Billion-dollar science projects end up being about much more than the science, whether we're talking about particle physics, or fusion research, or the international space station, or missions to the moon and beyond, or the next-generation radio telescope. They're also experiments in national prestige, international cooperation and technological leadership - and they can end up lasting far longer than the regimes that started them.

That point was brought home last weekend during a side trip on the Big Science Tour, to the Palace of Versailles near Paris. Among the glories on view were the newly renovated 17th-century Hall of Mirrors, as well as an 18th-century astronomical clock that has kept track of the hours, days, years and planetary progressions since Louis XV's reign.

Through revolutions and wars, these marvels demonstrated the scientific and technological prowess of the people who made them - sparking awe amid allies and would-be rivals, and stimulating future generations of innovators. Even the mirrors of Versailles had a technological purpose at the time, to demonstrate that France could outdo the Venetians in one of the most important crafts of the day.

Now the technological game is shifting, to reward those who can most skillfully capitalize on international collaboration. CERN provides one example of that, where the Europeans appear to be securely in the driver's seat when it comes to the next decade of particle physics.

The international fusion research effort known as ITER shows how things have changed in the half-century since CERN was created: After decades of political wrangling, ITER's seven parties worked out complicated formulas for divvying up and procuring the in-kind contributions that make up as much as 90 percent of the projected $13 billion budget. None of the countries wanted to serve merely as a cash machine for ITER; rather, they're all looking for the national boost resulting from Big Science.

"For the partners, this gives you an immediate guarantee that you have a return of the technologies," Carlos Alejaldre, one of ITER's acting deputy directors-general, explained to me.

Alejaldre said experts who are involved in future Big Science projects now under consideration, such as the International Linear Collider and the Square Kilometer Array, are  consulting with ITER officials about the lessons learned.

"Some people say that the management of ITER is an experiment in itself. ... This is a good example to follow to build these new experiments," he said.

Even the Boeing Co.'s next-generation Dreamliner jet, due for its debut next week, could be considered a private-sector experiment in international technological management, in light of the fact that the only structural component built strictly at a Boeing plant in the United States is the vertical tail fin.

However, there are experiments that result in something short of full success (like my video snapshots from CERN, for example). Will participating nations get less than their money's worth if it turns out that a Big Science project takes the wrong approach?

For instance, some have argued that the roughly billion-dollar Mars rover missions have provided more scientific bang for the buck than the $100 billion international space station project. Others maintain that ITER's approach to the fusion challenge is destined to lose out to other approaches such as inertial confinement (or inertial electrostatic confinement, which ranks right up there with the iPhone as one of the Web's latest buzztechs).

Over the weeks and months ahead, we'll be taking a closer look at future trends in international scientific collaboration as well as particle physics and fusion research. During this two-week European tour, some commenters have complained that I should have been taking a more critical look at Big Science - but it's hard to do that on a quick drop-in basis. Try to regard this tour merely as an initial, impressionistic look, to be followed up by the full treatment later.

So although this is the end of the Big Science Tour, it's not the end of our coverage. And we're certainly not closing off the commentary, either. Feel free to add your big-picture observations (as well as your brickbats about past coverage and tips for future coverage) in the comments section below.

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Toiling in the fields of physics ... Inside the antimatter factory ... First, the Web ... now, the Grid ... Suspense on a subatomic scale ... Inside fusion's fortress ... How far away is fusion? 

• L.A. Times: The Lewis and Clark of Mars 
• PC Magazine: Five ideas that will reinvent computing
• National Geographic: Bedlam in the blood
• The New Yorker: My nature documentary 

Alan Boyle / MSNBC.com

A bare spot amid forested land in the distance shows where ITER's nuclear fusion facility will be built in the French countryside. Construction is slated to begin in 2009. The tallest building on the complex will rise 160 feet (50 meters) high.

Right now, the site of the ITER experimental nuclear fusion plant is literally just a bare spot on the ground in the south of France. But the grand energy vision is gradually taking shape on the computers and whiteboards at the ITER organization's temporary quarters nearby - and Gary Johnson is already worried about getting everything ready in time for the big reveal in 2016.

"A 10-year cycle to do all this is very tight from our standpoint," Johnson told me in his very temporary office, set up in a prefab building at CEA Cadarache, one of France's nuclear research centers.

"All this" refers to the long list of tasks that Johnson, one of the top-ranking Americans in ITER's hierarchy, will have to oversee. During this week's visit to Cadarache, I saw firsthand how the international effort to develop commercially viable fusion reactors is only now beginning to gather critical mass.

ITER is an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but it also refers to the Latin word for "the way." ITER's seven partners, or "parties" - China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States - believe the effort will show the way toward the long-held but elusive dream of harnessing the power behind the sun's glow and an H-bomb's blast. Agreement on the ITER framework was announced two years ago today, and the treaty setting up the organization was signed last November.

ITER

An artist's conception shows what the ITER fusion facility would look like from the air, in the center of the picture, after completion in 2016.

Scheduled for startup in 2016, ITER's 15-story-tall facility would combine two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, amid temperatures of tens of millions of degrees to create helium and a neutron - releasing a burst of energy in the process. The chief challenge will be to contain all that power inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic field, generated by a superconducting contraption called a tokamak.

As one of ITER's seven acting deputy directors-general, Johnson is in charge of building the tokamak, in cooperation with all the parties backing the effort.

"It's definitely a big challenge," said Johnson, a veteran of nuclear research programs at the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore national labs. "We're going to have bumps in the road, but I go to a lot of meetings with various parties, and they're motivated just as much as we are to make this successful."

Kaname Ikeda, ITER's acting director-general (and Johnson's boss), is convinced that his nascent organization is taking the right way. "I feel quite comfortable," Ikeda told me. "It's just a question of investment and commitment by the parties. ... It's not something you can do alone."

If ITER is successful, the project could open the way to a new source of power - one that is arguably safer and cleaner than nuclear fission, potentially better for large-scale power generation than wind or solar, and less problematic than fossil fuels when it comes to the issue of global warming.

"Not to argue the impact, but I do think that nuclear energy is very essential to solve the living quality of the environment, and also to save many communities from the question of resources, and also to raise the supply of energy," Ikeda said.

Exploring all the inner workings of nuclear fusion research in general - and ITER in particular - will have to wait for a later time. It's just too much information to digest at once, even during this month's Big Science Tour.

For now, I'll just list some of the reasons why 2016 doesn't look that far away for Johnson. They aren't the reasons that you might think would apply. Sure, some people are doubtful whether ITER will actually show the way - but not Johnson. He believes commercial fusion is at least theoretically possible, even though it may take until 2040 to get all the way there.

"Basically, we know how to design this machine," he told me. "It's just a complicated, integrated package with a lot of different players, that's what makes it challenging for us."

The first challenge is to ramp up the ITER organization, while at the same time respecting the contributions of the seven parties. Although ITER has been decades in the making, the legal and administrative foundation for operations is only now being established.

