Exploratorium, San Francisco Robyn Higdon, a producer from the Exploratorium in San Francisco, looks up from the broadcast site in Yiwu, China, during preparations for Friday's live coverage of a total solar eclipse. Check the Exploratorium's Flickr site for more images.

There's nothing like seeing a total solar eclipse with your own eyes - but if you just couldn't make it to Friday's remote totality zone, you have at least three chances to catch the event online in real time. And if you'd rather sleep in, you can still catch up on what you missed. It's the next best thing to being there.

Unlike a lunar eclipse, which can be seen by half of the world, total solar eclipses are visible only along a narrow track for mere minutes at a time. In the totality zone, the moon's disk covers the sun completely, producing daytime darkness. The sun's shimmery corona, or outer atmosphere, becomes visible around the dark disk.

Such blackouts occur only when the moon is precisely lined up between the sun and the earth, which doesn't happen at every new moon. From a global perspective, total solar eclipses aren't all that rare: The last one occurred two years ago, and the next one is due in a little less than a year. But the track of totality is determined by orbital mechanics rather than a market survey, and so eclipse enthusiasts often have to travel to Earth's remote frontiers.

Friday's eclipse is a classic case: The moon's blackest shadow touches down in northern Canada at sunrise (5:20 a.m. ET), then races eastward as the world turns, zooming through Greenland, the Arctic, Siberia, Mongolia and China. The eclipse's last hurrah occurs at sunset in west-central China (7:20 a.m. ET).

To get a sense of how the shadow moves across the planet, check out this animated image from Andrew Sinclair. And to see how the eclipse looks from different locations at different times, take a look at Larry Koehn's Shadow and Substance Web site.

The main event in Xinjiang
The time spread is what makes it possible to see the eclipse online several times, depending on how many hardy souls are willing to set up Webcams (or, preferably, full-fledged broadcast operations) at locations along the track of totality.

The headliner act would have to be the hourlong show broadcast live from western China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The Exploratorium science center in San Francisco will present commentary and demonstrations from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. ET, in partnership with NASA and the University of California at Berkeley.

In addition to the science, you'll get a sense of the excitement surrounding the event: According to China's Xinhua news agency, the place is already a madhouse. The climax comes at 7:08 a.m. ET, when the area experiences two minutes of totality.

We'll be broadcasting the show at msnbc.com, but you can also get to it through the Exploratorium or NASA. You can even meet up with your virtual pals in Second Life to share the experience. For those who prefer their totality straight up, there will be a telescope-only video feed showing the eclipse's progress between 6 and 8:15 a.m. ET.

If you miss the show, we'll provide a video clip showing totality as part of our eclipse roundup. 

The warmup act in Novosibirsk
Even before the eclipse passes over China, you can catch totality online from Siberia, courtesy of the Novosibirsk Guide. The eclipse is due to go total there from 6:44 to 6:46 a.m. ET.

The Russian city of Novosibirsk is also the base of operations for Live! Eclipse 2008, the latest Webcast production from Japan's Live! Universe crew. The Live team has broadcast 14 eclipses from spots around the world. Its coverage of Friday's event will begin at 5 a.m. ET, climaxing with the two minutes of totality at 6:44.

The follow-up at Weinan
The area around China's ancient imperial city of Xi'an - well-known for its terracotta army - is near the tail end of the totality track. As a result, it gets less than two minutes of totality, starting at 7:19 a.m. ET. The University of North Dakota's eclipse team will be broadcasting from Weinan, 24 miles (39 kilometers) from Xi'an.

The North Dakotans not only offer the usual Webcast and blog, but they also provide a chatroom where viewers can ooh and ahh (or kvetch about the weather or the bandwidth). However, you'll want to make sure you've installed all the software required for the big show.

Other options
Outside the totality zone, billions of people in Canada, Europe and Asia are in a position to see a partial solar eclipse, which has its own kind of appeal. (If you're in the partial-eclipse zone, be sure to wear adequate eye protection when you're watching the event.) Taiwan's Atlaspost is promising online eclipse coverage (much of it in Chinese), and Norway's Astrofoto will have a Webcam going as well.

