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NASA's Cassini probe bids farewell to Saturn with epic image
NASA's Cassini spacecraft was always destined to be a doomed hero. After two decades in space, diligently exploring Saturn and its many strange and beautiful moons, operators deliberately crashed the spacecraft into the planet to make sure the moons remain pristine and unaffected by debris. But not before the spacecraft took one final, breathtaking look at Saturn, which NASA has shared in tribute to the dedicated spacecraft. The image, "Farewell to Saturn", is a combination of 42 natural-color pictures showing a sweeping view of the planet and its rings. The image even captures six of the planet's moons, including Mimas, the so-called "Death Star" moon.
New Horizons parts Pluto with a shot of its puniest moon
NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft has done yeoman's work at Pluto, having taken stunning images of the ex-planet and its major moon Charon. Now it's taking off for the largely unseen Kuiper belt, but it grabbed one last image of the tiny moon Kerberos before leaving. It turns out that the body is smaller than thought at around 8 miles across, and consists of two distinctive "lobes." Much like Comet 67P orbited by the ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, the unusual shape of Kerberos may be the result of a collision between two smaller objects. Like Pluto's other small moons, and several spots on the quasi-planet itself, it's also coated with "relatively clean water ice," making it highly reflective.
NASA probe snaps Pluto's smallest moons for the first time
Getting kicked out of the major planet club always seemed a bit unfair to Pluto, considering that it has four more moons than Earth. On the other hand, two of those, Styx and Kerberos, are so small that we only found out about them a few years ago. NASA's New Horizons probe has just taken its first snapshots of those new satellites, something of a miracle considering it was 55 million miles away and Styx is only 4 to 13 miles across. It required 10 second exposures from the probe's sensitive Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and copious image processing to reduce background glare, resulting in the animation above.
The Big Picture: Neptune's largest moon, Triton
Neptune has more moons than we have planets in our Solar System, with a total of 14 (and counting) orbiting around it. Its largest, Triton, is big enough to practically be considered a planet, so much so that scientists often compare it to Pluto. (You know, the planet which isn't really a planet, but some people think it should be a planet? Yeah, that's the one.) Now, courtesy of old NASA footage from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, we're getting a closer look at Triton and how it looked back in 1989. Not only that, but NASA's taken images from the aged trek and used them to create the best global map of Triton yet, with color schemes which "are a close approximation to Triton's natural colors." The map, according to NASA, features a resolution of 1,970 feet per pixel, which makes for very, very interesting viewing action.
Line of Defense approaches beta test phase
After a few months of silence, Derek Smart is back with a Line of Defense update. He reports that the title is preparing to transition from alpha to beta testing, even with "setbacks" due to switching the game engine. The team transitioned the game from an internal engine to the Havok Vision engine, which oversees the 25 middleware engines that handle aspects like the AI, atmospheric effects, networking, and more. He says that optimizing the game has been "touch and go for the most part," however. Smart predicts that next year should be interesting for Line of Defense. "All things being equal, we should be rolling in awesomeness by Q2 2014," he writes. "Prepare to have your mind blown. Guaranteed."
The Blue Child returns to Azeroth
Players who were around during classic may remember that Azeroth once had two moons: The large, white moon was called the White Lady, and the smaller, blue moon was called the Blue Child. Lorewise, the White Lady was what the night elves called Elune and the tauren Mu'sha. The Blue Child doesn't seem to have figured quite as prominently in the lore, so I guess it was an auxiliary back-up moon for when Azeroth experienced sudden spikes in moon-related demand. The Blue Child disappeared during patch 1.10.0 before the Burning Crusade. Anne's theory is that, since this coincides with Blizzard's addition of weather effects to the world, it was probably removed due to graphical errors. Whatever the reason, since then there have been only occasional references to its existence within the game: You could see it around the three-dimensional map of Azeroth in Halls of Lightning, and it was briefly visible during the Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest quest line. However, players were delighted to discover that it made a reappearance on the Mists of Pandaria beta, and it looks like patch 5.0.4 has finally restored the Blue Child to the world. Thanks to Jeff Hoskins for the tip and Dawn Moore for the picture!
