Technology

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.

Of our solar system's nine planets, tiny, frozen Pluto is the only one that's never been visited by a spacecraft. And at three billion miles away, the runt of the planetary litter is incredibly difficult to study from Earth. But this year NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will check the iceball off their exploration agenda as they launch New Horizons–a compact, 1,000-pound spacecraft that they hope will offer some insight into the orb that, right now, is just a blurry smudge of light in the outer reaches of space.

If the asteroid Apophis were to collide with Earth 30 years from now, it would strike with the force of 57,000 Hiroshima bombs. The aircraft-carrier-size rock could wipe out a city the size of Los Angeles and cause a 30-foot tsunami to smack into southern California. There's only a 1 in 5,500 chance of impact, but it's a chance that NASA is not willing to take.

So in late October, the space agency outlined a three-phase plan to observe, track, and deflect the rogue rock over the next two decades.

Dept.: What You Built
Cost: $750
Time: 120 Hours
Easy | | | | | Hard

How It Works

With NASA's beleaguered shuttle still grounded over safety concernsand given the unanswered questions about its replacement, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which won't be ready to fly until 2012the 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.

The twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have observed more than 4,000 geographical features on the planet since they landed in January 2004. Expected to run for only three months, the rovers are still going strong, and their mission has now been extended to at least September of next year. They've been ranging for so long, in fact, that they're causing a problem for their handlers. In order to document the terrain efficiently, scientists have had to come up with unique names for all the features the rovers discover, a task that gets tougher with each passing day.

Projection TVs with three chips-one each for red, green and blue-deliver richer, brighter images than single-chip solutions. But all that silicon is expensive, so Sony saved money by making smaller chips, squeezing 2,074,600 pixels (enough for 1,080 lines of high-definition resolution) onto a chip that's just 0.61 inch diagonally, or 78 percent the size of those in LCD sets. Along with better color, the SXRD (Silicon X-TAL Reflective Display) chips produce an incredible contrast ratio of 5,000:1. $4,000 (50-inch), $5,000 (60-inch)

The AN110 goes where no front projector has gone before: the wall. To achieve its 3.7-inch-thick form, engineers at LG developed an L-shaped lens that shoots the picture across itself. The resulting projector can display an image of between 30 and 300 inches with a 2,500:1 contrast ratio. 1,280 x 768 DLP; HDMI output; $3,500

Imagine an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could fly for days rather than hours, aiding soldiers on reconnaissance missions or supplying emergency communications to disaster-affected regions. AeroVironment, which built the first human- and solar-powered airplanes, has successfully flown a prototype of a UAV that will be able to remain at high altitudes for longer than a week at a time. Unlike earlier solar-powered systems, which had to power the vehicle and store enough electricity for nighttime flying, Global Observer uses fuel-cell-powered electric motors to drive eight propellers.

Meade's RCX400 is the first consumer scope that comes out of the box with all the features you need for optimal stargazing and astrophotography. In addition to its GPS tracking, it has a built-in cooling fan, a motorized focuser, and a heater to keep condensation off the lens. Its mirrors can be aligned electronically, and it offers customized settings for different celestial targets.
10- to 16-inch apertures; $5,150 - $16,400

As the first of the next-gen gaming consoles (Sony's PlayStation3 and a system from Nintendo are expected next year), the Xbox 360 easily maintains the cred the original Xbox earned in 2001 when it crushed rival PlayStation with superior graphics and performance. This time, though, it's not just about games-the 360 is poised to take over the living room as well.
Its one-teraflops processing speed, fueled by three 3.2-gigahertz processors (think: three desktop computers), may make the 360 the most powerful computer you've ever used.

Swift is the first satellite explicitly designed to solve the mystery of gamma-ray bursts, the enigmatic explosions that have puzzled astronomers for decades. Practically every day, another burst randomly appears in the sky, flashing powerful gamma rays for anywhere from a fraction of a second to two minutes. Before the burst fades, Swift quickly locates it, rotates its telescopes and other satellites for observation, and relays the burst's location to ground-based telescopes, which study it in detail.

"A bullet hitting a bullet" is how NASA scientists described the Deep Impact mission. The 800-pound copper-and-aluminum impactor positioned itself in comet Tempel 1's path and, on July 4, slammed into it, offering a first-ever peek inside a comet. Sensors on the spacecraft that launched the impactor analyzed the detritus, which was packed with surprising ingredients such as carbonatesminerals typically formed in liquid waterand aromatic hydrocarbons, the principal ingredients of soot.

When you rip songs from CDs into MP3 files, some audio quality is inevitably lost during compression. Creative's X-Fi is an audio-processing chip that identifies the specific sound patterns that are typically damaged
in music-file conversion. Then it enhances them, restoring audiophile quality to the digital file without adding to its size.

It used to take a geek to program a command-everything universal remote control. With Philips's new device, setup is a simple point-and-press process. Tell it what equipment you have and what you want to do, and tap the buttons it tells you to tap. Then, instead of turning on the DVD player and the stereo and switching speakers and changing settings, you can simply press the "watch DVD" button. $600