ITER has to lay out the specifications for all of the facility's components, which are to be supplied by the parties under the terms of a complicated procurement formula. All this will take years to thrash out. Then, under the watchful eye of French nuclear regulators, ITER will be charged with making sure that the components do the job safely and according to the specs.

"It's going to be quite an interesting time when these things start coming in," Johnson said.

Materials science will be a big issue for the ITER facility. The cryogenically cooled tokamak will have to weather the radiation thrown off by the fusion plasma, as well as electromagnetic loads created by the magnetic containment system. All this will likely require the use of exotic metals such as beryllium, niobium and tungsten.

"In some cases, we're going to put a big dent in the world supply of some of these things," Johnson said. "We're going to be buying 23,000 tons of some high-tech stuff."

ITER's reactor will have to use radioactive tritium, and that means the components will degrade over time. The best workers for the job of maintaining the reactor will be robots, operating autonomously as well as under remote control, Johnson said. All this will require rock-solid systems for the remote handling of radioactive materials.

"We're going to actually test those out during our assembly activities," Johnson said.

Every day brings new issues to deal with. On Wednesday, the day we spoke, Johnson had at least three major meetings to attend - focusing on the plans for the tokamak's vacuum vessel, the superconducting coils and the building plans. France hasn't yet signed off on the permits for the actual fusion facility, so crews have just been clearing the trees off the main site and working on secondary buildings (like the prefab office space). Plant construction is due to begin in earnest in 2009.

Plenty of organizational matters as well as engineering challenges still have to be addressed. For example, Europe's procurement agency, Fusion for Energy, was inaugurated just today in Barcelona - and the agency's director has yet to be named. (The designated U.S. procurement agency is hosted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in partnership with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the Savannah River National Laboratory.) These domestic agencies will play a key role in making sure Johnson and other ITER officials have the hardware they'll need to make the reactor a reality.

And then there's the issue of public sentiment, which is often tinged with suspicion of all things nuclear. ITER officials have been conducting a series of public forums to reassure local residents in Provence about the facility's safety, and they say the project has been well-received. But not everyone is convinced. One sign painted on a hillside along the road to ITER's headquarters proclaims in French: "Non a ITER."

Check out the ITER Web site and review this discussion of ITER's pros and cons on the journal Nature's Weblog. Then put on your thinking cap and let me know whether you vote "oui" or "non" by adding your comments below. You can also register your opinion and find out what others think by taking this unscientific Live Vote.

I'm heading back home from Europe today, but I'll start passing along what you have to say as soon as I touch down in Seattle.

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Toiling in the fields of physics ... Inside the antimatter factory ... First, the Web ... now, the Grid ... Suspense on a subatomic scale ... Inside fusion's fortress. 

• Carnegie Mellon U.: Cosmic simulation includes black holes
• Science @ NASA: See the summer moon illusion
• Improbable Research: Geometry is a pizza lover's friend
• The Onion: 1939 World's Fair portends ghastly future

Alan Boyle / MSNBC.com

The entrance to Chateau de Cadarache has a medieval look.

You can count on the French to add a little joie de vivre to the most unlikely of pursuits – for example, by bringing haute cuisine to the battlefield. So it shouldn't be surprising that France's nuclear industry has a bit of elan as well: Witness the Chateau de Cadarache, a medieval castle that serves as the home away from home for scientists and engineers working at the country's top nuclear research site.

The setting is stunning: Far below the fortress, the Vordure River flows into the Durance, and on through Provence toward Marseille and the Mediterranean. The grounds boast plenty of walking paths, including a trail up to the stone chapel on a nearby hill. The chateau's rooms are spacious, and the restaurant menu offers glazed duck and other delicacies, plus a carefully thought-out selection of local wines. You might think you're at a resort, rather than at the site where the future of fusion power could well be forged.

Two years ago, Cadarache was selected as the site for the world's biggest nuclear fusion experiment, a $13 billion international project known as ITER. The ground has not yet been fully cleared for the new reactor. Construction is expected to last until 2016. And ITER's partners don't expect to demonstrate commercially viable energy production until 2040 or so. Nevertheless, things are humming around Cadarache: The talk at the dinner table (yes, over a tangy glass of Chateau de Clapier Cuvee Soprano) was about how housing prices are going up, and how rooms at the chateau are getting scarcer.

ITER isn't the only reason for the influx: As my colleagues at MSNBC.com reported earlier this year, nuclear fission may be making a comeback, with Europe leading the pack. Some of the chateau's guests spend several nights a week here, working on fission-related projects during the day at the nearby facilities of the French Atomic Energy Commission. The commission, known here by the French acronym CEA, recently marked the 60th anniversary of its founding - and in 2009, Cadarache itself will be hitting the Big 5-0 as one of the agency's main research centers.

OECD / NEA

The Chateau de Cadarache, seen at the center of this aerial photo, is surrounded by scenery.

One of the engineers commuting to Cadarache actually works for Areva, the agency's commercial spinoff. During dinner, we chatted about alternative technologies for separating out radioactive waste and eventually disposing of it deep underground, a la Yucca Mountain. It sounds as if the French are wrestling with the same kinds of issues Americans are facing when it comes to long-lasting nuclear waste.

In addition to its activities in France, Areva is angling for a share of the U.S. market for nuclear management - and generating political controversy in the process.

Nuclear research is rife with opportunities for political wrangling. For example, a standoff between Japan and Europe held up an agreement on the ITER project for three years. Both parties wanted to be the host for the reactor site, and neither would yield. Finally, negotiators (at times working here at the Chateau de Cadarache) came up with a Solomonic solution: Europe would get the ITER reactor site – and as a consolation prize, Japan would get favored status for procurement contracts and staff appointments, including the directorship.

The man who got the ITER concept going in the first place told me he's worried that such politics could hurt the fusion project before it really gets started. "That is my fear," said Robert Aymar, who went on from ITER's directorship in 2004 to become the director general of CERN, Europe's particle physics research center.

"It looks like now every decision, which should be purely technical, will become a political issue which is discussed by ambassadors and so on - and that is not something which is nice, for technical reasons," Aymar said last week at CERN, on the French-Swiss border. "ITER is a large experiment to build, and very complex and very difficult. To assume that you can solve that by splitting any decision by individuals from seven countries who are probably not competent for that role ... Bargaining that is not something which we should do."

Over the past week, we've seen how CERN is gearing up for its own big scientific challenge: next year's scheduled startup of the Large Hadron Collider. Next we'll delve into the challenges facing ITER as it starts toward its date with fusion's fate.

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Toiling in the fields of physics ... Inside the antimatter factory ... First, the Web ... now, the Grid ... Suspense on a subatomic scale.

• Astronomy: Venus and Saturn cross paths
• NASA: New office to study cosmic phenomena
• Slashdot: LiftPort founder responds to his critics
• Popular Science: The highest high dive

Who will find the "God particle" first? Next year, CERN is due to start up its Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border to hunt for the Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic particle that is thought to give rise to mass. But some scientists are wondering if Fermilab's Tevatron collider in Illinois might beat the LHC to the punch. For now, the wondering hasn't gone much beyond hints and rumors. Nevertheless, the Tevatron's operating life is likely to be extended to see if there's something real behind those rumors.