To learn about the science behind a solar eclipse, check out our "Moonshadow" interactive graphic. (We have a similar graphic for lunar eclipses, too.) You can also click through a time line of historic eclipses, test your knowledge of eclipse lore and see the "greatest hits" of eclipse imagery.

For detailed information about eclipses past, present and future, you just can't do any better than the NASA Eclipse Web site, maintained by Fred Espenak, the researcher known as "Mr. Eclipse." You can hear some of Espenak's words of wisdom in NASA's collection of podcasts.

Another valuable resource is SpaceWeather.com, which also keeps track of auroral displays, meteor showers, solar activity and much more. Do you have other eclipse resources to add? Pass them along as a comment below. Then, settle in and watch the skies ... on the Internet.

Update for 6:55 a.m. ET Aug. 1: I just caught the tail end of the total eclipse from Novosibirsk via Live! Eclipse. You can still watch the partial phase of the eclipse, but you have to go to the Web site's main page to see the coverage. The navigation to the live video wasn't as clear as it could have been. Also, I wasn't able to connect with the Novosibirsk Guide coverage. But our video stream of the Exploratorium coverage from China is working just great - and totality is coming up in just a few minutes.

Update for 7:20 a.m. ET Aug. 1: Whew! That was close! Clouds obscured the Exploratorium's view of the eclipse until just before the total phase. They moved away just in time to provide a good view of the corona, including a prominence that looked like a licking flame.

If you haven't installed the software already for the North Dakota coverage, it's too late to do it in time for seeing the view from Xi'an. However, you'll be able to replay the Xinjiang view anytime you want once we've added the video clip to our eclipse roundup. Just to emphasize that point, you'll soon be able to click here to watch the eclipse. The Exploratorium will be archiving the video as well, and we thank them for their cooperation.

You'll soon be able to find video on demand (VOD) of the view from Novosibirsk as well, on the Live! Eclipse site. If you run across any other eclipse clips, please add the Web links in your comments below.

• Kimbal's Blog: SpaceX's Falcon 1 is vertical
• CollectSpace: Father's spaceflight inspires son's space patch
• Improbable Research: A breakthrough in snore science
• The Onion: Al Gore places son in rocket to escape dying planet

Virgin Galactic An artist's conception shows passengers in the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane. Millions could afford to take such flights by 2020, the craft's designer says.

Leaders of the "Old Space" effort and the "New Space" effort laid out separate visions for the next 15 years on the final frontier at the world's biggest experimental air show this week. It turns out that their visions are not all that separate - and that the current space frontiers are not anywhere near that final.

The bottom line? If you think space is cool now, just wait.

By the year 2020, about 100,000 people will have taken a suborbital ride into outer space, said Burt Rutan, the designer of the SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo rocket planes. He said such a trip will be within the reach of millions more, at a cost substantially less than the current going rate of $200,000 - and tourists should be able to buy trips into orbit and around the moon as well.

"All the fun stuff, I think, will be available to the public sooner, because we took the time right now to develop a high-use, affordable, fly-a-lot-of-people space system," Rutan told an overflow crowd Tuesday night at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wis.

Meanwhile, NASA will be setting up permanent bases on the moon by 2023, and laying out plans for getting to Mars by 2033, Mike Griffin, the space agency's administrator, told a different AirVenture gathering.

Neither of those visions are set in stone, of course: For Rutan and his fellow private-sector rocketeers, it all depends on proving that space tourism is a viable business. Despite the occasional encouraging market study, that proposition still has to be proven in the real world. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is still more than a year away from starting commercial service, although a significant step forward was taken this week with the rollout of the rocket plane's mothership.

For Griffin, the predictions about the moon and Mars depend on politicians maintaining the current level of funding for NASA - and "not jerking us around" on space policy.

