black hole eclipse

A black hole is not the first thing to come in one's mind in the list of eclipsable things. Nonetheless, Chandra X-Ray Telescope recorded such an "serendipitous" event. X-Ray photons released from the superheated material disk around the supermassive black hole were blocked by a passing dense cloud of gas. This allowed astronomers to measure the size of the material disk.

The X-Ray insert in the picture contains the Chandra image with the black hole appearing as a bright spot in the center, while the optical image was captured by the European Space Observatory Very Large Telescope.

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Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/INAF/Risaliti Optical: ESO/VLT

training New Horizons

New Horizons is a NASA spacecraft launched in 2006. It's main mission is to visit Pluto and it's moon Charon and to reach the Kuiper Belt.
On February 28'th, New Horizons came to within 2.3 million kilometers from Jupiter, using the planet's gravity to trim 3 years from it's journey to Pluto. During it's approach to the Jupiter system, New Horizons stored more than 30Gb of pictures and information collected from Jupiter and it's moons. This proved to be a good occasion to test all instruments aboard New Horizons.

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photo: NASA, New Horizons Spacecraft, Jupiter's moon, Io, with a volcanic plume

rocket science games

Both NASA and ESA let you play a little with assembling their main launchers.

You can assemble Ariane 5 on ESA's webpage.

On NASA's webpage you can assemble one of the Delta, Atlas or Pegasus launchers.

milibots - nanonauts

A new breed of astronauts is born in Glasgow's laboratories. Taking advantage of miniaturization, the engineers there are cooking up robots not bigger than 1 mm. Despite their size, they can communicate, work in formation and take scientific measurements.
The most impressive part though, is their way of moving. They use small voltages to deform a polymer which is attached to the main chip. This allows them to change shape and increase or decrease the drag coefficient. Thus, they can use wind for moving towards a target. Actually they hop towards the target, taking advantage even of the swirling winds.
The nanonauts can be used to explore planets like Mars and Venus, but their size is limited by the density of the planet's atmosphere.

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no more radiation

If I were you I wouldn't schedule a photo session in 15 trillion years from now. It's not that my molecules would be so far away that I'll probably need Hubble v.100 to do it, but it seems that by the end of time, matter would dominate radiation. That means in 10 trillion years we will only be able to see our own cluster of galaxies. And in about 15, Hollywood will bankrupt.

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visiting aliens' hometown

Burkhard Heim is a German physicist that worked on the Theory of Everything, the Philosophical Stone of modern physics. This theory should unify the quantum theory and the general theory of relativity. His results are surrounded by doubt, mainly because almost nobody seems to understand them. Nonetheless, his theory is the only one able to predict the mass of fundamental particles.
What makes his theory important for visiting aliens' hometown is the fact that it provides the background for a new method of propulsion, one that would make the trip to Mars a leisure 3 hour drive. A spinning ring and a strong magnetic field could produce a repulsive anti-gravity force that would propel a spacecraft into a multidimensional hyperspace. The required magnetic field required to propel a 150 tones spacecraft would be around 25 Tesla (500,000 times the Earth magnetic field). This is within the reach of today's technology that allows pulsed magnets to briefly reach 80 Tesla.

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Galileo?

The European version of GPS seems to have some problems. It's not technology, but the never ending economic-political quarrellings. Nevertheless, the EU Commission is decided to continue the program no matter the costs.

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picture: ESA, Galileo constellation