Over the past few weeks, the rumors have surfaced on physicists' Web logs as well as Wired's Web site, focusing on what's said to be a small amount of data from the Tevatron's DZero experiment. Just this month, the DZero team announced that they had identified a new type of "triple-scoop" baryon - but so far, nothing has been published relating to the purported Higgs results.

Bagging the Higgs boson would be a big deal because it's the only particle whose existence is predicted by the Standard Model but has not yet been found. The Standard Model, which some have called the "theory of almost everything," is a description of the subatomic world that has served exceedingly well as a guide for technologies ranging from microwave ovens to hydrogen bombs.

Over the past century the Standard Model has been repeatedly fleshed out and nailed down - but if it turns out that the theory is fundamentally wrong, that could force physicists to rewrite their cosmic rulebook. On the plus side, such rewritings typically lead to dramatic shifts in science and technology, as they did in the case of quantum theory and relativity.

Based on the reports that have emerged so far, including chats I've had with physicists at Europe's CERN research center over the past week, it appears safe to say that there's something intriguing about the DZero data, but not yet enough statistical significance to the results. More runs are required to determine whether what has been seen is just a crazy blip or true evidence of the Higgs boson.

The big question is, how much longer will the Tevatron be around for those future runs? The traditional expectation has been that the collider would be shut down in 2008, and that particle physicists from the United States as well as other parts of the world would turn their attention to the more powerful Large Hadron Collider.

But Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson told me that an advisory panel appears likely to recommend keeping the Tevatron around through 2009. "It is far from a done deal, but it looks as if that is going to be what they will recommend," she said Monday.

That recommendation would have to be pushed up the chain, through the Department of Energy and on to Congress, Jackson said. But the prospects look good, based on what the scientists are seeing. "It does illustrate the fact that there is a possibility that people could find something interesting," she said.

There are a couple of other factors at work: The schedule for starting up the Large Hadron Collider has faced some setbacks, and this means the particle physicists involved in the Tevatron collaborations (DZero as well as CDF) might be more willing to stick around. And Jackson said that the Tevatron has been working better than ever.

"The Tevatron is exceeding everyone's expectations. ... The experiments are getting, I think the technical term is, a boatload of data," she said jokingly.

Jackson said the Tevatron was in top form primarily because scientists had found some "really clever ways of getting more collisions per second out of the machine." If the machine is working well, and there's not yet another game in town, and the promise of a big scientific payoff is out there – why not keep it going?

"The whole thing is obviously about the science," Jackson said.

During my visit to Europe's research center, one of the top scientists behind the Large Hadron Collider acknowledged that the Tevatron was still in the hunt for the Higgs.

"There is a possibility, there is a window for Fermilab still at this moment for Higgs physics," said Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer and deputy director general. "The longer we wait, the higher the probability that Fermilab discovers something that we wouldn't mind discovering ourselves here."

But what exactly might Fermilab have discovered? On one hand, some of the rumors indicate that the results match up with the Standard Model's predictions for the Higgs boson's characteristics. On the other hand, particle physicist Ian Hinchliffe told me the Higgs results just might be, well, non-Standard.

"If the result is right, then it's not the Standard Model Higgs," said Hinchliffe, who is a theorist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as the physics coordinator for the U.S. Atlas collaboration at the LHC. The rate of particle production appeared to be too high, a result that could suggest there's a family of at least five Higgs particles out there, he said.

No matter what the result turns out to be, the last word will likely go to the LHC rather than the Tevatron - just because the LHC is capable of producing collision energies several times as high. Fermilab is heavily involved in the LHC project as well as the Tevatron, so the lab has all its bets covered.

On Friday, as a matter of fact, Fermilab conducted the first tests on LHC magnets that had to be modified in the wake of an untimely failure in March, Jackson said."We did a test of the retrofit that people had to do, and the retrofitted magnet performed like a champ," she said.

For Jackson and the rest of the Fermilab team, that was a real day-brightener. And for the rest of us, there's this cover art from the May issue of Symmetry magazine. Thanks to cartoonist Roz Chast, the elusive Higgs boson never looked so good.

While you're paging through Symmetry, don't miss the picture story about Katie and Adam Yurkewicz. As the U.S. communications representative for the LHC, Katie Yurkewicz was our main host for last week's visit to CERN - and deserves thanks for putting the "big" in the Big Science Tour.

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Toiling in the fields of physics ... Inside the antimatter factory ... First, the Web ... now, the Grid.

CERN

Computer cases are lined up in CERN's Computing Center with room to spare.

The World Wide Web was born in 1990 to manage the billions of bytes of data from experiments at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory. Now the same laboratory is gearing up for a new round of experiments that could generate more than a quadrillion bytes of data every month - data that will have to be processed and delivered to researchers around the world. Is there anything in sight that could outdo the Web? Say hello to the Grid.

CERN has been working for a decade on the foundations for the Grid, which is a next-generation network that draws upon storage space as well as processing power from linked computers. That's about as long as it's been preparing for the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC.

The LHC's experiments will be taking in the details from millions of proton collisions every second. A lot of the less interesting data will be filtered out almost immediately by the "trigger" computer programs overseeing each experiment. Nevertheless, hundreds of megabytes of data will be dumped into CERN's central computer system every second.

"That means you fill a DVD in a few seconds," Francois Grey of CERN's Computing Center told me. Over the course of a year, the center is due to store 15 billion megabytes of data – which you can also think of as 15 petabytes, 15 quadrillion bytes or (according to CERN) roughly 1 percent of all the information generated by humanity in the course of a year.

All those data will have to be available on demand for the 7,000 researchers around the globe who are slaving away on the LHC experiments. The information flow is expected to rise to 1.6 gigabytes per second, or roughly 1,000 times faster than your typical high-end cable Internet connection.

Fortunately, information technology has come a long way since the invention of the Internet (in the 1960s) and the Web (in 1990).  You can tell by all the empty space you see in the Computing Center's air-conditioned hive, in the heart of CERN's campus on the French-Swiss border.

Thousands of computers and robotically controlled tape drives are humming right along, processing simulated data to prepare for the real thing. But there's still enough empty floor space available to start up a bowling alley.

"We have this oversized computer center because it's from the '70s, when computers were huge," Grey explained.

Even while information is coming in from the experiments for storage, Grey said, it will be going out via a 10-gigabit-per-second optical-fiber network to 11 Tier 1 computers around the globe (PDF file). Like a multilevel-marketing pyramid, the network is structured so that Tier 1 computers feed the data to more than 50 Tier 2 computers in various regions (PDF file). Those computers, in turn, distribute the data to the home institutions for all of the 7,000-plus collaborators in the LHC experiments.

"What's new here is that we're getting hundreds of organizations to share resources," Grey said. He added that the "human challenge is in a sense bigger than the technical challenge."

But Grey said the Grid is settling into place as CERN prepares to move from merely simulating the data load to sending out the real stuff. "The peak grumbling phase is over," he joked.

There are already moves afoot to expand Grid technology to other applications. The Open Science Grid and EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) are among the first initiatives going beyond the LHC, Grey said. He foresees a day when climate modelers, genetics researchers, oil and gas prospectors and others who have to deal with large, dynamic data sets will get into Grids as well. "It'll be behind the scenes in Web services who use them," Grey said.

Many everyday Web users are already using different breeds of Grids, such as SETI @ Home, Einstein @ Home or Stardust @ Home. CERN itself is joining the club by offering LHC @ Home as a public project.

Just as the Web addressed the challenges of the 1990s, interlocking Grids will be called upon to address the challenges of the 21st century. "It's not about information management now. It's data processing and storage," Grey said.

But when you consider Grids for the common computer user, you have to remember the potential downside. Like the Web, the Grid can be used for good or evil: One could easily imagine the rise of a malevolent Grid - in fact, the zombies may already be taking over.

Add your own thoughts about the rise of the Grid in the comments section below - and for more information about the Grid's past, present and future, just drop in at CERN's Grid Cafe. As for me, I spent the weekend dropping in on cafes and tourist sites in Paris, but I'm due to get back on the road on Tuesday.

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Toiling in the fields of physics ... Inside the antimatter factory.

• PhysOrg: Could quantum dots be used in teleportation?
• Science News: What's inside a hurricane's core?
• Air & Space: Can we hear E.T. now? (via Daily Grail)
• ZDNet: Will airship tourism rise again? Oh, the humanity!

Colin Hicks / MSNBC.com

Professor Joel Fajans of the University of California at Berkeley, a member of the ALPHA antimatter research team, looks over equipment at the Antiproton Decelerator facility on the CERN campus.

It's not often that a scientific experiment gets written up as a front-page news story, as well as a science-fiction twist in a best-selling thriller and a can't-miss movie script - but that's what's been happening to CERN's Antiproton Decelerator facility, the only place in the world where whole atoms of antimatter are built.

This summer, physicists at the facility are engaged in their own real-life thriller: Two teams of researchers are racing each other to be the first to trap atoms of antihydrogen in a magnetic cage. The researchers who do it first will grab the headlines once again. And the other team? "Being second is last in this game," said Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at the University of Aarhus who is the spokesman for the ALPHA antimatter collaboration.

The race illustrates how competition kicks the science up a notch - and how hard it is to turn science fiction into science fact.

Today, Hangst showed us around the Antiproton Decelerator's digs, down one of the less-traveled streets on CERN's campus straddling the French-Swiss border.

"This is the hall mentioned in the Dan Brown book 'Angels and Demons,'" Hangst told us. "This is what inspired the book."

The first scenes in "Angels and Demons" - the book Brown wrote before "The Da Vinci Code" - focus on crimes of catastrophic proportions at CERN. An international conspiracy steals a quarter of a gram of antimatter, intending to use it to blow up the Vatican. And from there, Brown's protagonists and villains are off and running.

In the wake of the splash over "The Da Vinci Code," Hollywood is doing up a movie version of "Angels and Demons," with Tom Hanks returning to his "Da Vinci" starring role.

Of course, there's far less than a quarter of a gram of real-life science in the antimatter plot. (And despite what it says in the book, there's no evidence that CERN has a supersonic jet or an indoor skydiving facility, either.) So Hangst is pretty sure the world is safe from an antimatter Armageddon.

"To make a milligram of antihydrogen would take more than the age of the universe," he told me. "It's just not a useful weapons technology by any stretch of the imagination."

I guess that also means we won't be seeing a "Star Trek" matter-antimatter drive anytime soon.

Even if you set aside the science fiction, the reality at the Antiproton Decelerator is dramatic enough: Back in 2002, Hangst coordinated the ATHENA collaboration, which assembled antiprotons and positrons to create antihydrogen atoms. The achievement earned acclaim from scientific journals as well as the popular press.

ATHENA's rival, the Harvard-led ATRAP collaboration, accomplished the same feat using different equipment months later - and published its own set of scientific papers. The acclaim, however, was somewhat less.

Now ALPHA, the successor to ATHENA, is once again in competition with ATRAP. The funny thing is that the two teams both use the same Antiproton Decelerator, setting up shop in nearby sections of the laboratory floor. "The only two experiments that can do this are 5 meters apart," Hangst noted.

Colin Hicks / MSNBC.com

A yellow radiation sticker is pasted on the lead-shielded box where positrons are kept for the ALPHA antimatter experiment. The antimatter trap itself is farther back, in a welter of cryogenic plumbing.

ALPHA and ATRAP have divvied up access to the facility with the Japanese-European ASACUSA collaboration, which is conducting a totally different type of antimatter research. Each of the three teams gets a daily eight-hour shift, which means the Antiproton Decelerator can be in a 24-hour usage mode.

This week, we've been talking mostly about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will become the world's biggest particle collider when it starts up next year. The Antiproton Decelerator is a very different part of CERN's research portfolio. The LHC will be focused on revving particles up to bust things apart at high energy, but the AD specializes in slowing antiparticles down so that they can be put together at low energy. The LHC involves thousands of researchers. In contrast, mere dozens are working on antimatter research.

ALPHA and ATRAP get their antiprotons from the same source, a ring tunnel in which negatively charged antiprotons are filtered out and cooled down to become manageable pulses of particles (hence the term "decelerator").

Although the two teams use different equipment and procedures, they follow a similar recipe to make antihydrogen. The antiprotons have to be slowed down and chilled down even further, to the point that they're just sitting in one section of a receptacle. Positively charged antielectrons (that is, positrons) are chilled down in another section.

The physicists working at CERN came up with clever electromagnetic traps to keep all those particles contained - almost like a Roach Motel for antimatter. "You can get in, but you can't get out," Hangst joked.

The next step was to blend the two ingredients carefully so that some of the positrons start dancing around the cold antiprotons, becoming atoms of antihydrogen. That's basically the state of the art up to now.

So far, physicists haven't been able to keep the neutral anti-atoms from drifting out of their electromagnetic cages - which means they quickly come in contact with ordinary matter and blow up. The only way to tell that anti-atoms were created in the first place is to detect the tiny, characteristic bursts of energy when they go away.

"Our critics will tell you that we haven't done any physics yet, and in some ways they're right, because we have yet to really measure something about antihydrogen, something fundamental about it," Hangst said. "Obviously if you want to do that, having the atoms disappear as soon as you make them is not a good idea. So the next step is to try to stop that from happening."

The challenge for ALPHA as well as ATRAP is to develop another type of cage that will still allow the mixing of antiparticles, but keep the resulting atom from drifting away. The two teams have designed different magnet systems that could theoretically "steer" the anti-atoms into a stable position.

Which system will do the trick first? "As usual, it's a race here - it's a race hour to hour," Hangst said.

Being able to keep antihydrogen in a cage is just one more step in a grander endeavor. Once physicists start storing up those anti-atoms, the next step would be to find ways to study them - in ALPHA's case, by using laser light to analyze the spectral signature of antihydrogen.

The conventional assumption has been that antihydrogen's signature would be identical to hydrogen's. But in recent years, scientists have found slight asymmetry between matter and antimatter. A close inspection of stable antihydrogen could help explain that asymmetry - and perhaps explain why there is almost no antimatter out there in the cosmos, even though theory dictates that matter and antimatter were made in equal proportions when the universe was born.

The antimatter factory at CERN could eventually blaze a whole new trail for physics, but for now, Hangst is focusing on the road in front of his feet - and the prize that's waiting at the finish line.

"When something like this comes out, you see it in newspapers all over the world," he said. "It's a big deal. ... It's not like anything I've ever been through before. And that's the atmosphere here."

CERN update: We reported Thursday that CERN was setting next May as the new target for the start of operations at the Large Hadron Collider, and today CERN issued the official news release mentioning May as the current goal. That time frame is in line with what was expected in the wake of a magnet mishap this March. Of course, the schedule could change again between now and next May, depending on how quickly the final phase of construction is completed. CERN's chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, provided some extra wiggle room by referring to the beginning of June as well as May.

The release also refers to the additional financial support for upgrades at the Large Hadron Collider - yet another angle we reported Thursday.

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Toiling in the fields of physics.

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'The Great Inca Rebellion' 
• The Economist: Diary from the Canadian Arctic
• Planetary Society Weblog: A visit to the next Mars rover
• Mars Society: Mars is under attack!

Colin Hicks / MSNBC.com

A worker on a crane checks one of the segments of the Compact Muon Solenoid, a particle detector that will be part of CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

The huge warehouse seems out of place in the French countryside, surrounded by pastures and cornfields. And if the farmers who work those fields were to take a look inside the structure, they might be forgiven if they thought space aliens had dropped a flying-saucer factory in their midst. Sticking up from the warehouse floor are massive disks of metal, lined up in a row and rising more than four stories into the air.

These are pieces of the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the four major detectors being built for the world's most powerful particle collider. Right now, the rounds look as if they were cut from a giant metallic jelly roll, measuring 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter. But when all those slices are lowered through a hole in the warehouse floor and assembled, sometime in the next few months, the Compact Muon Solenoid will be a 13,750-ton (12,500-metric-ton) cylinder sitting in the guts of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, 330 feet (100 meters) beneath the countryside.

"It is the heaviest scientific experiment ever," said Steven Nahn, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is a member of the CMS research team.

To call this contraption "compact" seems like a gross misnomer: The CMS is compact only in relation to its rival sibling, the ATLAS detector, which is roughly twice as large but only half as massive. The contrasts in the weights and dimensions hint at the different designs for ATLAS and CMS - two detectors that are designed to probe the same types of subatomic mysteries.

When the collider is turned on next spring, the teams behind ATLAS and CMS will be racing each other to find evidence of long-predicted but still-unseen subatomic particles, such as the Higgs boson (thought to give rise to mass itself) and supersymmetric particles (which may contribute to our universe's mysterious dark matter). If one detector finds a new twist in physics, the other will serve as a reality check.

As we toured the CMS site today, Nahn noted that the competition is a friendly one. Both teams recognize they need each other - particularly when it comes to stalking the Higgs boson. "If one finds it, the other better see it," he told me.

Construction crews check each slice of the detector, lower it down into the collider cavern with a giant crane, then outfit it for the work ahead. Eventually, all the slices will be smooshed together, surrounding a solenoid that Nahn calls "the world's biggest doorbell magnet." Within that high-powered solenoid magnet will be an intricate silicon device, designed to follow the tracks of subatomic particles that are thrown off by the collision of high-energy proton beams.

Data will flow in floods from the CMS detector. "People describe it as an 80-million-pixel camera that takes 40 million frames per second," Nahn said. Computers will have to winnow that raw data down to mere millions of bits per second - separating the wheat from the chaff. That should be something the farmers working above the CMS totally understand.

Colin Hicks / MSNBC.com

Fermilab's Peter Limon, MSNBC.com's Alan Boyle and MIT's Steven Nahn walk down the ring tunnel for CERN's Large Hadron Collider, 330 feet below ground.

Before all those bits start flowing, the collider's 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground ring will have to be ready to handle the accelerated proton beams - and that's the job of people such as Fermilab's Peter Limon, who is working on the U.S.-built segments of the ring's powerful magnets.

As our group headed toward the elevator to descend to the ring tunnel, Limon checked our hardhats and handed us metal containers that looked like industrial-strength lunch boxes with canvas straps attached. He explained that the boxes actually contained emergency breathing equipment, in case something went wrong in the tunnel's ventilation system. It's a safety requirement, but Limon said he's never had occasion to use the equipment.

"My advice is, if anything happens, drop that thing and run to the nearest exit," he told us.

Despite his easy-going manner, Limon knows all too well that bad things can happen underground. In March, his efforts suffered a huge setback when a magnet segment broke during a high-pressure test. The segments look like sections of pipeline on the outside, but on the inside they're stuffed with plumbing, cryogenically cooled vacuum chambers and beamline conduits. It turned out that a particular type of segment was improperly designed to handle the pressurization. When the lines were put to the test, the magnet's innards pushed out in an unexpected direction and buckled with a loud bang.

"It's an embarrassment, it's a pain," Limon told us down in the tunnel.

Now that the problem has been analyzed fully, all the magnets with the design flaw are being fixed. "The important thing is that all the fixes can be done in situ," Limon said. Modifying the magnets in place, rather than pulling them up out of the tunnel, will save a lot of time. Nevertheless, the mishap put a huge dent in the schedule for getting the Large Hadron Collider up and running.

Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer and deputy director-general, confirmed that the scheduled start of operations is being pushed back from November to next spring, in the May-June time frame. But he also told me the project's coordinators would try to make up for some of the lost time by doing some of the commissioning activities in parallel, and by bringing the collider up to full power more quickly once everything is ready to go.

"Around Christmas of 2008, we should be satisfied, with a good harvest of entirely new data," Engelen said.

Engelen was also pleased to report that CERN's Council approved a plan to provide $193 million (240 million Swiss francs) over four years to upgrade the Large Hadron Collider and "optimize its performance." The money will come from increased contributions by CERN's member nations, he said.

Like good farmers, Engelen and his colleagues are bearing the highs and lows patiently, confident that the scientific seeds they're planting underground will yield a rich bounty.

"You should be here when we switch on," he told me, "and only then will people realize how big a relief and how big a step this is."

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle ... Inside the big-bang machine.

• Telegraph: Archaeologist sparks Holy Grail hunt (via Daily Grail)
• Technology Review: The rise of Second Earth
• BBC: Fruit could make a powerful fuel
• National Geographic: Mysterious 'sprites' caught on film

EIROforum / CERN

A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector. The collider is due to begin operation in 2008.

The future of particle physics is being built below ground, in a setting that's more appropriate for construction hardhats than lab coats. To get to the caverns where the world's most powerful particle collider is taking shape, you have to take an industrial-issue elevator down just one floor. But that floor is a doozy: It's about 100 meters below ground, roughly as deep as a 30-story building is tall.

The machines under construction in the depths are just as gargantuan: It's hard for any picture to capture the immensity of the ATLAS experiment's seven-story-tall, electronics-laden cylinder. You have to be there to get the full effect. So that's where we went today, and we've created three video postcards just to say "wish you were here."

ATLAS is just one of the four major experimental edifices placed around the 17-mile (27-kilometer) ring on the French-Swiss border - an underground tunnel that will be the home of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. Scientists from around the world have converged on CERN's facilities here in hopes of finding the answers to decades-old questions about the subatomic world.

Those scientists will have to wait longer than they expected to look for those answers: Like most construction projects, the LHC hasn't kept pace with the laid-out schedule, due to a nasty magnet accident as well as other hitches. The revised schedule calls for operations to begin next spring rather than this fall.

As a result, the construction crews building ATLAS and the other science structures have a little more time to finish their work - and at each of the three sites we visited today, the crews were clanging away. You'll have to bear with the background noise and the shaky shutter as you click through these home movies, but they'll at least give you some sense of the project's scale.

The first video postcard features Silvia Schuh, a researcher on the ATLAS experiment team, showing off the current state of the 82-foot-high (25-meter-high), 151-foot-long (46-meter-long) detector. The middle of the giant cylinder is almost totally hidden by scaffolding, but you can see the wedge-shaped elements that are designed to identify the track of muons as they zoom away from the proton collisions at the heart of ATLAS.

ATLAS is one of the LHC's two general-purpose detectors, and is expected to point to the existence of the long-sought Higgs boson (which is thought to create the field that gives particles their mass) as well as other weird particles that may be responsible for mysterious dark matter.

In the second video clip, Roger Forty, deputy spokesperson for the LHCb experiment at CERN, points out some of the components on the business end of his team's apparatus: LHCb is aimed at answering questions about why matter is so predominant over antimatter in our universe.

And in the third clip, Jurgen Schukraft, CERN spokesperson for the ALICE experiment, points out how a beam of heavy ions will come from a section of the 17-mile-round accelerator tunnel and plow right into his team's detector.

ALICE is designed to create miniature big bangs, enabling researchers to study the conditions that existed just an instant after the universe was born. Scientists say they've have already created such a primordial brew, known as quark-gluon plasma, in a liquid state. Schukraft and his team want to see if quark-gluon plasma might exist as a gas at higher energies. The ALICE experiment is one of the prime reasons why the LHC is called a "big-bang machine."

We have a couple of additional stops on our Big Science Tour on Thursday - including a look at the last of the LHC's four major experiments, known as the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS. The CMS team has had its challenges, reportedly leading some wags to refer to the project as "See a Mess." But we don't expect to see a mess during our visit - instead, we'll see still more signs of science under construction.

Previously from the Big Science Tour: The science behind the tour ... Living in the Web's cradle.

• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): The race to recover a lost kingdom
• Popular Mechanics: Jet packs finally go on sale (via GeekPress)
• Improbable Research: Bicycle helmets vs. wigs
• The Onion: National air conditioner to address climate crisis

There's a thrill to logging onto the Internet from Europe's CERN nuclear research center for the first time, just as there's a thrill to your first sip of a latte at the original Starbucks coffee shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market. That's because the World Wide Web got its start right here, on a woodsy campus near the French-Swiss border.

But that's not the place's only claim to fame: It was here that physicists found the particles behind the weak nuclear force and figured out how neutrinos fit into the subatomic family tree. And the future is looking even brighter: In the leapfrog race to build ever-bigger particle colliders, the Large Hadron Collider - due to be turned on at CERN next year - is the biggest of them all, with no competitor currently in sight.

We'll be delving more deeply (literally!) into the Large Hadron Collider later in the week. But for now, let's talk about a more pragmatic concern: the housing crunch resulting from the hubbub here.

All the activity surrounding the new collider has turned CERN (which is the French acronym for the European Nuclear Research Center) into an international mecca for physicists. Already, about 8,000 researchers from 50 countries work on experiments at CERN, and some of those visiting scientists say they're feeling the crunch as the new collider ramps up. It can take weeks or months to find a suitable place.

The building where we're staying is designed to relieve some of that pressure: Building 41, which opened just last month, adds another 100 rooms to the 400 or so that are available on or right next to the campus. The quarters are much like monastic cells: Don't expect to see cable TV or game rooms here. I've put together a little home movie as an illustration.

[YouTube:2DiuB9FvW90]

Clearly, the setting isn't designed for luxury living - and that's not what it's about here. In fact, after I finished up my cafeteria dinner (penne with meat sauce, salad with a raspberry vinaigrette, and a Cardinal beer that tasted great on a muggy evening), I sidled up to a table full of twentysomething researchers. They were somewhat at a loss when I asked what they did during their time off.

"What time off?" one said.

We'll learn more about what all these physicists do with all their time when we take our first tours on Wednesday.

• New Scientist: Do black holes really exist?
• Physics News Update: Time and time again
• UCLA: Virtual Qumran sheds light on Dead Sea Scrolls site
• Discovery.com: NASA launch towers blasted down

For the next decade or so, if you want to see the biggest science projects on Earth, Europe is the place to go. One one hand, you have the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle collider, which is in the final stages of construction at the CERN nuclear research center on the French-Swiss border. And on the other hand you have the $13 billion ITER experimental fusion reactor to be built in the French countryside near Marseille.

The scientific shrines are already the object of pilgrimages - by researchers as well as journalists - and over the next 10 days, we'll be sending back dispatches from our own midsummer sojourn to the holy sites.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is the latest in a series of "Big Bang" machines aimed at finding exotic subatomic particles that theorists think should exist but have never been seen. No. 1 on the most-wanted list is the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the "God Particle," which is thought to be responsible for mass itself (yes, the m in E=mc2). Other suspects include candidates for dark matter, as well as particles that may hint at spatial dimensions beyond the three we can perceive (while giving string theorists something to cheer about).

Along the way, physicists could find mini-black holes, plus new insights about exotic quarks and the balance of matter vs. antimatter. That's sparked some worries that the LHC could destroy the universe - worries that the LHC's scientists are trying to put to rest.

The physicists have their own, less cosmic worries: Big science tends to follow the rule of pinball, as laid out in "The Soul of a New Machine," Tracy Kidder's book on the computer-chip industry: "If you win, you get to play again." Some of the folks working on the LHC say they'll need some really, really big wins if they're ever going play again. If the LHC doesn't find what scientists expect to see, that may be scientifically interesting - but it will make lawmakers think twice about putting up billions of dollars more for the next, next "Big Bang" machine.

The engineering challenges involved in bringing the LHC to life are as much a part of the story as the promised scientific returns. Due in large part to an accident involving a faulty magnet, the Large Hadron Collider's startup has been postponed until next spring. We'll aim to provide an on-the-ground update on how the builders are coping.

