A robot created by Carnegie Mellon University will travel to Hawaii and traverse across the Mauna Kea volcano. The goal: prepare the rover for a lunar mission, where it will have to withstand -385F temperatures for extended periods and drill meter-deep holes to collect scientific evidence.

The "termination shock" sounds like the stuff science fiction movies are made of. In reality, it marks the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. The invisible "shock" forms as our sun's solar winds begin to encounter the gases and magnetic fields of outer space, which slows the winds down abruptly.

China is primed to earn a proverbial bronze medal within the next week as the third country to conduct a space walk. The launch of China's third manned space mission should occur between today and next Tuesday from the Jiquan launch pad in Inner Mongolia. Some Chinese media report that this statement-making event will occur at 9 this evening.

One of the most promising technologies for the aspiring outer-space commuter is the space elevator. The concept, like quite a few others, was pressed into the public imagination by Arthur C. Clarke, who in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise described a incredibly thin, incredibly strong carbon filament with one end anchored on Earth and the other extending up to a satellite in geostationary orbit. Now, a group of Japanese scientists are convinced that they can build a space elevator more quickly and cheaply than has been believed possible.

Such a cable could convey cargo into space very cheaply and easily. Carriages would travel up and down the cable under modest power, not the vast expenditures of energy that are currently needed to send anything into orbit.

It's becoming a familiar story: robots on the surface of Mars outlasting their expected lifespan. Take the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, for example. The rovers landed on Mars in 2004 and have performed so well that NASA has extended their mission activities five times in the past three years.