Two astronauts will leave the International Space Station and step into free space today, for the first of three spacewalks to deliver spare parts, Space.com reports.

The two spacewalkers will spend about six and a half hours floating outside. Here's the to-do list: install a spare communications antenna for backup, grease the station's robotic arm and rail car attachment point, and install new cables and a handrail for a future ISS expansion mission.

The shuttle Atlantis launched mission STS-129 Monday and arrived at the ISS Wednesday with a total of six crewmembers. The entire round trip will last 11 days, barring unforeseen weather issues the day of landing. (Image credit: NASA TV)

Thirty-three years after the first Cray-1 supercomputer, the company is still cranking them out. Now the Cray XT5 "Jaguar" just won the title of world's fastest computer, displacing the IBM Roadrunner that held the title for the previous 18 months, InformationWeek reports.

The Jaguar features six-core AMD Opteron processors, nearly a quarter million total CPU cores, and managed to hit 1.75 petaflops per second on the Linpack benchmark used by researchers in determining the biannual Top500 list. That's compared with the Roadrunner's 1.04 petaflop/s rating. (A petaflop/s is one quadrillion calculations per second.)

Of the top 500 machines in the list, 399 use Intel processors, 52 employ IBM Power chips, and AMD brings up third place in popularity with 42 systems. HP and IBM together account for building almost 400 of the 500 computers. Anyone for Crysis benchmarks?

NASA's announcement on Friday that the LCROSS moon probe discovered significant water ice at the lunar south pole is fueling colonization hopes, Space.com reports. The idea is that someday humans could either colonize the moon, exploit it as a source of minerals, or use it as a launch pad to stage further space missions unhindered by Earth's atmosphere.

For now, scientists are just concentrating on where they can find more than the equivalent of a dozen 2-gallon buckets of ice water already found, the report said. But in turn, it's leading to a private moon race similar to the existing one for reusable spacecraft.

It's all-systems-go for the Large Hadron Collider, just a week after a bird threatened to gum up the proceedings with a piece of bread.

The world's largest particle accelerator has been under repair for over a year due to an electrical failure back in September 2008, but it's now gearing up to resume operations, according to CNN.

The 17-mile collider will circulate high-energy proton beams beginning later this month, according to Steve Myers, CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology. The goal: to explore questions about the origins of the universe.

Myers said in the report that the full scientific program for the LHC will probably last over 20 years, though scientists hope to discover new properties of nature in short order--possibly as early as 2010. (Image credit: CERN)

Okay. So we know that the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, has run into a few snags recently, including a major coolant leak, an arrest, and numerous delays.

Now we can add bird droppings to the list. Or, more specifically, a dropped piece of bread.

Popular Science reports that a bird dropped a baguette on a section of LHC machinery outdoors, which eventually caused part of the accelerator to overheat--enough that if the LHC were actually running at the time, the heat would have triggered automatic failsafes and shut down the system.

The bread won't cause another delay in the planned reactivation next month, according to the report.

The $1 million race to build a lunar lander is heating up, as--unexpectedly--Masten Space Systems' Xoie rocket prototype has taken the lead. MSNBC reports that the Masten team's remote-controlled rocket had a successful test flight, just one day after a damaging fire on the launch pad and two days after communications glitches derailed two earlier launch attempts.

Level 2 of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge requires that a remote-controlled aircraft makes a complete round trip between one launch pad and a boulder-strewn pad about 164 feet away, according to the report. Each leg of the flight needs to last at least three minutes, and the rocket has to rise up 50 meters from the ground--all within a 135 minute time period.

Armadillo Aerospace--backed by id software's John Carmack--first qualified to win last month. Since more than one team has now qualified for the prize, judges will decide who to award it to based on the accuracy of the flight. (Via Slashdot)

This is starting to become a regular event: Astronomers have detected what appears to be the most distant object anyone has seen from Earth, according to NPR.

The discovery, which appears in the current issue of Nature, involves a gamma ray burst, which is essentially a type of exploding star (visible as the tiny red dot in the center of the photo). "These things are brighter than anything else we know of in the universe," said Nial Tanvir, a University of Leicester astronomer who was on one of the two teams involved in the discovery. "In principle we can see them very far away but they're incredibly rare."