To learn more about the LHC, check out the tales from past journalistic pilgrims at Seed magazine, National Public Radio, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

After a few days at CERN (and, ahem, a long weekend in Paris), we'll be heading over to Cadarache, home of the French nuclear research effort and the winner of the international competition to become the site of the world's most advanced fusion experiment. Right now there's not a whole lot to see. The builders are just starting to clear the site for construction. But scientists and engineers are already laying their plans, and the controversies have already begun.

ITER is an acronym that stands for "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor," but you don't see that spelled out much in the press materials for the project. The fact that the thermonuclear angle is downplayed is apparently aimed at avoiding an outcry from anti-nuclear activists, even though the project's leaders insist the reactor will be totally safe (PDF file). Instead, the project emphasizes that ITER is Latin for "the way." 

But is it really the way? ITER's magnetic containment vessel - or tokamak, to use the Russian-derived acronym - is today's most favored approach to commercial fusion. But there are other proposed approaches out there, and the backers of those alternatives have heaped criticism on the "tokamakers." Last year, an article in the journal Science said ITER may never lead to a viable technology for future fusion reactors, drawing a sharp response from ITER's backers.

Greenpeace and other environmental campaigners, meanwhile, argue that the billions being spent on fusion research should be used instead to address the climate change crisis and to develop renewable-energy technologies.

During our brief visit to Cadarache, we'll get a look at the site and find out how scientists expect the experiment to turn out. In the meantime, you can learn more by clicking over to Seed magazine as well as this BBC Q&A.

The Big Science Tour will be focused on experiments in more ways than one: This will be a logistical experiment for Cosmic Log as well. We're not exactly sure what capabilities we'll have on the road - so you may see video and still pictures, you may see text, you may even see nothing at all until we get back home. Bear with us (that is, MSNBC colleague Colin Hicks and I), and wish us good fortune on our pilgrimage.

• Slashdot: Is colonizing the galaxy impossible?
• Fermilab: Physicists find 'triple-scoop' subatomic particle 
• BBC: Warnings of 'Internet overload'
• Scientific American: An Earth without people

Zero Gravity Corp.

Lucy Hawking follows in her physicist father's footsteps on a zero-gravity flight.

World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy have finished a fictional tale that's aimed at the middle-school set but takes on grown-up topics ranging from black holes to the origins of the universe. Lucy Hawking says the book, "George's Secret Key to the Universe," should give kids a better grasp on the cosmic mysteries that are her father's specialties.

Has the father-daughter team come up with new scientific explanations that can turn cosmology into child's play? "There's something really great," Lucy Hawking told me, "but if I tell you, it would spoil the plot." Despite the Harry Potteresque air of secretiveness, she went on to drop a few hints about what kids will find when they crack the book open in October.

Simon & Schuster

"George's Secret Key to the Universe" is a father- daughter effort.

"'George's Secret Key to the Universe' is an adventure story about two children who find a sort of computer portal through which they can slip into the solar system and beyond," she explained.

Among the themes covered in the book will be "black holes, obviously stellar formation, the formation of the solar system, our place in the solar system and the way that you as a child, or a human being on this planet, relate to the universe around us," she said.

"I'm sorry to be Miss Mystery, but I can't tell you more," she said.

Her famous father's involvement in the project is obviously a powerful draw, considering that his nonfiction book about frontier physics, "A Brief History of Time," quickly became a best seller when it was published in 1988. Since then, he's coped with the progressive effects of a neurogenerative disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease) - and today he can communicate only through a computer controlled by facial gestures (or, in a pinch, through an eyeblink code).

Despite the disability, the elder Hawking played a key role in making sure the physics of "George's Secret Key" turned out just right, the younger Hawking said.

"The book was my idea, and I came up with the creative framework into which we wanted to blend the physics," she told me. "The science and the storyline depend on each other to take the book forward."

During the writing process, father and daughter bounced ideas off each other, with an extra assist from Christophe Galfard, one of the physicist's former graduate assistants.

"There was so much bouncing," Lucy Hawking said. "There were just hours and hours and hours of conversation."

She said the name of the book's main character was inspired by her grandfather on her mother's side, who died two years ago. But 65-year-old Stephen is tickled by the fact that George is also his grandson's name. Indeed, he's tickled by the mere idea that he can share his scientific vision with the pre-teen set.

"My dad's really, really excited about this book," Lucy said.

October's publication of "George's Secret Key," which publisher Simon & Schuster lists at 320 pages (with illustrations by Garry Parsons), will by no means be the end of the adventure for George - or for Lucy and Stephen, for that matter. Lucy told me she and her father are working on two more books in the series.

"We couldn't have covered everything in one children's book," she said.

For more on Stephen Hawking's scientific and personal life, check out the report from my first encounter with the physicist in April, or my coverage of his zero-gravity airplane flight later that month.

By the way, Lucy Hawking followed in her father's footsteps last weekend on a Zero Gravity excursion - which led us to compare notes on the weightless experience.

"It's like being a small child, isn't it?" she told me. "You've got that sense of exuberance and hilarity. You just can't stop laughing."

• Join the discussion at Space Solar Power 
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Bone Diggers'
• The Economist: Biology's Big Bang
• Technology Review: Driverless car passes first tests

NASA today released the first pictures from this month's flyby of Venus by the Messenger spacecraft, which is on its way to the $427 million mission's main event at Mercury. The black-and-white snapshots provide just a preliminary taste of what is said to be a spectacular portfolio comprising more than 600 images.

NASA / JHU-APL

This black-and-white image was captured as Messenger closed in on Venus.

Messenger got as close as 210 miles (338 kilometers) from Venus during the June 5 encounter, giving the mission team a chance to put the probe's Mercury Dual Imaging System to the test. Once Messenger gets to Mercury, it will use the wide-angle/narrow-angle camera system to map out landforms and gather data on surface composition.

The cameras weren't designed specifically to show off cloud-shrouded Venus to its best advantage, but Messenger's principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said in a news release that the dress rehearsal was a "huge success." The probe's aim was so good that a course correction planned for July will not be necessary after all, he said.

Arizona State University's Mark Robinson, a member of the Messenger science team, said the most detailed image released today, taken on June 5, would be used to fine-tune the MDIS.

"Venus is enshrouded by a global cloud layer that obscures its surface to the MDIS," Robinson explained. "This single frame is part of a color sequence taken inbound to help us calibrate the wide-angle camera in preparation for its first flyby of Mercury next January. Over the next several months the camera team will pore over the 614 images taken during the Venus 2 encounter to adjust color sensitivity parameters and better understand the geometric properties of the instrument."

NASA / JHU-APL

This sequence shows Venus receding as Messenger flew away on June 5-6.

Another series of images released today shows Venus receding in Messenger's rear-view mirror over a 25-hour-plus period on June 5 and 6. "These images provide a spectacular goodbye to the cloud-shrouded planet while also providing valuable data to the camera calibration team," Robinson said.

