Hasta La Gadget!

Even as basketball fans gear up for a weekend of NCAA semifinal action, NASA’s roster of 64 candidates for its “Greatest Mission of All Time” has been pared down to its own Final Four, and the remaining field is surprising, to say the least. Gone are heavyweights such as Apollo 11, the Hubble Space Telescope, Voyager I and II, Cassini, the Viking Mars landers as well as Spirit and Opportunity, still roving Mars after 5 years.

The remaining missions include LRO (the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), SPB (that’s Super Pressure Balloon, for the uninitiated), the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The semifinals, for which the two-day voting period began today, pit New Horizons against SPB, which so far has been the Cinderella mission of this tourney, while the venerable SOHO faces LRO.

Scientists observed a huge supernova in 2005 that happened much earlier than predicted, leading to speculation that our theories about how black holes are formed need further refinement.

According to a report in The Future of Things , scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and San Diego State University detected a huge explosion—not the one from September, but another one—from a star that was roughly 50 times the size of our own sun. “In what they call a ‘first observation of its kind’ the scientists were able to notice that most of the star’s mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a creation of a large black hole,” the report said.

What makes this particular supernova remarkable—aside from its enormous size—is that it happened much earlier than astronomers had predicted. That lends further credence to the theory that massive stars—those 20 or more times the size of our sun—can suddenly and violently end their lives by becoming black holes.

“This might mean that we are fundamentally wrong about the evolution of massive stars, and that theories need revising,” said Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam, from the Weizmann Institute’s Faculty of Physics, in the article. (Via Slashdot) (Image credit: Supernova 1994D / NASA)

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, we asked you to depict more people and things being tossed into space in honor of Spacebat. You didn’t disappoint.

First Place — Greg Gatarz
Second Place — Chariot is drawn by a horse
Third Place — Howard Suissa

OK, let’s cut the crap here, NASA: After today’s near-evacuation, it’s clear that you need weapons on the International Space Station. And don’t forget to put web controls so we all can play.

Seriously now: This is seriously fraked up. The ISS is almost as big as a Corellian corvette and it’s up there defenseless, floating peacefully, sitting like a dinosaur-sized duck, waiting for one of the 18,000 pieces of tracked space debris to crack it open and take it down in a fiery ball of junk.

Sure, they have a escape spaceship for astronauts. In case things go bad—like they almost did today—they can jump in there and fly away before the worst happens. However, after all the money and effort put in the only human post in space, do we want to send everything to hell for a piece of orbiting crap? Wouldn’t it be better to install defense mechanisms against space debris—or, ah, hmmm, alien ships!—to preserve the ISS?

Technically, there are already weapon systems that may be altered to perform this task, but this is not an easy task. We know it is not as easy as firing a laser and taking down the incoming chunk of metal with a Star Wars explosion.

There’s a lot of things to be taken into account. First, you will need to detect the threat and fire from a very long distance, so the resulting effect doesn’t cause any harm to the ISS itself. Then, the method to take down the object will change depending on its nature. Is it a big satellite or just a big chunk of metal from a previous collision? Does the incoming object have explosive elements inside? If the object is too big and can’t be obliterated in a single shot, perhaps it would be better to have some kind of rocket that may approach the object and change its orbit by exploding near it? Perhaps some kind of emergency tug that can attach to the object and take it down?

We don’t know. Whatever NASA and its international partner can come up with, they need to do it as soon as possible. Things are getting complicated up there, and this doesn’t conflict with the international protocols against the militarization of space—which, in any case, are being constantly violated by the US, Russia, and China.

This will be a defense mechanism against space threats, and that’s exactly what the ISS needs. It is just too valuable to be left there with no protection. NASA, it’s time to get some pew pew action going on up there.

The International Space Station will soon surpass Venus to become the second brightest object in the sky after the Moon, once astronauts install the fourth and final set of solar array wings as part of Space Shuttle Discovery mission STD-125 TS-119/15A, according to Slashdot.

The final section of the ISS’s structure will bring the station to a total length of 102 meters, and increase the amount of electricity available for science experiments by half, the report said. The mission will also help prep the station for a full crew size of six (instead of the current three). The shuttle mission launches tomorrow, assuming good weather, and will be the shuttle program’s 125th since its inception in April 1981.

Currently, Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the Moon, with an apparent magnitude that reaches -4.6 on occasion. Track the ISS and other space missions across the sky using NASA’s sighting calculator.