geekosystem

Your dream vacation to space --come on, you totally have one of those, right? -- may be a little closer to reality after today's test flight of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. This morning, the company completed a successful rocket powered test flight of the new ship it hopes to start sending tourists into orbit in later this year.

We love photos from space as much as the next guy, but there are some pictures we probably never need to see. Like when one of NASA's Mars rovers leaves a distinctly phallic line of tracks in the dirt, inscribing what looks for all the world like the sort of crude drawing of a penis you can see on men's room walls the world over on the face of another planet. 

"From high above the world to the Irish everywhere, Happy St. Patrick's Day," said Commander Chris Hadfield at the start of his recording of "Danny Boy" released today on Soundcloud. It's the first time the song has been recorded in space, and the latest in a long line of remarkable things Hadfield's done during his time in space. I don't even like the song "Danny Boy" and I can't stop listening to this. Give the song a listen, and hear Hadfield explain the challenges of playing a guitar in space after the jump.

Space is huuuuuge, but it gets a tiny bit smaller each time we discover something new that we can name, classify, and tell everyone about. The latest is exciting, because it's been a very long time since we've seen anything like it. It's a new star system -- a field of stars revolving around one another -- and it's the closest one we've found in nearly a century. It's also the third-closest to our Sun. While we've been busy demoting our own Solar System's planets into ice dwarfs, then letting William Shatner name the moons, this binary system's been floating out there beyond our knowledge. Until now. Hit the jump to find out how.

The Herschel Space Observatory's mission to photograph the stars is winding down, so we wanted to take the chance to remember some of the finest images Herschel captured during its three-year tour of duty. Now, yes, some of these images are color corrected and touched up to highlight the more spectacular points contained within them -- like the star forming inside a galactic bubble eight times more massive than our sun. In our view, that doesn't make them any less valuable to astronomers studying them, which is the whole point. It also makes them way better eye-candy for the rest of us to gape at, so we're just going to be thankful for it, rather than nitpicky.

Since it's launch in 2009, the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope has treated us to some truly amazing images of space. All good things must come to an end, though, and the ESA's shiniest toy is just about out of time. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, the liquid helium tanks that provide coolant for the telescope's impressive instrumentation will run dry, marking the close of a good run for one of the most powerful instruments ever used to capture images of space.

As a race, we can't leave well enough alone. We need to look and prod and just generally be voyeurs of the entire universe, and that's been all right, since aliens haven't called us on it yet. So back in 1977, we sent out a space probe -- not the first, not the last -- that you might remember called Voyager 1. Its mission was to get a good look at the outer reaches of the Solar System. And so it was that today, in 1979, Voyager 1 made its closest approach to mighty Jupiter and snapped some amazing photos. Thousands, in fact. So what did we learn about the Jovian gas giant that constitutes the fifth planet from the Sun?

Even as the Curiosity rover roves across the rusty-hued surface of Mars collecting samples, multimillionaire "space tourist" Dennis Tito announced earlier this week that he plans to send his own mission to the Red Planet in five years. Except Tito's intent on sending humans, not robots. That's a formidable trip to make, fraught with the perils of time, atrophy, boredom, and high-energy radiation from the depths of space! To protect against such cosmic rays, Tito's team says they will use the astronauts's own fecal matter as part of their wall shielding.

The results of a three-month long directed search of a small patch of sky by researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are officially in, and they are disappointing. Well, disappointing for anyone who was hoping they would come back showing some glimmer of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. If you're particularly worried about alien invasions, though, you can sleep peacefully for at least one more night, as a close survey of 86 stars turned up none of the signals indicative of life that the SETI scientists were looking for.

Iran's Mehr News agency is reporting that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has volunteered to be the first Iranian citizen launched into space. Say what you will about Ahmadinejad, who is a world-class jag by pretty much any metric you might care to use, but that's a pretty brave move, considering there are significant questions about whether Iran is even capable of launching a monkey into space and retrieving it safely. Representatives of the U.S. government have already responded to Ahmadinejad's orbital aspirations through the accepted diplomatic channels, which in this case is apparently "monkey joke on Twitter."

A proposed mission by the European Space Agency seeks to send a pair of spacecraft out to a nearby asteroid to test the effects of smashing one of the crafts into the asteroid at 6.25 km/second. The primary goal is to see how well a possible method of asteroid deflection would work, but it won't do anything as spectacular as actually blowing up the asteroid. I guess they're saving that honor for Bruce Willis.

Some of the oldest celestial bodies in our known universe are stars. And we don't mean that name-forgetting and license-revoking kind of old, we're talking about way before the first single-cell organism decided to start splitting in that puddle of primordial ooze. But for all our technological advancements in the field of astronomy, it can be difficult at times to accurately pinpoint the exact age of a particular star, since such efforts can take exhaustive years of constant analysis. Over an eight year period between 2003 to 2011 utilizing the Hubble Space Telescope’s Fine Guidance Sensors, astronomers have concluded that the star designated HD 140283 is the oldest star out in space -- and even more surprising is the fact that neighbors our very solar system.

This amazing photo of the Sun -- taken by astrophotographer John Chumack through a filter that renders it blue, and would probably make a really good tool if you ever needed to defeat Superman -- shows some of the dozens of sunspots that have been flaring up on the surface of the Sun over the past few days. Chumack snapped some pictures through a couple different filters, and you can actually see the sunspots -- which show up as white spots in this image -- more clearly in the photos below. While you're at it, you can get a look at new video -- courtesy of NASA -- that will get you as up close and personal as you can be with the Sun and still not be vaporized. What can we say, we just couldn't resist leading with a bright blue picture of the Sun.

There's two ways you can get your hands on a movie-accurate replica of the nefarious artificial intelligence HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first -- provided you have no qualms with the destruction of property and your own reputation -- is smashing open the display case of cinematic tchotchkes at Planet Hollywood. The second, and comparatively least felonious, option is shelling out an honest buck for a HAL 9000 of your own. Currently on sale at ThinkGeek, every adult geek's one stop shop for frivolous spending, this reproduction of everyone's favorite wall-mounted A.I. unit comes programmed with 15 chillingly calm phrases and other goodies sure to make innocuous trips across the living room into a paranoid experience!

If you're anything like me, you still haven't given up on that dream of being an astronaut one day, breaking the surly bonds of Earth and experiencing the wonder and vastness of space firsthand. That's why I bring you the following story with a heavy heart -- according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center, the list of dangers involved in space travel just got a little longer, with "alien attacks," "insane computer AIs," and "being sucked out of an airlock" joined by a new hazard to space flight -- an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease.