Who knew? The Russians pack heat on every space flight, as part of their post-landing survival kit:

“In 1965, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 1,200 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft. It took Russian search crews more than two hours to locate the spacecraft and another two hours for helicopters to get support crews to the landing site.”

Heh.

Now here's an interesting experiment - NASA is going to toss an uninhabited spacesuit out into orbit, with the environmental controls off, but the communications gear on. The idea is to see whether or not the idea can be used as a cheap satellite:

"We've equipped a Russian Orlan spacesuit with three batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power," says Bauer. "As SuitSat circles Earth, it will transmit its condition to the ground."

Unlike a normal spacewalk, with a human inside the suit, SuitSat's temperature controls will be turned off to conserve power. The suit, arms and legs akimbo, possibly spinning, will be exposed to the fierce rays of the sun with no way to regulate its internal temperature.

"Will the suit overheat? How long will the batteries last? Can we get a clear transmission if the suit tumbles?" wonders Bauer. These are some of the questions SuitSat will answer, laying the groundwork for SuitSats of the future.

The cool part for us non-rocket scientists is that we can listen in:

SuitSat can be heard by anyone on the ground. "All you need is an antenna (the bigger the better) and a radio receiver that you can tune to 145.990 MHz FM," says Bauer. "A police band scanner or a hand-talkie ham radio would work just fine." He encourages students, scouts, teachers and ham radio operators to tune in.

I passed on this story early yesterday - it sounded way, way too much like an April 1st thing for me to take seriously. In the meantime, everyone else has linked to it, so here goes:

The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

I still think this needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It comes off sounding "too good to be true" to me. I'd love to be wrong about it though.

Wired reports some good news on the Mars Rover Opportunity - NASA has gotten it out of the sand trap it had gotten stuck in. It took them a month, but it's done.

Water on the Moon? NASA thinks there may be some there, which would make moonbases a whole lot easier.

Slashdot has fresh things you can't possibly do anything about to keep you up at night :)

The Titan probe landed successfully yesterday, and has started sending back data on what it's finding. I love this description of the terrain:

Data sent back by the Huygens space probe from the Saturnian moon Titan show a frozen, orange world shrouded in a methane-rich haze with dark ice rocks dotting a riverbed-like surface the consistency of wet sand, scientists said on Saturday.

Kudos to the European Space agency, Italian Space agency, and NASA for their work on this.

No one is quite sure how this happening, but one of the Mars Rovers (Opportunity) is getting its solar panels cleaned off at night. Did Guiliani send all the squeegee men that far away? :)

An unexplained phenomenon akin to a space-borne car wash has boosted the performance of one of the two U.S. rovers probing the surface of Mars, New Scientist magazine said on Tuesday.

It said something -- or someone -- had regularly cleaned layers of dust from the solar panels of the Mars Opportunity vehicle while it was closed down during the Martian night.

The cleaning had boosted the panels' power output close to their maximum 900 watt-hours per day after at one stage dropping to 500 watt-hours because of the heavy Martian dirt.

"These exciting and unexplained cleaning events have kept Opportunity in really great shape," the magazine quoted NASA rover team leader Jim Erickson as saying.