Space

Bow, nerds, and greet your king. Before this week, Richard Garriott was already geek royalty. The son of an astronaut, Garriott grew up in a NASA village, started writing best-selling videogames in high school, and has voyaged to the bottom of the ocean. Now Garriott has achieved the crown jewel of nerdom: he's in space.

In space, no one can hear a tardigrade scream. They can, however see the tiny organisms (also called water bears) survive a trip through that icy, radiation filled void relatively unscathed.

If you started just before the first dinosaurs appeared, you’d probably be finishing your hike just about now.

A new simulation has mapped out the way dark matter—the invisible heft of the universe—could be distributed in a galaxy like our own Milky Way; showing that dark matter could be much more present in our neighborhood than previously thought, and suggesting that we may soon be able to detect it (and understand it) close to home.

Snug in Earth’s orbit, Hubble is free from the background glare that earthly telescopes must fight to see the stars. This allows its supersensitive camera to take better photos of galaxies farther away—and thus much dimmer—than any optical telescope on the ground can. But despite being closer to the moon than any other telescope, there’s no way the scope could snap a photo of that one small step man took 40 years ago.

Along with satellites and space stations, Earth is surrounded by tens of millions of pieces of floating space debris. Like any landfill, the trash is diverse, ranging from dead satellites to castaway rocket parts to flecks of paint. On average, over the past 40 years, one piece of space junk has fallen to Earth every day.

When it launches in 2009, NASA's Kepler Mission will include the most sensitive detection system ever put into service for discovering exosolar planets. In the meantime, our toolkit on Earth is getting better with each passing year. Astronomers using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at La Silla Observatory in Chile have discovered three new rocky planets orbiting a single star, all within ten times the size of Earth.

NASA spent $420 million to send the Phoenix Lander to Mars last year. Festooned with state-of-the-art detection equipment, the rover's task was to scour the red surface in search of elusive Martian ice. And today, the NASA mission finally did uncover some extraterrestrial frost, and it did it with its simplest tool, a shovel.

For as long as humans have looked to the night sky to divine meaning and a place in the universe, we have let our minds wander to thoughts of distant worlds populated by beings unlike ourselves. The ancient Greeks were the first Western thinkers to consider formally the possibility of an infinite universe housing an infinite number of civilizations.

The search for a planet analogous to our own has taken one step closer with the discovery of the smallest extrasolar planet yet orbiting a star which could support life. It is about three and one-third times the size of Earth, much more in line with our home than the gas giants on the scale of Jupiter or Saturn we had been finding up to this point. (An even smaller planet has so far been found, but it is orbiting a pulsar. Pulsars spew highly powerful radiation, so it's highly unlikely that anything within their vicinity could survive).

For the past two weeks, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has been broadcasting a wealth of incredible images from its landing site in the Martian arctic. I've been refreshing the mission's raw photo stream obsessively—no little green men yet, just gorgeous panoramas and detailed closeups of the most foreign of all foreign lands. Being a bit of a camera geek, I was quite curious as to what kind of hardware was behind the action, and naturally, Phoenix has some pretty sweet gear on board to make it all possible.

Taking beer-making to a whole new sphere, Japan's famous Sapporo Holdings Ltd. plans to launch a beer in November that's literally from out of this world. The brewery will collaborate with scientists at the Okayama University in Japan to concoct this unearthly beverage from a third generation of barley grains that spent five months on the International Space Station in 2006.

Asteroid 2008HJ is not only a "superfast rotator," it's the fastest of the superfast. According to the British amateur astronomer Richard Miles, who clocked the asteroid using the remotely operated Faulkes Telescope South, 2008HJ makes a full rotation every 42.67 seconds—almost twice as fast as the previous record holder.

In the first ever instance of a spacecraft photographing the landing of another craft on Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this incredible image of NASA's Phoenix Lander making its descent on Sunday. Phoenix landed successfully and has already begun transmitting images from its landing zone in Mars's northern polar region, where it will be conducting meteorological and geological surveys over the course of its three-month mission.

If it weren’t for the landmines, Lingapura would be a great place to dig. For part of the 10th century, this pocket of northwestern Cambodia was the capital of the famed Angkorian empire, a sprawling city studded with homes, irrigation channels, and more than 1,000 temples crowned with stone lingam, or phalluses. But ever since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge dotted Cambodia with millions of landmines in the 1970s, Lingapura’s ruins have sat mostly untouched.