"It is within our capacity to do it," he said. "It is within our budget capacity to do it, if it remains within our will to do it."

The 'why' of space travel
So why do it? In Oshkosh, leading lights of "Old Space" and "New Space" both cited physicist Stephen Hawking's recent comment about the necessity of space travel. Hawking said spreading out into the cosmos would be the only way to guarantee against the effect of a planetwide catastrophe - and that view got an "amen" from Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, as well as from Griffin.

"In the long run, space exploration is about the survival of our human species," Griffin said.

Kathy Barnstorff / NASA NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, at center in the dark red shirt, has his picture taken Tuesday with girls from the World Group Home School in Monona, Wis., who helped name one of the international space station's modules "Harmony."

Whitehorn went even further, arguing that without the benefits of the past 50 years of satellite sensing, Earth would be in a world of hurt today. He pointed out that satellite monitoring has given a big boost to global agricultural production - and said "we'd literally have half a billion people starving right now" if those space assets didn't exist.

"What people don't understand is that space is absolutely crucial to our survival right now," he said.

Old vs. New? The line gets fuzzier
Going forward, it won't be so easy to separate "New Space" from "Old Space." Sure, Virgin Galactic is counting on the revenue from space tourism. "You are the large-volume payload that's been missing," Rutan told Tuesday's appreciative audience.

But Rutan and other New Spacers are hoping NASA will buy some rides as well. That's what Griffin hopes, too: "I've said repeatedly that when commercial human spaceflight opportunities exist, NASA will be a purchaser of those services, whether for astronaut training or for scientific flights," he said.

NASA is in the market for orbital services as well: Two companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, are getting millions of dollars in development funds to build spaceships capable of resupplying the international space station once the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. Griffin said the space agency's recent request for station resupply bids drew proposals from more than a dozen companies.

"I'm very confident that we're going to find some [orbital space services] that we're going to want to purchase," he said.

Pushing out the frontier
Griffin is fond of saying that NASA is involved in the same sort of exploration that sailors on Viking ships or clipper ships took on centuries ago - and is facing the same sorts of challenges. (For example, just as the British voyagers figured out how to beat scurvy, voyagers to Mars are going to have to figure out how to beat deep-space radiation.)

If you extend that metaphor, you'll find that settlers and salesmen almost always followed in the footsteps of the explorers. Rutan slyly referred to that phenomenon during one of his talks in Oshkosh, when he looked right at Virgin Galactic's rebel billionaire, Richard Branson, and observed that innovators "tend to look like a swashbuckler."

If the visions voiced by Rutan and Griffin come true, the explorers will have pushed far beyond Earth orbit by 2023 - leaving plenty of open space for sightseers and settlers. And maybe swashbucklers as well.

Bits and pieces
Tuesday's sessions were mostly devoted to questions and answers, and here are some of the miscellaneous nuggets that came out of the give-and-take:

• White Knight Two, the plane that will carry SpaceShipTwo up to 50,000 feet for an air launch, has extra seats for ride-alongs, and Rutan said those riders could get an experience much like a spaceflight - complete with a zero-G float, followed by a jolt of acceleration that could briefly go as high as 6 G's. That could serve as a shakedown cruise for would-be spacefliers. Still more seats could eventually be put in White Knight Two's left-side cabin, and Whitehorn said "we would hope that the tickets for that side of the hull would be $900 to $1,000 at the most."
• Whitehorn promised that the White Knight Two / SpaceShipTwo system would be flown to Oshkosh next year if at all possible. That would be an on-the-ground display opportunity, with SpaceShipTwo remaining firmly attached to its mothership. But Oshkosh also might get first crack if and when Virgin Galactic takes its launch operation on the road. "The first place we'll bring it, commercially, is going to be Oshkosh," Whitehorn said, sparking applause from AirVenture attendees.
• NASA's Griffin acknowledged that he wasn't happy about the five-year gap between the shuttle fleet's retirement in 2010 and the planned debut of the Orion-Ares launch system in 2015. That gap means NASA will have to purchase rides to the space station from other countries or private providers. But Griffin said the agency couldn't afford to keep the shuttles in operation while it was developing their successors, based on Congress' current funding formula. "I admit, on the face of it, that seems silly," he told the crowd. "But ... I don't want to shock anybody, sometimes in Washington we do think of silly things."
• Griffin downplayed media reports about vibration problems with the Ares 1 rocket, saying that there were "half a dozen means to mitigate that" and that two top strategies would be selected for further study next month. "Let me put it this way: I hope this is the worst problem we have in developing a new system," he said.
• He said NASA was working out a deal to send a small, experimental VASIMR engine to the space station for testing. Boosters of the VASIMR plasma technology say such engines could be used on spacecraft bound for Mars and beyond.
• Griffin said "NASA can technically fly" a shuttle mission to deliver the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station, but he noted that no money has yet been appropriated for such a flight. Until the funding is provided, "AMS won't fly, because it can't fly for free," he said.

