Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, so we all know that warp drive isn’t possible, since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, right? It turns out that some physicists believe it may be feasible after all. According to Space.com, the idea is to find another method of propulsion besides a rocket, which could never propel something faster than the speed of light–the universe’s speed limit as set by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (A few physicists theorize that this has already happened, just after the time of the Big Bang.)

“The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it,” said Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, in the article. “The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it’s not moving at all. It’s the space-time that’s moving.” So how do you do that? Since any concentration of mass warps space-time around it–just very little, given real world, everyday objects–“some unique geometry of mass or exotic form of
energy can manipulate a bubble of space-time so that it moves faster than
light-speed, and carries any objects within it along for the ride.”

To accomplish this, scientists are already experimenting with rotating super-cold rings, parallel uncharged metal plates, and (in a purely theoretical sense) harnessing dark energy, that mysterious stuff that is supposedly out there but no one can find yet. So they’re on it–awesome. In the meantime, got your tickets for Star Trek yet?

Search-and-retrieve space missions are high up on our list of cool
things, so check this out. Six years after a high-altitude NASA
research jet collected comet dust from the wake of Comet
26P/Grigg-Skjellerup, the effort has finally paid off: Scientists determined through isotopic analysis that the age of the comet dust predates the formation
of our solar system, according to Discovery.

“This was the equivalent of sampling a meteor shower. Nobody had
previously collected samples of a comet in that way,” said University
of Washington’s Donald Brownlee, who leads a science team analyzing
particles returned by another spacecraft (Stardust, which flew by Comet
Wild-2 in 2004), in the article. Could Mars be next? Here’s hoping. 

Following the news that scientists have developed a black hole simulator video comes word that astronomers now suspect hundreds of of these things are roaming loose in our very own Milky Way, according to Science.

That doesn’t mean we have to hide under our desks or anything. But the report said that these black holes are likely orphaned from smaller galaxies that
the Milky Way has swallowed over its billions of years of existence, adding that the discovery of one could tell us things about the evolution of our galaxy.

The science behind it is a bit much for my layman’s eyes, but computer simulations have revealed that in a collision between a large galaxy and a smaller one, the gravitational interaction could sometimes “kick the smaller black hole out of the smaller galaxy’s center,” but still remain within the confines of the larger galaxy. All of these gulping black holes and huge explosions in space are fun to read about as long as they stay far, far away, as far as I am concerned.

For the
first time since the Apollo era of the 1960s, NASA is testing a new moonship “in the
turbulent waves of the open ocean,” according to Space.com. The agency is testing a life-sized mock-up of its Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle in the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern coast of
central Florida, in an attempt to see how it does with a water-landing.

“During the
tests, teams of divers and engineers are practicing recovery
techniques to retrieve an Orion capsule after splashdown, as well as
testing how the spacecraft performs in open water,” the report said. “The sea trials are the first
in which recovery teams attempted to attach a flotation collar around the Orion
craft while it bobbed up in down with the ocean waves.”

The Orion
crew capsule is NASA’s
planned replacement for its three aging space shuttles, which are due to
retire at the end of next year, according to the report. The capsules can carry six astronauts to the ISS, or four astronauts to the moon and back. Each capsule is about 15 feet wide and weighs 18,000 pounds–about six Honda Accords, essentially.

Static cling makes lunar dust stick to the instruments astronauts use to conduct experiments on the moon, according to a new survey of 40-year-old Apollo mission data. Brian O’Brien, a now-independent researcher in Floreat, Western Australia, and a former professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, determined that the angle of the sun in the lunar sky modulates the “clinginess” of lunar dust, Scientific American reports.

Since the moon has little atmosphere, solar radiation hits the lunar surface and gives it a clingy electrostatic charge, the report said. If O’Brien’s theory proves correct, this will be a larger problem for future manned missions than it was back in the Apollo days, when astronauts undertook them in the “morning” (roughly equivalent to a month here on earth, according to the article). The solution? You guessed it: a shed. “A sun-proof shed may provide dust-free working environments on the moon,” O’Brien said.