Even space needs a bit of a Spring-clean, and after years of boldly exploring regions of the cosmos where few humans have dared to float, we've left it in a bit of a state up there. Now a team from The Swiss Space Centre at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) are preparing a solution to the space clutter.

They're planning on launching a satellite called CleanSpaceOne, which will work a bit like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the debris left behind after humanity's many trips to space.

According to EPFL, "16,000 objects larger than 10cm in diameter and hundreds of millions of smaller particles are ripping around the earth at speeds of several kilometres per second," which must be a pretty terrifying prospect for any astronaut who has ever had to do a space walk.

"It has become essential to be aware of the existence of this debris and the risks that are run by its proliferation," said Claude Nicollier, an astronaut and EPFL professor.

Two models are being considered for the clean up operation: one that collects the debris and then falls back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere in the process, and another which collects the debris and fires it away into the further reaches of space, while staying in orbit to continue the clean up operation.

"We want to offer and sell a whole family of ready-made systems, designed as sustainably as possible, that are able to de-orbit several different kinds of satellites," centre director Volker Gass said.

"Space agencies are increasingly finding it necessary to take into consideration and prepare for the elimination of the stuff they are sending into space. We want to be the pioneers in this area."

Via: Sky News

Despite having their budget cut to the bare bones NASA is still determined to go where no man has gone before, or in this case send a rover where no rover has gone before.

November 25th will see NASA launch their new rover mission to Mars. The new car sized robot called Curiosity will launch with an eye to land in August 2012. At 10 metres long and weighing in at 1 tonne this is the largest rover ever to go up into space as part of the mars missions.

Onboard the rover will be a 7ft mast which will carry cameras and laser firing equipment which will enable the robot to carry out a variety of tasks, or for a more personal approach it has a 7ft fitted arm to examine soil and rock samples.

It is being sent to Mars to further investigate the possibility of Mars one day being habitable. The sorts of experiments it will carry out while on the surface of the red planet will include studying soil and rock composition, gather weather information and test the radiation levels of the surface.

This experiment will lead the way to a manned mission to Mars in the future but also try to answer questions scientists have always wanted to know, the main one being whether life every existed on Mars.

The faithful tractor beam; securing rebel space scum and alien abductees in sci-fi flicks since 1886.

NASA are now looking to take tractor beam technology out of the realms of fiction and into the reality of their own space exploration missions, announcing that they are beginning to invest in reseach to bring the space-faring gadgetry to life.

However, this isn't the sort of tractor beam that will bring down the Millenium Falcon; instead NASA are looking into creating a beam that can manipulate single cells, molecules and other minute objects.

The plan would be to create a tractor beam capable of being fitted on rover vehicles for future missions on planet surfaces, which would allow the rover to collect samples of dusts and gasses for research back on Earth.

Lasers technology already allows beams to capture particles on nano and microscopic scales.

Star Wars has become such an indelible part of popular culture that it's hard to imagine how bat-shit crazy some of George Lucas's ideas were when the movies were first released a long time ago in a galaxy...er...this galaxy actually. I mean, Jawas? The force?? A PLANET WITH TWO SUNS????

Well, about that last one. Apparently Lucas was on to something when he dreamed up the planet Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home world that orbited two separate suns. NASA scientists have discovered a planet that does indeed have two different stars for neighbours, and showing their geek credentials, have been referring to it as Tatooine.

Keplar 16b, to give the planet its official name, has both an orange sun and a red sun, and is thought to be a mostly gaseous planet the size of Saturn about 200 light years away in the Cygnus constellation.

A great holiday destination for those looking to enjoy the thrills of podracing or to pick up a cheap R2 droid then. Just avoid the cantinas in the Mos Eisley district. "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" according to locals in the know.

In other news, the Star Wars movies landed in high-def Blu-ray format this week. Grab all six movies from Amazon for £60.

Scared of our inevitable annihilation at the hands of a huge network of connected supercomputers? Seen the Terminator flicks? Then you may want to stop reading.

A team of scientists from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) is starting a new project involving a massive web of computers around the globe. Its name?

SkyNet.

Now before you start having nightmares about an army of robot Arnies wrecking havoc across the globe, breathe a sigh of relief; SkyNet's purpose isn't the automation of our nuclear weapon controls, but to scan and record the masses of astronotmical data that may point to as-yet-undiscovered galaxies and stars.

A crowd-sourced project, computer owners across the globe are being asked to download a piece of software that sifts through some of the data while their machines aren't being used.

"As we design, develop and switch on the next generation of radio telescopes, the supercomputing resources processing this deluge of data will be in increasingly high demand," said Professor Peter Quinn, director of ICRAR in a statement.

"SkyNet aims to complement the work already being done by creating a citizen science computing resource that radio astronomers can tap into and process data in ways and for purposes that otherwise might not be possible."

As an incentive, those who help the SkyNet cause can win a visit to one of the observatories used to gather the data. There you'll discover the real threat to humanity; the impending Xenomorph alien invasion.

