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Astronaut Ice Cream Sandwich

Know a passionate stargazer or amateur astronomer?

Throwing a birthday party with a space theme?

Send them over the moon with these freeze-dried, ready-to-eat space snacks, served on NASA spacecraft from the Mercury Missions through today.

Remarkably, the snacks reconstitute into rich ice cream from the first bite.

99 cents.

"In space today, an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it. With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically."

NASA's interplanetary Internet tests a success, Vint Cerf triumphs again originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Luckily, fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen was nearby to help afterwards, sharing his tools with Stefanyshyn-Piper. Flight controllers are currently trying to track its location in orbit and determine its impact on the next three spacewalks. "Oh, great"? Really? Since E.T. is back home now, I suppose he can call the space station to find out what's up, track down the bag, and personally hand-deliver it to Stefanyshyn-Piper. Only she'll be like, "Holy mother *bleep* what the *bleep* *bleep* Reeses' *bleep* *bleep* Pieces *bleep*!!" [Associated Press]

Noah is going to work for Fast Company, Lisa went to Tokyo for NPR work and left me to watch the new puppy, go to puppy school and get him neutered and pick up poo and pee at all hours of the day/night. In the middle of the night, he was trying to take his cone thing off to lick his stitches and realized I had to go get a bigger one from the vet at 2am. (I call him captain radar when he wears it.) Doesn't sound that bad a few days later, but then the Mac fried its HDD with no warning or clicking. Probably the logic board. One HDD swap and Time Machine/Capsule restore later and I've got zero data loss. (I set mine to back up at 1am every night, using Time Machine Editor.) I consider that my lucky break of the week. Lisa's RAM fried too, when she got back, the symptom being repeat kernel panics. Maybe it was the full moon.

Here are my favorite posts from this week so far:

• 10 Gadgets That Have No Business Using a Jet Engine
• What it Feels Like to Drive a Tesla Roadster
• At Gizmodo Gallery: Ancient Apple Phone Prototypes From Frog Design
• Google's iPhone Voice Search Mobile App Now Available
• 30 Mars Phoenix Discoveries NASA Will Never Show the World

Unlike TCP/IP, DTN does not assume an continuous end-to-end connection. Delays can occur in a host of situations (like when a spacecraft moves behind a planet or when a solar storm occurs) so the protocol has to be robust...and patient. With DTN, data packets are not discarded when a destination path cannot be found. Instead, each network node stores data until it can safely communicate with another node. It may take a little longer, but the data will eventually get there. The second round of testing will occur next summer when DTN software will be installed aboard the International Space Station. Over the course of the next few years, NASA hopes to have the technology aboard a wide variety of space missions. [NASA]

For this week's Photoshop contest, I asked you guys to show us what the Mars Phoenix really discovered that government didn't want us to know about. Well, apparently Mars is a popular destination for politicians, terrorists, Bigfoot and assorted other bizarre life forms. If most of this stuff did exist on Mars, the Men in Black would break down crying because their lives are meaningless and the government would shut down NASA immediately and return the money to taxpayers. Hit the jump for the top three, the Gallery of Champions and... the truth.

First Place — Ross Jeffcoat
Second Place — Andy Sciamanna
Third Place — John Fischetti

• Broken MacBook Pro is reborn as a sweet "mini tower" Mac Pro Mini
• No lawsuit too small: iPhone 3G case cracks added to the class action list.

• Original NASA moons images made beautiful with ultra HD.
• Even Google gets the shaft from Apple and the App Store approval process.
• Forget the iPhone, Verizon pits BlackBerry against BlackBerry in a pit of death!
• Assault with a deadly weapon now includes Apple iPhone rechargers.
• Mr. President-Elect, we're going to need to have you surrender your Blackberry at the door.

Now, chin up, and read more great gadget news and views at the homepage.

The Lunar Orbiter missions included five spacecrafts dedicated to map the entire lunar surface, a task necessary to select the landing sites for Apollo. The first three missions focused on twenty potential landing sites, while the two last ones—which flew high altitude polar orbits—took photographs of 99% of the surface with a resolution that ranged from 60 meters to an stunning 2 meter.

While these probes were not as sophisticated as the HD cameras of the Selene spacecraft developed by the Japanese space agency, the NASA orbiters had a clever imaging system that achieved similar results four decades ago. It included a dual lens camera—one 610 millimeter narrow angle for high resolution and an 80 millimeter wide angle for medium resolution—, a film processor, and a scanner. Both lenses were aligned to expose the same part of the 70 millimeter film roll, so the high resolution image area was centered with the medium resolution area.

This was more complicated that it sounds: Since the spaceship was cruising above the lunar surface, they had to compensate for that motion. Using an electro-optical sensor to measure the distance while a small motor shifted the film so the second exposure exactly matched the first one. After that, the film was processed, scanned, and the information send back to Earth, where it was stored in analog tapes.

Now, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA's Ames Research Center, is retrieving and analyzing all the data stored in those tapes. To do this, first they restored the original tape recorders and 1,500 of these tapes. Then they digitized the data into modern computer, putting it through special software designed to extract all that information to produce the image you are seeing here. Their goal is to do this with every single image lurking inside those tapes, which then will be mapped to standard coordinates and sent to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Their objective is not only preserving and enhancing these historical documents, but also provide the scientific community with refreshed information prior to next year's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. [NASA]

More Gizmodo Sunday Eye Candy

The story of Phoenix's tweeting started when it became clear that the landing date—the most critical point of any mission—would be over Memorial Day weekend, when many American hit the road for beaches, barbecues and beer. McGregor realized that Twitter's SMS updates may have been the perfect way to reach people interested in the mission via their phones when they weren't in front of a TV or computer.

So a few weeks before Phoenix was scheduled to land on Mars, without thinking about it too much, Veronica started a Twitter page for the mission with a single tweet: "Less than 20 days till I land on Mars!" On top of reaching people's phones, Twitter also seemed like the perfect way to get info out quickly and easily without having to deal with the typical NASA bureacracy that tended to bog down news blogs for past missions.

There was no publicity, no big media push to promote it—just a single announcement on a serious space geek forum, unmannedspaceflight.com. But the next day, over 3,000 people were following MarsPhoenix on Twitter. The day after that: 6,000. And after getting tossed around on the bigger Tweeters feeds, it was off.

"After that, I kind of had a "there goes my summer" moment." Veronica remembers. "After we saw that everybody else was mentioning it, we thought 'hey maybe we should put something on our homepage.'"

Two specifics of Twitter's messaging format made Phoenix's tweets take off. To fit into the 140 character max for each post, writing tweets in first-person quickly became the easiest way to squeeze in the most possible information.

Second is Twitter's direct response feature, which allowed Veronica to answer submitted questions in the best way possible. Who wouldn't want to receive a first-person tweet directly addressed to them?

Now with over 39,000 followers, with almost no one dropping the feed now that the mission is technically complete, MarsPhoenix is one of the biggest Tweeters in the history of the site. It no surprise, then, that Veronica has also been tweeting for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (although not in first person, as per the mission director) and plans to carry on in first person for the upcoming Mars Science Lab mission.

We here at Giz were honored to be the home for Phoenix's final words, although sometimes it's kind of a morale-killer: how could my posts ever possibly top a robot's coming direct from Mars?