He said a preliminary analysis of the images indicated that "the cameras are healthy and will be ready for next January's close encounter with Mercury."

The Messenger spacecraft was launched in 2004 and made its first Venus flyby last October. This month's encounter was the second Venus flyby. January's encounter will be Messenger's first brush with Mercury - additional flybys are scheduled in October 2008 and September 2009, with the probe settling into orbit around the first rock from the sun in March 2011.

The mission is being managed by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory on NASA's behalf.

The images released today may be the first from this month's flyby, but they won't be the last. Solomon promised that the science team would release further data "as fast as we can." So stay tuned for still more Venusian views - and mark your calendar for the probe's Jan. 14 date with Mercury. 

How many people are still cranking along with a 12-year-old computer at work? If that's your situation, you might have a bit more sympathy for the astronauts trying to cope with the computer problems on the international space station. The system that controls the station's orientation as well as other key functions on the Russian side of the outpost basically uses 12-year-old chips that were designed using a 21-year-old architecture and sent into orbit seven years ago.

NBC News space analyst James Oberg pointed out today that the Russian computers were actually built in Germany under contract with the European Space Agency. And if you delve further into the origins of the system, you'll find that the computers use radiation-hardened ERC32 three-chip processors that came from the factory in 1995 or so. The chips had to go through a grueling round of tests, during which some serious floating-point glitches were identified and fixed (PDF file). Then they were incorporated into the DMS-R computers that went up with the Russian-built Zvezda module in 2000.

Go another level deeper, and you'll find that the ERC32 chips are based on the SPARC V7 chip architecture, which was pioneered by Sun Microsystems and came out in 1986. The chips are way obsolete by now - even the European Space Agency acknowledges that - and the company that made them was absorbed long ago by Atmel Corp., based in San Jose, Calif.

The software running on those chips has a California connection as well: It's written on top of the VxWorks operating system, produced by Wind River Systems in Alameda, Calif. VxWorks, a Unix-like real-time programming platform, is a popular choice for spacecraft software: It was used on the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission as well as NASA's Stardust probe and the still-operating Mars Exploration Rovers.

So there are at least three lessons to be learned from digging into the genealogy of space station gadgetry: One is that it takes a long lead time to get hardware into space, at least the way governmental space agencies do it. Another is that space technology is becoming increasingly international. And the third lesson is that you shouldn't be so quick to make fun of Russian space technology. If you follow the trail  far enough, you just might end up back in Silicon Valley.

• Javno: Bosnian 'pyramid' loses funding (via Daily Grail)
• Scientific American: Arctic plants move fast as climate changes
• Slate: The quest for radioactive items on eBay
• Seed Magazine: Ghosts of climates past

The organizers of this year's $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge have just unveiled an upgraded Web site that tells everything the competitors want you to know about their rocket-powered hovercrafts.

Sometimes that's not much. In fact, one of the nine listed teams is going totally incognito for the time being. But the other eight provide at least some hints of what they're up to. For the record, those eight have been mentioned as likely entrants, but this is the first time the official list has been revealed.

The lineup includes Acuity Technologies, Armadillo Aerospace, BonNova, Masten Space Systems, Micro-Space, Paragon Labs, Speed Up and Unreasonable Rocket.

Armadillo was the only entrant in last year's challenge, although Masten, Acuity and Micro-Space all made an effort to join the fray. BonNova, Speed Up and Unreasonable Rocket are among this year's first-time entrants. And if you're looking for any surprise, you'd have to cast a glance in Paragon Labs' direction: Even though Armadillo is widely seen as this year's front-runner, the X Prize Foundation's Will Pomerantz says Armadillo team leader John Carmack isn't taking Paragon (or the other competitors, for that matter) for granted.

"He sees some of these teams charging up in the rear view mirror, and Paragon is one of them," Pomerantz told me a few days ago.

The X Prize Foundation is in charge of putting on the rocket show this October at the Wirefly X Prize Cup in New Mexico, just as it was last year. This time around, Pomerantz has a whole year to prepare for the Lunar Lander Challenge - and he's breathing a lot easier than he was last June.

"We're in so much better shape than we were last time," he said.

The biggest regulatory hurdle ahead has to do with permission to launch: Each team that's serious about competing will have to get an experimental permit from the Federal Aviation Administration. In fact, the rules say that the teams should have that permit 30 days ahead of the Oct. 26-28 event, although the judges might be willing to bend those rules. (They did last year.)

Because it can take up to 120 days for the FAA to rule on the permit, the teams should already have turned in their completed applications to be assured that time won't run out. And that's no mean trick.

"We have a couple of teams that met that mark, which is really great news," Pomerantz said.

The bottom line is that the Lunar Lander Challenge is shaping up as more than a one-horse race, as we discussed last week. The basic rules are the same as they were last year: To have any chance of winning a prize, a team will have to get its remote-controlled rocket ship to lift off from one pad, hover at least 50 meters high, touch down at a destination pad 100 meters away, fuel up again, then make the return trip - all within 150 minutes.

In the Level 1 competition, the minimum hover time is 90 seconds, and the destination pad is nice and level. In the Level 2 competition, 180 seconds of hovering is required, and the destination is a rocky, rugged spot much like a lunar landscape. The Level 1 prizes, provided under NASA's Centennial Challenges program, are $350,000 for first and $150,000 for second. For Level 2, NASA's prescribed payoff rises to $1 million for first, $500,000 for second.

So what happens if two teams fly the course successfully? That could get complicated. "When I wrote the tie-breaker, I never really expected it to come into play," Pomerantz admitted.

Each successful team would get another 150-minute time period, but this time the team would have to fly its craft between Point A and Point B as many times as it can. The winners would be decided on the basis of who has the most hops.

"It's really going to be a race between those two pads. ... They could probably do four or five flights. It could very intensive. It's so exciting that we can talk about that," Pomerantz said.

If teams are still tied after that fly-off, the judges would go back and measure how close each landing came to the target point on the pad. The team that, on average, came the closest would be declared the first-prize winner. But if it's still a tie, the teams that were deadlocked would split the money.

The purpose behind the exercise - and the reason why NASA is putting up the prize purse - is to encourage rocket-powered innovation that could someday come into play during the drive back to the moon and beyond. That's why Northrop Grumman, which built the Apollo-era lunar lander, is providing the sponsorship money for the contest. And that's also the big picture that Pomerantz has in mind as he continues to prepare for this year's contest.

But you also get a sense that he has his heart set on a really, really big show.

"There's going to be that element of drama that was there in a lesser form last year," he said. "There's that drama, and wondering who's going to win the check. It's as close to a guarantee as you're going to get that money is going to be given out this year."

Check out the Web site (including the head-to-head matchups and the links to lunar-lander games), and let me know how you'd handicap the Great Lunar Lander Race (or who's behind the mysterious ninth team). If you're looking for additional tips, you can study The Space Review and browse through the past and present blog entries at Space Prizes, RLV and Space Transport News and Lunar Lander Challenge.