As we've seen, NASA has some pretty big plans for the moon (which may or may not come to fruition), and it's now finally offering up a solution for how it might keep everything powered. Turns out, it's looking at going nuclear -- with a fission surface power system, to be specific. That system, seen above in an artist's concept, would consist of nuclear reactor buried below the lunar surface (which provides some handy radiation shielding), with the engines that convert the heat energy into electricity placed in the tower above the reactor -- those long radiators would "radiate into space" any leftover heat energy that wasn't converted to electricity. All told, the system promises to generate a steady 40 kilowatts of electric power, or enough for about eight houses on Earth, but with NASA's various power-saving measures, they say that'd be more than enough to sustain a serious lunar outpost.

The Phoenix lander has already proven its mettle by finding ice on Mars, and now it's gone and shown off its quick-thinking skills by shutting down its robotic arm after receiving a command that could have permanently damaged it. The lander apparently did it's best to find a workaround first, however, but ultimately determined that any further movement would have bent its wrist out of shape. That left NASA engineers scrambling yesterday to come up with some new instructions to send to the lander, and they're now simply waiting to see if they meet with the robot's approval.

[Via Slashdot]

While it's not nearly exciting as their Space Cycle (but really, what is?), the National Space Biomedical Research Institute's new brain scanner here looks to fill in a niche of its own nonetheless and, if the institute has its way, it could actually find its way into space. Described as a "brain breathalyzer," the device promises to monitor astronauts for signs of brain injury, depression and mental fatigue, which could allow mission control to determine if they're capable of carrying out a mission or not. That's done with the use of an optical scanner that sends weak pulses of near-infrared light into the brain, which gets reflected back to determine the amount of oxygen in the blood. While NASA isn't fully sold on the idea just yet, it apparently is interested enough to shell out $400,000 to further the development of the scanner, which it hopes will also eventually be able to monitor other vital signs like blood pressure and heart rate.