Jumping out an airlock is a legitimate mode of travel in Line of Defense
Contrary to many of Derek Smart's previous expansive computer titles, Line of Defense will be "streamlined" to focus on a small corner of the galaxy. In a new dev blog, Smart outlines the scope of the MMO's territory and how it connects to his previously established game universe. Line of Defense consists of four space regions, each with its own planets and moons. The regions are connected by jump gates in the Sirius/Barnard's Star systems pathway. However, when the game first launches, players will only have access to the planet of Lyrius, with other planets and moons coming afterward. Players can teleport from base to base on planets using Dynamic Jump Pads or can transfer to a station via a carrier. Jumpgates, however, will allow players in vehicles to traverse entire regions. But probably the most interesting mode of transportation is to let loose with an orbital drop from a space station down to the planet surface below. The one thing that Line of Defense won't have, however, is the ability to seamlessly transition between planets, bases, and regions without loading screens.
EVE Evolved: Bringing back the glory days
In years gone by, exploring the unknown far reaches of the EVE Online universe meant setting a course for nullsec. With no way to install a permanent residence in the most lucrative far-off systems, players would launch dangerous expeditions into the deep with the hope of striking it rich. Nullsec was the only place to mine rare ores containing megacyte and zydrine, and piracy wasn't as common as it is today. For putting themselves at the risk of pirates, miners were rewarded with an income stream greater than that of any other profession in the game. It was a golden age in exploration that wasn't to repeat itself until March 2009's Apocrypha expansion opened 2500 hidden wormhole systems for exploitation. Things have changed considerably since those early days of EVE. Player-built starbases and outposts have transformed the face of nullsec, allowing alliances to build themselves an empire in the void. December 2009's Dominion expansion brought a complete revamp of the nullsec sovereignty mechanics, allowing alliances to upgrade their space but dramatically increasing the cost of system ownership. Despite all of these updates and improvements, over the past several years we have somehow lost a lot of what made nullsec great in its glory days. Local industry has been replaced by risk-free logistics, and nullsec's risky but rewarding mining profession is now greatly overshadowed by safe highsec mission-running. With a new iterative nullsec revamp scheduled to begin this winter, I use this week's EVE Evolved to speculate on what can be done to bring back the glory days of nullsec industry.
The Queue: Howl at the nonexistent moon
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. So many amazing people have performed Blue Moon over the years. Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Ella Fitzgerald, the list goes on and on. It's a simple song that's been everywhere. I decided to go with The Marcels for the embed, but it was a tough choice. Melfina the Blue asked... "What happened to Azeroth's second moon? It used to be there, where did it go?"
EVE Evolved: Graphical upgrades for EVE Online
Some time ago, I looked at the different graphical updates EVE Online has received over the years and what was to come. The ship graphics were renovated years ago with the Trinity expansion and much of the rest of the game was left looking dated in comparison. The Apocrypha expansion picked up on the upgrades where Trinity left off, with re-developments of asteroid graphics and most of the game's special effects. Future updates were planned, with promises of bringing new life to planets and everything else that hasn't been improved. With the Dominion expansion on the horizon, it now seems that those promises are being fulfilled. We've seen new planet graphics and even shiny new starfields on the test server but are there other parts of the game that could benefit more from a graphical overhaul?In this short opinion piece, I take a quick look at the graphical overhauls that are coming with the Dominion expansion and ask which other aspects of EVE's graphics are long overdue for an upgrade.
EVE Online devs explain their plans for revamping the sandbox
EVE Online's sandbox approach to game design is one where where centralized, well-developed clusters of solar systems are controlled by NPC factions while vast, lawless tracts of space can be claimed by the players themselves. This 0.0 space (aka nullsec) contains some of EVE's most valuable resources plus offers complete freedom from the laws imposed in high security NPC space. It's the frontier -- the wild west -- that alliances of EVE's capsuleers clash with one another to control. For all the freedom to use diplomacy, espionage, and outright warfare to get the most out of 0.0 space, players have long been hindered by the game mechanics of "sovereignty" -- EVE's system of establishing control over territory and reaping the various rewards that come with such control. The changes CCP Games are making to the game with the Dominion winter expansion aren't just about altering a few game mechanics related to territorial control -- they're about changing the rules of the sandbox itself.
Castlevania: Dual Moons
Forum poster Think Tank recently did a little snooping at Gamepro.com to shed some light on the supposed upcoming DS Castlevania title. It looks like we have an actual name for it now. Castlevania: Dual Moons isn't as gripping a name as Aria of Sorrow or Harmony of Dissonance and hopefully will change before the suggested 2007 release. Stay tuned to DS Fanboy for more information as it develops. [Via Go Nintendo] [Update: Gah! We fell for an April Fool's joke. Serves us right for that nasty Mario DS Lite prank we pulled.]
