1972, along with some of the old Soviet automatic probes.

To date, the best images we have so far were made by the Japanese probe Kaguya, the report said; they showed a white patch where the lunar module’s engine had blown away dust on the surface.

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.