Mind Soup

This year provided plenty of cosmic eye-openers for astronomers and casual stargazers alike. Neighborhood planets such as Mercury and Jupiter received makeovers in both a scientific and literal sense. The discovery of water on the moon and Mars provided clues to the past, not to mention hints for the future of space exploration. A class of newly-detected "Super-Earth" planets around alien stars may ultimately prove more habitable than Earth. And a growing fleet of existing, new and revived space telescopes promises another stellar year ahead. Here are the stories that stood out: 9. Oddball Objects Earth had a front row seat to a multitude of space objects in 2009, with stunning meteor showers, wayward space rocks buzzing the planet and weird lights in the sky – both natural and man-made. Annual light shows such as the Leonid meteor shower continued to dazzle, but some space rocks came a bit too close for comfort. An asteroid exploded over Indonesia with the force of ...

NASA now gives anyone the opportunity to send their name to Mars . Just enter your name, country and zip code into the form, and your name – along with many others – will be included in a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover which will be heading to Mars in 2011. NASA has actually done this before, for example, you could have sent your name to Mars with the Phoenix rover . However, now that this has been found by Reddit , I’m afraid that that list of names sent to Mars will be an odd one indeed. First of all, there’s no captcha, and the form accepts nearly anything, even very long entries. From Reddit’s commenter digitalboy: “ It appears that the input is unbounded. One could then send a somewhat long Base64 encoded binary messages to mars. I’m sure there is SOME bound somewhere but it doesn’t appear to be on the form. I create a 4k first name and it took it as input. What to send…. Perhaps a map to my house? Perhaps the lyrics to my favorite song? Fibonacci sequence? Prime...