Want to experience all the travails of being an astronaut with none of the glory? Now's your chance! The European Space Agency is seeking healthy, psychologically-stable test subjects to make a mock trip to Mars.

Last night, a few of us PopSci editors were invited to an IMAX screening of the new movie Poseidon, the Wolfgang Petersen flick about a cruise ship that’s hit by a huge rogue wave. The film, which opens today, has all the teeth-gritting suspense of The Day After Tomorrow—with the cheesy dialogue slashed by a good 75 percent. As the star, actor Josh Lucas, explained in a Q&A session after our screening, that’s because the actors realized on-set that the script was pathetically absurd and cut out as much of the dialogue as they could get away with.

Lucas also bluntly acknowledged that the reason actors do these films is just for the money and that the filming itself was a painful slog. Literally; two emergency-room visits resulted from injuries he sustained as he struggled through the submerged maze of wires and debris that made up the set.

But enough about the star. How about the 100-foot wall of water that scuttles the ship in the first place? About as absurd as The Day After Tomorrow’s 24-hour global freeze, right?

Actually, no. It turns out these waves are real, and they actually do sink a number of ships each year. Rogue waves (also called freak waves or monster waves) were long assumed to be just the stuff of mariner legend. Until January 1, 1995, when just such a wave was definitely documented at a North Sea oil platform (in a rare though insignificant case of action flick mimicking reality, the wave also strikes the fictional Poseidon on New Year’s). In 2000, the EU initiated Project MaxWave, which used imagery from European Space Agency satellites to conclude once and for all that rogue waves are real. Scientists are now using the project’s finding to study the root causes of the monster swells. My conclusion: Add rogue waves to the long list of good reasons never to go on a cruise. And check out this link for more on the science behind them. —Kalee Thompson

Despite its playful name, taken from Miguel de Cervantes’s classic novel, the European Space Agency’s Don Quijote mission is deadly serious. Slated for 2012, the $180-million mission will attempt to move one of two target asteroids, just identified this fall, by rear-ending it with a speeding spacecraft. Quijote is the first venture of its kind, although the B612 Foundation, a privately-funded nonprofit based in Tiburon, California, intends to launch a similar effort by 2015.

With NASA's beleaguered shuttle still grounded over safety concerns–and given the unanswered questions about its replacement, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which won't be ready to fly until 2012–the European Space Agency is mulling an option to buy its own ride to space. This month ESA plans to request $60 million from its member states to help Russia prepare its new, reusable spaceship, the Clipper, for a crewless test flight by 2011 and a manned flight by 2012.

Pointed at the surface of Mars, the half-meter telescope on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will reveal structures as small as three feet wide—cracks in the canyons, rock outcroppings that had been just a blur. Scientists hope the craft, which launched in August and will take up orbit around the planet in March, will be able to spot the twin Mars rovers still tirelessly rolling across the surface and trace the fate of the European Space Agency's failed Beagle 2 lander. Ground-penetrating radar will further
the search for water.

On October 26, a Soyuz rocket will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmo-
drome in Kazakhstan, catapulting a VW Bug–size spacecraft toward Venus. If all goes as planned, Venus Express, which was built by the European Space Agency, will pull into orbit around the cloud-covered planet on April 4, 2006, becoming its first visitor since 1990. The reward upon arrival: searing heat,
hurricane-force winds and little, if any, water.

But planetary scientist Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington
is confident that Venus is worth the trip.

The penetrometer was the first thing to hit. The stick-like probe on the bottom of the Huygens lander punched aside a hard pebble made of water ice on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and sliced down through five inches of soft, muddy material. Scientists watching from Earth were ecstatic—the probe was not expected to survive the landing—but at the same time puzzled: If Titan really was, as they suspected, much like a young Earth, where were the liquid oceans predicted to cover the surface?