When it comes to UFO's and little green men, the truth may well be out there, but the UK's Ministry of Defence doesn't have the dough to find out. Newly released government files concerning UFO sightings show that a lack of money and interest on behalf of the authorities is keeping alien lifeforms very much in the realms of the final frontier.

The sightings, spanning the years 1985 to 2007, include reports of "worm-shaped" UFOs "wriggling around in the sky" over East Dulwich in south-east London and a number of images of what looked like a "flying saucer" over the Retford town hall in Nottinghamshire. In all, 34 separate file cases have been released.

"The fascinating thing about these files is that they show that just as in society there's this huge debate about UFOs - is it really interesting, are we being visited by aliens - or is it all just nonsense?" said Nick Pope former MoD investigator between 1991 and 1994.

"We were having the same debates in the Ministry of Defence. Some people thought it was a waste of time and money, others thought it was of extreme defence significance."

To check the files on sightings, visit the National Archives website here.

Via: BBC

There are few titles more cool or crazy than that of "The First Human Being Ever To Go Into Space", but it was one given to Russian pilot Yuri Gagarin 50 years ago today. On April 12, 1961, Gagarin became the first human being to man a shuttle that left Earth's atmosphere, almost completing a full orbit of the planet in just 108 minutes.

His achievment sparked the 1960's space race that culminated with Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon on 21st July, 1969.

You can find out all there is to know about Gagarin's (very interesting) life by clicking here.

Awesome news from Kansas State University and their, eh, glue department - an adhesive that doesn't go brittle when it dries.

Usually, glue loses its stickiness when it loses moisture, but not anymore! This will make it so much easier to glue things in outer space.

According to PopSci, the new glue is made up of peptides, an amino acid, that become increasingly sticky when their pH reaches a level of about 9. Then these peptides form long fibrils that get tangled up in each other and the surfaces they are attached to.

It's not great for non-porous, smooth surfaces, and there are stronger glues out there. But next time you need to re-attach some heat-resistant tiles on the space shuttle, you will be a happy bunny indeed.

For the first time NASA has taken 3D images of the sun, using its Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites.

The twin satellites, launched in 2006, were positioned on opposite sides of the sun to generate the images. Unlike the moon, which has a permanent far side, the sun rotates once about every 24.5 days. This means the whole surface is visible from earth over the course of a month, but if there is an event on the far side we would not become aware of this until at least another week later, if at all.

The STEREO satellites travelled 290 million miles to give scientists this unique view of the solar surface. From now on, solar structures and phenomena will be visible to scientists in three dimensions. This will aid their understanding of the star's physics, and improve their ability to predict space weather.

Those crazy kids over at Imperial College are at it again. Famed for their pioneering research into invisible sheds, they say they have applied the undetectable garden sanctum theory of metamaterials to produce a type of "space-time cloak." Which translates from geek speak into "Were making a cape that will produce the "illusion of a Star Trek transporter"

The leading the team of Start Trek fanatics is Professor Martin McCall. He explains how the new idea works stating:

"Light normally slows down as it enters a material, but it is theoretically possible to manipulate the light rays so that some parts speed up and others slow down...This would mean that downstream of the metamaterial there would be an interruption in beams of photons travelling through space - creating a "corridor" in which "energy, information or matter can be transported undetected...If you had someone moving along the corridor, it would appear to a distant observer as if they had relocated instantaneously, creating the illusion of a Star-Trek transporter,"

No word on when we might see this transporter, but we like to think that by 2050 our commute to work will become a breeze.

Oscar winning Avatar director James Cameron is planning to turn his 3D camera away from the fantasy world of Pandora and take it to the surface of the planet Mars.

After budget issues forced NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to scrap plans to put a 3D camera onboard the new Curiosity Mars rover in 2011, long-time supporter Cameron has waded in and seen that 3D imagery will indeed be beamed from Mars.

As the plan now stands, the footage will use a 34mm fixed focal length flight camera. For Avatar, Cameron and colleagues developed a lightweight 3D digital camera system, the Fusion Camera, in order to achieve the movie's ground-breaking visual style.

A tenner says there is nothing as dumb as the Nav'i to film on a real extraterrestrial planet though.

In the first reported orbital collision ever, a US and a Russian communications satellite have accidentally collided 780km above Siberia. A "massive cloud of debris" has been produced, and NASA is tracking the hundreds of bits resulting from the crash, in the hope that they won't interfere with the ISS and the shuttle, which is due to launch later this month.

It's comprehensively answered the question of "how much stuff can we stick up there without it hitting each other?", as 6,000 satellites have been sent into orbit since the first in 1957. Only about half are still in use, with the others having become defunct over the years.

The satellites in question belong to Communications firm Iridium, based in Bethesda, Maryland, and Russia's civilian space agency, Roscosmos. The former was launched in 1997 and only weighed 560kg, so probably came off rather worse in the collision than its one-tonne Russian rival from 1993.

Place your bets in the comments below as to when the second collision will occur. The closest wins a bit of charred satellite, dug out of the tundra of Siberia.

(via BBC)

A gentleman who used to work for the Ministry of Defence has said that the RAF has been trying, unsuccessfully, to shoot down UFOs for years.