Update for 10 a.m. ET July 30: Will SpaceShipTwo really come to Oshkosh next year? Most of the other news reports about Whitehorn's promise focused only on the White Knight Two mothership, but when he referred to the "White Knight Two system" during his talk, I took that to mean the whole package. I called Whitehorn up to clarify today, and he said that although his promise to the Experimental Aircraft Association extended only to White Knight Two, SpaceShipTwo would come along if possible.

So if the rocket plane has to stay in Mojave next year, don't blame Whitehorn. But don't give up hope, either. "We're very hopeful," Whitehorn told me.

Rocket Racing League Click for video: An XCOR-powered rocket plane fires up its engine Tuesday during a Rocket Racing League exhibition flight at the EAA AirVenture show.

After three years of press releases and hush-hush rocket testing, the Rocket Racing League finally presented its first public demonstration of a NASCAR-style racing plane, powered by a on-and-off blaze of orange flame.

The league put its first built-to-order rocket plane through a 10-minute run-through today at the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wis., the world's largest experimental air show. And although the crowd experienced only the sound of one plane racing, league executives exulted over the success.

"Yi-hi-hi-hoo!" the league's co-founder and chief executive officer, Granger Whitelaw, yelled into a cell phone after the flight.

The league's X-Racer wasn't the loudest or the smokiest plane at the air show, but its bright rocket plume and unconventional flight profile set it apart from any other entry. AirVenture spokesman Dick Knapinski said he could recall only one other rocket-powered plane to make an appearance - and that was XCOR Aerospace's EZ-Rocket, which served as a precursor for the league's first plane.

The EZ-Rocket, which came to Oshkosh in 2002, packed far less punch than the X-Racer: Today's demonstration started with a takeoff powered by 1,200 pounds of rocket thrust. The engine roared for about 30 seconds as the racer took to the air.

Then, in a flash, the bright kerosene-fueled flame disappeared. A couple of seconds later, the roar snapped off, as if a spigot was being turned shut. The cutoff was punctuated by a fuel burp that some have dubbed a "bark" or an "elephant sneeze."

The silence that followed was eerie.

That's all part of the plan for the league's races: The racers can carry only so much fuel, and a big factor in the race strategy is how to optimize the rocket burns and the unpowered glides as pilots negotiate separate lanes in a "raceway in the sky." XCOR's rocket can't be throttled; it's either all on or all off.

In all, the X-Racer performed six rocket burns, ranging from 15 to 35 seconds in length. That was enough to keep test pilot Rick Searfoss airborne for nearly 10 minutes, rising to an altitude of about 2,000 feet.

The X-Racer has been tested in the air at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, where XCOR is based, but this was the first time that the plane was flown in front of a paying audience. For that reason, Searfoss played it conservatively today. The rocket plane is due to make repeat appearances on Friday and Saturday.

Whitelaw said the typical competition flight would be somewhat flashier than today's demonstration.

"It'll actually be a little lower, a little closer, with more vehicles," he told me. "But for a first flight we wanted to be a little cautious."

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

An Armadillo-powered rocket plane, partially assembled, sits on display at the Rocket Racing League's booth at the EAA AirVenture show.

Whitelaw said he was anxious to get the league's second rocket racer into service. That plane, powered by a 2,500-pound-thrust, alcohol-fueled rocket engine from Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, was on display in Oshkosh. However, it still lacks the required certification from the Federal Aviation Administration for a demonstration flight.

That may come in time for the Armadillo-powered plane to join the XCOR plane in the sky at the Reno Air Races in September, Whitelaw said. As time goes on, still more racers will be added to the mix - most likely using the bigger Velocity XL airframe used for the Armadillo craft.

Honest-to-goodness competition could start in late 2009 or 2010, Whitelaw said.

"It's really TV-dependent," he explained. In addition to having the races televised, the league is working out a deal for a reality-TV "docu-soap" that follows the rocketeers behind the scenes, Whitelaw said. Viewers can get a taste of that treatment on Sept. 24, when the Rocket Racing League is due to be featured in a Discovery Channel documentary series.

Then there are the sponsorships: The DKNY fashion label had its logo emblazoned on the X-Racer under the terms of the league's first corporate sponsorship. Whitelaw, along with some of the league's racing team members, modeled flight suits designed by DKNY.

Success doesn't come cheap: Whitelaw told reporters that the league's backers have spent somewhere between $10 million and $20 million to get to this point. The next step is to turn the venture into a real race.

Will such a race attract NASCAR-size audiences? The verdict may not be in for another two years. But if the Rocket Racing League can eventually attract a crowd like the one that showed up today for the EAA AirVenture show ... well then, the sky's the limit.

One of the classic dreams of aviation is to rise into the air with a flying machine strapped to your back. The jetpack dream is so iconic that it has shown up in movies ranging from "Thunderball" to "The Rocketeer" - and so elusive that it has spawned a book about high-tech failures titled "Where's My Jetpack?"

TODAY

Click for video: NBC News' Jenna Wolfe takes a ride on the Martin Jetpack, live on the TODAY show.

Over the years, several ventures have tried to realize the jetpack dream - and now a New Zealand inventor is taking the wraps off a secret decade-long effort that he hopes will bring the dream to a sky near you.

Today's unveiling of the Martin Jetpack is one of the marquee events at the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture, a weeklong air show that is drawing hundreds of thousands of people - and about 10,000 airplanes - to Oshkosh, Wis.

Through next weekend, Oshkosh will serve as a mecca for the aviation world's dreamers and builders. Many of the private planes parked in the fields surrounding the town's airport were built by their owners. The hundreds of events on this week's schedule range from quiet seminars on aircraft maintenance to ear-splitting flyovers of military jets.

The show focuses on the experimental side of aviation - and that makes Oshkosh the perfect place for Glenn Martin to unveil his jetpack. "This is an experimental aircraft with a big 'E,'" he told me.

Jetpack or ultralight?
Whether the Martin Jetpack technically qualifies as a jetpack is debatable. It's not the type of rocket belt that James Bond wore in "Thunderball," and it's not anything like the jet-powered, wearable wing that a Swiss daredevil cranked up to 186 mph in May. As far as the Federal Aviation Administration is concerned, what Martin has is an experimental ultralight airplane, equipped with a gas-powered, V-4 piston engine and two ducted fans that provide the lift.

That puts it in a class with several other fan-powered lifters, including Trek Aerospace's Springtail, Urban Aeronautics' X-Hawk and even Moller International's flying-car prototype. But Martin believes his 250-pound ultralight, initially priced at $100,000, stands the best chance of going commercial. He sees it as a recreational sport vehicle that just might be in the right price range for affluent thrill-seekers.

"I've made a Jet Ski for the sky," he said.

'A beast that roars'
Does it really fly? Definitely. This sneak-preview video shows the Martin Jetpack in action, in the backyard of Martin's host in Fond du Lac, Wis.