So here's the tech portion: the astronomers used NASA's SWIFT satellite to find the gamma ray burst. In this case, it turns out to be from a star that collapsed when the universe was "only" 600 million years old; that's 13.1 billion years ago. The light took that long to reach us, and finally arrived on April 23rd of this year--and is the most distant object ever detected, according to the report.

"It was absolutely thrilling -- a spine-tingling moment, actually," Tanvir said in the article. (Thanks to Warren W for sending this in.) (Image credit: A.J.Levan and N.R.Tanvir/Nature)

Researchers figured out how to simulate a miniature black hole in a lab--though fortunately for us, it's not going to eat the Earth, as Space.com reports.

"The device we created is not a real black hole, but only a device to mimic the black-hole effect," said researcher Tie Jun Cui, a professor at Southeast University in China, in the article. "Actually, the device can trap and absorb the electromagnetic waves which hit the device. Hence we call it as the Electromagnetic Black Hole." Essentially, the pseudo black hole sucks in light, but not mass.

The team "built the black hole" (I love my job) out of circuit board, by linking 60 concentric circular layers etched with copper patterns, the report said. In turn, the patterns interact with electromagnetic waves. That means the device, as a result, absorbs any incoming light that's in the microwave range of the spectrum--but not any mass. (Image credit: Cheng/Cui/Arxiv)

The weather isn't cooperating at the moment, but NASA is poised to launch its highly-anticipated Ares I-X rocket this morning. As Space.com reports, the rocket is designed both to replace the aging space shuttle and--perhaps one day--transport humans to Mars.

To commemorate the event, NASA built the booster stage from parts previously flown on 30 shuttle missions, including the one that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, according to the report.

Currently, winds are a little heavy at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But NASA has until noon today to launch the rocket before rescheduling. The rocket won't actually enter space; instead, it will follow a 28-mile-high, five minute flight profile while over 700 sensors record its performance, according to the report. (Image credit: NASA)

Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Washington are receiving $1.6 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) to enable the automated discovery of astrophysical phenomena.

The idea is to capitalize on a new generation of telescopes--to be built and deployed over the next decade--by automating the sifting of massive amounts of cosmological data. The tools will be able to spot new objects for further study, as well as identify patterns in observational data that could help scientists understand how the universe evolved.

Get ready to duck (again). The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has now reached an operating temperature of 1.9K--colder than outer space itself, according to Ars Technica.

That means the LHC will soon be ready to begin crashing particles together, after a catastrophic failure and series of repairs over the past year took the accelerator out of commission.

The current prognosis is that the LHC will begin operations sometime in the next five weeks. It will accelerate particles at speeds very close to the speed of light. In effect, they'd run around the 16.7-mile length of the accelerator over 11,000 times per second, the report said. That necessitates the accelerator contain a vacuum that's an order of magnitude less dense than the moon's atmosphere. In other words, this is tough stuff, so let's give those guys a break about that whole catastrophic failure thing. (Image credit: CERN)

Hold onto your phasers: a new rocket, designed jointly by NASA, Ad Astra, and Canadian firm Nautel, could potentially slash trip times to Mars to as little as 39 days. And yep, it uses ion propulsion--just like Star Trek taught us.

Ion propulsion, via the new plasma-based VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) engine, is now close to the point where it could be tested on a flight to the moon, according to Canada.com. The rocket works by turning electrical power into thrust in order to harness solar energy.

The 39 day time compares to six months using current rocket technology. Actually, a round-trip ticket to Mars would take far longer than even six months. Since Mars and Earth only pass close to each other every two years, engineers assume a crew would go one way, wait a year, and then fly back the next time the planets passed each other by, according to the report.

The ion drive would enable astronauts to shoot there and back during a single close approach. (Image credit: Ad Astra) (Via Slashdot)

There's nothing quite like having a meal with geniuses. And Popular Mechanics gave me that opportunity today, at a lunch held in honor of its Breakthrough Awards 2009 winners.

In a panel during the lunch, PM's Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs (far right) introduced three of the honorees, each of who gave us a précis of his or her winning project. 

William Borucki (far left) is the science principal investigator of NASA's Kepler mission, whose aim is to find habitable planets.  As he explained it, there are a series of steps humanity needs to take in order to expand into the galaxy; first, we have to determine whether other "earths" are frequent or rare. If they are common, we need to determine more closely their habitability. Then, Borucki said, "our children decide what happens."