SpaceX's Reusable Rockets, Uber's First Self-Driving Car, and Other Amazing Images of the Week

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SpaceX has successfully landed three separate rockets on Earth. Every time they do so, they place these boosts inside Hangar 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It looks like they will need a bigger hangar soon if they keep this up, but that’s the least of their worries. The ability to reuse rockets will dramatically cut the cost needed to get supplies and people to space, especially to the International Space Station. The next step is for SpaceX to actually refurbish one of these previously used rockets and make sure they can fly again.

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The six ‘astronauts’ pictured above spent a remarkable 520 days inside a confined space together to study how a trip to Mars would play out. The experiment, which ended in 2011, has been the subject of countless studies that aim to figure out how spending so much time in a very small space with five other people affects astronauts’ mentally. One of the newer studies, published in Acta Astronautica, sat down with the team so they could share their thoughts on all that time together. You can read some of the most exciting bits here.

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This is Android’s new wearable that allows users to leave their phones at home while running or walking around. Besides the freedom of roaming without a phone, the watch’s face is customizable; users can even draft messages with their own handwriting. Will this compete with the Apple Watch? Maybe. Only time will tell, but it definitely looks more like a watch and less like an iPod Nano strapped to your arm.

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NOAA just released a new map showing the world’s temperature in April. While it may not look like a big deal, this is the 12th consecutive month (also known as a year) that the world has experienced record-breaking high temperatures across the board because, you know, climate change. In the report, researchers say that April’s temperature this year was 1.98°F higher than average, which isn’t great news for the environment.

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Star Trek will return to TV (sorta) in 2017. The show will be run by Bryan Fuller of Hannibal fame and will feature weekly episodes on CBS’ All Access streaming platform, which will cost viewers $5.99 a month. Will this get CBS into the streaming game? Will the show cause fans everywhere to break out into happy tears or sad tears? These are the questions that everyone wants to know. Sadly, CBS has been pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing. The one thing we do know for certain is that it has a new logo!

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They grow up so fast. Uber, the seven-year-old ride service company, took to the streets of Pittsburgh this week. But this time without a human driver. While Uber’s driverless cars still have a great ways to go–and a lot more testing–there may very likely be a time in the future when driverless cars are a regular thing. For now, there’s still human training wheels on hand.

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While Earth is most famously known for its changing seasons, Mars regularly experiences seasonal changes as well. As seen in the above image taken on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope at a time when Mars and Earth were a mere 50 million miles apart. The image shows Mars’ clouds and polar caps, as well as some famous features including Syrtis Major Planitia, the dark region at the right, and Arabia Terra, the orange region that covers much of the center.

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Since they came out, plastic rings that hold beer and soda cans together have harmed ocean life. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Saltwater Brewery in Florida created six-pack holders out of various brewing byproducts that are edible for ocean life and also break down if they aren’t eaten. They are just in concept form right now, but they might prevent a lot of injuries and save ocean animals if they become a regular thing.

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In the future, if you look up at dusk, the bat you might catch a glimpse of might actually be a bat bot. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created a prototype of a robotic bat that mimics a real bats’ characteristics. Made of a carbon fiber airframe, the Bat Bot, as they call it, weighs just 92 grams. It’s built-in microprocessor and sensors help it navigate and spy on you from above. Gizmodo

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Since humans first took to the skies, we have been trying to make the trips shorter with each successful flight. Now a group of researchers from NASA, the Air Force, and Australia’s Department of Defense, have successfully tested a hypersonic rocket. The HIFiRE rocket, which they are calling it, went to a height of 172 miles with a speed of 7.5 times the speed of sound. Read more about it here.

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SpaceX’s Reusable Rockets, Uber’s First Self-Driving Car, and Other Amazing Images of the Week