Nick Pope, who worked on the MoD's UFO desk for three years, told the Sun:

"We know of cases where the order has been given to shoot down - with little effect to the UFO."

According to Pope, pilots only open fire if they consider the UFO to be a threat to UK airspace which is probably about every time they show up at all. I can't imagine most pilots not thinking there's much of a threat when faced with an enemy both uncommunicative and with technology way in advance ourselves.

Watching the inauguration yesterday from the ground, it was almost impossible to get a proper sense of scale of the proceedings. It was clear it was massive, but how massive? Well, click the image above to get a bird's eye view of the scene in Washington from 681km up in the atmosphere.

You see those brown blobs? Those are massive crowds of people. Millions, in fact. The image is courtesy of Google's (well, it's not really theirs) GeoEye-1 satellite. More awesome satellite images of the inauguration over the break.

Patrick McGoohan, made famous by his role in bewildering 60s sci-fi escapology show The Prisoner, died on Tuesday, aged 80.

He was great in Danger Man, made his name in The Prisoner, then continued to deliver entertainment beyond the call of duty by directing and starring in numerous episodes of Columbo between the 1970s and his last directorial appearance in 2000.

Every Saturday we scan the satellite TV listings hoping a McGoohan-based episode of the shambling cop show will be on. And you can never go wrong watching him in Scanners. It is terribly sad news. He really didn't make enough films and TV shows considering his mesmerising acting skills.

Turns out we have a lot more in common with our Klingon friends than we first thought.

Klingons like a nice big Enter key on the right to make typing easier, just like us. They also enjoy a big Space bar, plus it looks like they have evolved a similar aesthetic of placing the 'Esc' key at the top-left and sticking a range of Function keys that go from about F1 to F12 along the top for easy access to features.

Klingons also like to use a separate numeric keypad for fast-entry of numerical data, ideal for the 'Worker Klingons' who do all the tedious admin work back on the homeworld.

It's so similar to our human keyboards, in fact, we're starting to suspect it's just a rebadged Cherry eVolution Stream Wired Multimedia QWERTY keyboard with a few novelty klingon symbols whacked on the top and an extra £25 stuck on the price.

(Via BB)

Related posts: Star Trek Command Chair OUT NOW! | How To Spot A Cylon

Demand a toilet AND underpants in one handy device? The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has got it covered!

The clichéd slightly wacky Japanese scientists have built the amazing below gadget, which could eliminate toilet trips for good. Poo and wee are sucked out by a pump, with a built-in washer/dryer system cleaning up the resulting mess, leaving you relaxed, fresh and dry. It's genius. Especially if the suction pump also comes with optional 'entertainment' attachments.

Might not be the most comfortable thing to wear about the place, but it'll definitely find itself a niche among Warcraft players, where abandoning your guild members to take a toilet break is a sign of weakness and dishonour.

(Via Akihabara)

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A 16 year study that involved staring at the stars for ages and everyone getting very, very cold, has discovered that there's pretty much definitely a massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Minor fluctuations spotted in the movements of stars have, apparently, signalled to people who understand this sort of stuff, that an object with four million times the mass of our Sun must be sitting there exerting its gravitational pull over all nearby stars.

We now have "the best empirical evidence that super-massive black holes do really exist" according to project leader Professor Reinhard Genzel, from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.

So that's why the sky is black at night. Seems so obvious now with the benefit of hindsight.

(Via PA)

Related posts: Urine-related space news | Bebo, Earth's black hole, sends messages

If you spend most of your spare time on the internet discussing the merits of Battlestar Galactica season one and then posting lengthy lists of 'What Went Wrong' regarding seasons two and three of the space-race epic, here is THE Christmas gift FOR YOU.

A "How To Spot A Cylon" poster, reproduced in glorious black and yellow. Here it is, uploaded for your entertainment in the largest possible format we could find on all of the internet. You can read most of the words if you click on it, making buying it a bit of a pointless activity, really, as the joke wears off before you're even halfway through.

If you want an old fashioned hard copy to watch fade and deteriorate over the coming years until you decide to replace it with a nice watercolour of a ship to make the flat look like it's lived in by an adult, the poster's available on Amazon (.com, sadly) for $19.

(Via Botropolis)

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The full, bewildering explanation of that headline is as follows. A 1997 documentary entitled Area 51: Alien Interview featured the sketch reproduced below, which some people on the internet on a slow news day like today, have taken to be a representation of the Xbox 360 logo (inset).

The sketch portrays the supposed events of November 4, 1697, when the people of Hamburg saw "two glowing wheels" in the sky and, presumably, got a bit annoyed because they were hoping to get a Wii for Christmas not an Xbox 360.

We don't believe this to be a true version of events. The Xbox 360 logo was actually dreamed up in a series of laboured meetings in a Seattle marketing office some time during the winter of 2004, then focus-grouped down into its current inoffensively-bland form the following spring.

(It was actually designed by poncy agency JDK which may or may not be staffed by UFO-obsessed conspiracy theorists)

(Via Kotaku)

Related posts: "Jasper" Xbox 360s out now | The MOD's "UFO files"