Martin Jetpack

Click for video: Watch test pilots put the Martin Jetpack through its paces.

Other videos show pilots tooling around a test field, flying as high as 6 feet off the ground. Two team members are hanging onto handles attached to the prototype to keep the pilot at that height, for safety reasons.

"One or two have cheated, you know?" Martin said. "It's very hard to hold people back."

One of the test pilots was Martin's wife, Vanessa.

"It was really an exciting experience, because at the time it was just a prototype. It was very loud, very noisy, very hot. It was like a beast that roars," she told me. "But once you throttle up, you feel it bite, and you leave the ground, and there's this feeling of floating and freedom - you become quite overwhelmed."

Training required
Theoretically, the jetpack can fly for 30 minutes, and rise to a height of 8,000 feet. But Glenn Martin said the flight envelope will be carefully tested over the coming months. Martin is opening the order book as of today, and said 10 to 20 vehicles could be sold by the time next year's Oshkosh air show rolls around.

Jetpack buyers will be required to go through about 15 hours of flight training as well as a safety screening. "If for some reason they're not coordinated enough, we'll send them their money back and give it to the next person in the queue," Martin said.

As an added safety measure, each jetpack is equipped with a ballistic parachute.

If you do buy a jetpack - whether it's Martin's or another brand - don't expect to take it to work anytime soon: The FAA regulations for ultralight aircraft rule out that kind of point-to-point travel, Martin said. But if regulators ever adopt a NASA-inspired scheme for a "highway in the sky," that could set more liberal rules of the road for jetpack commuters as well as flying cars, he added.

Swathed in secrecy
Jetpack aficionados might well wonder whether Martin has enough technical competence to make his venture fly. After all, his formal background is in pharmaceutical sales and biotech rather than engineering. But the 48-year-old said he's been tinkering on the jetpack concept ever since he was a college student.

"I had my day job going on, as well as what some people called my secret night job," he said.

In 1998, he received enough venture-capital backing to devote full time to Martin Aircraft Co., and today he has a staff of 12 and a posse of corporate partners in New Zealand.

Over the past decade, Martin kept his venture swathed in secrecy - to the point that his teenage son couldn't tell his schoolmates how cool Dad's job was. Martin explained that he was trying to avoid the fate of an earlier pair of aviation tinkerers, the Wright brothers, who found themselves embroiled in years of patent battles.

"If`you read the Wright brothers' diaries, it's almost cliche, isn't it?" Martin said.

Today, Martin feels secure about his patents - and he feels he has a product he can sell. What do you think? Is Martin's price point too high? Is his track record too scanty? Or will this venture finally answer the decades-old question, "Where's my jetpack?" Feel free to add your comments below.

Update for 1 p.m. ET July 30: Hundreds gathered Tuesday on EAA Adventure's Aeroshell Square to watch the first public takeoff of the Martin Jetpack. There were so many people gathered around that the folks in the back (like me) really could only get a glimpse of what was going on.

Unless you were sitting on someone else's shoulders, as was the case for 17-year-old, 130-pound Daniel Woodberry of Nampa, Idaho. Woodberry's buddies took turns lifting him up to take pictures during the buildup to the 30-second flight.

It turned out that the pilot was Martin's 16-year-old son, Harrison, the kid who couldn't tell his friends what Dad was doing.

"I really wanted Harrison to fly," Vanessa Martin told me Tuesday.

After a couple of introductory talks, white awnings were lifted up, revealing two jetpacks. Harrison Martin started up the engine on one of them. "Sounds like a giant leafblower," Woodberry said.

Then the teenage pilot, guided by his father and another handler, buzzed around a tight little area on the square. Martin's feet never got more than three feet or so off the ground - which came as something of a disappointment to those expecting a James Bondian blast into the sky.

