As NASA awaits the newly rescheduled launch of its latest mission, Microsoft has been busy creating a "3D montage" of the space shuttle Endeavour. According to the team, this venture will enable individuals around the globe to "view 3D images of Endeavour and surrounding buildings at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida before it launches into space." The environments are being constructed using hundreds of snapshots and an imaging technology dubbed Photosynth, which stitches together 2D digital images to give a three-dimensional view "that can be navigated and explored in a highly intuitive manner." This go 'round, it seems that the goal was simply to provide a wow-factor to remote onlookers, but both entities are reportedly "looking into ways of using this new technology to support future missions." Check out the results here.

[Via PCWorld]

If you thought hoisting a giant banana above Texas was outrageous, you may indeed chuckle to learn that a 1,400-pound refrigerator-sized container of ammonia will be jettisoned from the International Space Station next week. On July 23rd, to be precise, Expedition 15 crew member Clayton Anderson will have the, um, privilege of heading outside in order to toss "two large hunks of unneeded equipment towards Earth," and once ejected, they will be tracked by NASA for an entire year until they finally begin to enter the atmosphere. Notably, officials are still not sure where the debris will land just yet, but if you happen to find your fridge replaced with a partially disintegrated (albeit similarly sized) container of fetid material in the next year or two, you'll know exactly what went awry.

[Image courtesy of MSNBC]

While we've no idea how much the Mars Global Surveyor actually cost to construct, launch, and manage whilst hovering around in space, it's entirely likely that a single human error wiped out even more than was initially lost by the Alaska Department of Revenue earlier this year. Sad to say, galaxy geeks everywhere now have a scapegoat to direct their wrath at, as a review board of the mishap found that "a single command (root@mars-surveyor: rm -rf /) that oriented the spacecraft's main communications antenna was sent to the wrong address," subsequently leading to a cataclysmic series of events that finally dismantled its communication system. Interestingly, the command caused the befuddled craft to think that one of its solar panels was "stuck," which eventually led to an autonomous decision to enter "safe mode," followed by a complete shutdown of the unit's onboard batteries. Intelligently, the LA Times report neglected to mention any specific culprit, and hey, living with the guilt of destroying the machine that showed us so much of the Red Planet is probably punishment enough.

[Via Slashdot]

Now that humans have shot themselves up into space, frolicked on the moon, and have their own space station just chillin' in the middle of the galaxy, what's really left to accomplish out there? How about cruising around at light speed? Apparently, a boastful group of scientists at the Bae Institute in Southern California feel that they're one step closer to achieving the impossible, as the "world's first photonic laser thruster" was purportedly demonstrated. Using a photonic laser and a sophisticated photon beam amplification system, Dr. Bae reportedly "demonstrated that photonic energy could generate amplified thrust between two spacecraft by bouncing photons many thousands of times between them." The Photonic Laser Thruster (PLT) was constructed with off-the-shelf parts and a bit of fairy dust, and it's said that this invention could eliminate the need for "other propellants" on a wide range of NASA spacecrafts, theoretically savings millions on energy costs and enabling longer missions. So while this may be an incredibly novel idea, the chances of this actually working outside of a laboratory seem relatively small, and make sure we're not the guinea pigs strapped into the first craft that utilizes this mystical method of launching, cool?

[Via Wired]