The flight was finished after about 45 seconds. Spectators thronged around the jetpacks, asking all the questions you'd expect from an aviation-savvy crowd. Meanwhile, Woodberry's pals looked through the pictures the teen had taken - and starting thinking about getting a massage for their aching necks.

I've added a video from NBC's TODAY show that includes a clip from the AirVenture demonstration as well as NBC News correspondent Jenna Wolfe's personal training flight.

Some commenters have asked about basic specifications for the jetpack, and here's what I was given:

• Empty weight: 250 pounds, excluding safety equipment.
• Gross weight: 553 pounds.
• Useful (pilot) load: More than 280 pounds.
• Maximum thrust: More than 600 pounds.
• Fuel capacity: 5 gallons.
• Engine: Martin Aircraft 2.0 L, V-4, two-stroke, rated at 200 hp. Maximum 6000 RPM.
• Range: 31.5 miles at maximum speed of 63 mph.

Many of those specs are designed to conform with the FAA regulations for ultralights.

For further discussion of jetpack setbacks, check out my list of failed flights of fancy, as well as my colleague John Schoen's report about futurism's flawed forecasts. And stay tuned for more from the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh.

• N.Y. Times: Why is glass hard? That's not clear
• New Scientist: NASA study touts 'gravity tractor'
• Discovery.com: Warp-speed engine designed
• Discover Magazine: When computers and minds meld

MSNBC

Click for video: Moonwalker Edgar Mitchell speaks out on UFOs. MSNBC's Alex Witt reports.

It sounds like a publicity stunt for the "X-Files" sequel: A real-life moonwalker, Apollo 14's Edgar Mitchell, says he was told that powerful alien beings have been among us for 60 years and that government officials have been carefully covering up that fact.

Mitchell's claims have caused a huge stir in the week since they were aired on a British radio show. But upon closer inspection, what the retired astronaut said was not all that earth-shattering - or even all that new.

"I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real, although it's been covered up by governments for quite a long time," Mitchell told Kerrang Radio host Nick Margerrison.

The way Mitchell told it, the aliens look much like the little gray men depicted in most sci-fi sagas and possess technology far superior to ours - so superior that they could have wiped us out if they chose to.

That's a view held by millions of people who believe extraterrestrials are piloting at least some of the unidentified flying objects that have been reported over the past 60 years. But the fact that the view is coming from a celebrity spaceman, who has talked with military sources supposedly in the know, invests Mitchell's pronouncements with greater authority.

Or does it?

As astronomer Phil Plait points out on his Bad Astronomy blog, just because you're a moonwalker (or a military officer, for that matter) doesn't mean you're entitled to a "get out of reality free" card. And in follow-up interviews with Discovery.com and BlogTalkRadio, Mitchell acknowledged that his evidence is essentially hearsay.

Mitchell emphasized that his UFO views are not based upon his personal experience as a NASA astronaut, but rather upon unofficial talks he's had with witnesses involved in the 1947 Roswell incident and other sightings. He put a lot of weight on the experience of a Navy admiral who tried to follow up on the witnesses' claims but found himself shut out from the top-secret stuff.

It's well-known that some military officials suspected there was something spooky about Roswell, even after the U.S. Air Force announced in 1997 that it had fully explained the UFO reports and was http://msnbc.com/news/82002.asp">closing out its file on the subject.

The best-known believer with Pentagon credentials was retired Air Force Col. Philip Corso, who spilled what he knew (and heard from others) about the alien conspiracy in a book titled "The Day After Roswell." In a 1997 interview, Corso told me he wrote the book because one of his key sources had passed away, releasing him from a vow of silence.

Corso himself passed away a year after that interview took place, but there are surely other military sources holding onto secondhand or thirdhand secrets. So it's not so surprising that Mitchell was "privileged enough" to hear some of those secrets - and it's not so new that he's bringing them to public attention.

In the Discovery.com Q&A, Mitchell acknowledged that he's been trying to spread the word about UFOs for more than a decade. At one time, he was working with The Disclosure Project, but in this 2001 interview with physicist-ufologist Jack Sarfatti, Mitchell complained that the project was improperly describing him as a UFO "witness." The moonwalker said he had heard disclosures from other seemingly knowledgeable individuals, "mostly of yesteryear," but had no firsthand knowledge himself.

Mitchell stuck to that story in a Fourth of July interview with CNN's Larry King - on a UFO-themed show that made less of a splash than last week's Kerrang interview.

So why did the more recent interview spark more of a buzz?

For one thing, Mitchell played up the references to advanced technology, as well as the idea that "we would be gone by now" if the aliens had been hostile. That added some extra color to Mitchell's oft-told tales about the little gray men. For another thing, he had a bigger piece of the spotlight on Kerrang - as well as an interviewer who was deeply impressed by what the astronaut had to say. ("Wow! This is big!" Margerrison told Mitchell.) 

But the most important factor may well be something so mysterious it's worthy of an "X-Files" investigation: What makes a particular nugget of information go viral? How do you get an item picked up by BoingBoing and The Daily Mail, on Newsvine and MSNBC on cable? The truth is out there ... at least about the viral effect, if not about UFOs.

Feel free to weigh in with your comments, either on UFOs or on Internet epidemiology. And as long as we're on the subject, check out my UFO viewing tips, register your opinion in our long-running Live Vote, take our UFO quiz, click through six real-life X-Files and take on your very own search for UFOs.

• National Geographic: Target Earth
• Environmental Graffiti: 20 incredible light shows (via Daily Grail)
• Slashdot: SETI @ Home adds new alien search strategy 
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Car of the Future' | 'Nova ScienceNOW'  

DKNY The Bridenstine Rocket Racing Team will fly DKNY's colors, as seen in this artwork.

Do rocket planes and men's fashions ever mix? The Rocket Racing League and DKNY certainly hope so: They've struck a sponsorship deal that will give ample exposure to DKNY's fashion brand on the league's flight suits and one of the rocket racers.

It's one more example showing how the league's rocketeers are following the model set in auto racing. NASCAR teams have long festooned their uniforms with sponsors' logos - and the organizers of the Rocket Racing League want to work that into their business model as well.

DKNY, the league's first corporate sponsor, is a fashion label created by designer Donna Karan that has spawned a network of retail stores as well. "This is not a company that sponsors NASCAR or Formula One, and the fact that they are sponsoring the Rocket Racing League is unique," Granger Whitelaw, the league's chief executive officer, told me.

Whitelaw and X Prize mastermind Peter Diamandis founded the league three years ago as a vehicle for bringing the excitement of auto racing to rocket-powered aerobatics. The first public flight demonstrations of the league's rocket planes are scheduled for next week at the Experimental Aviation Association's annual AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wis.

Fashions for flight
DKNY will be showing off its fashions for flight in Oshkosh as well, to coincide with the launch of the DKNY Men clothing brand.

The pairing of the new clothing line and the racing league was the result of discussions between the executives of the two ventures. "Everything just aligned," Patti Cohen, executive vice president for global marketing and communications at Donna Karan International, told me in an e-mail.

"Rocket Racing is exciting, innovative, fast and fun, attributes which completely mirror the DKNY man," Cohen said. "DKNY loves the innovation aspect of the sport, which we strive to do creatively in our own business model."

DKNY These designs are being adapted into uniforms for the Santa Fe Racing Team, one of the groups intending to compete in the Rocket Racing League.

DKNY is paying to sponsor the Bridenstine Rocket Racing Team, one of six teams aiming to compete in the league, Whitelaw said. That means the corporate logo will appear on the wings of the Bridenstine rocket plane.

In addition, DKNY is sponsoring the entire league, which means they'll be providing branded flight suits for all of the teams' pilots and pit crews.

"The flight suits were inspired by NASCAR suits, but we really wanted to be sure that the suits had the aesthetic of an actual flight suit rather than NASCAR," Cohen explained. "NASCAR suits are much heavier, and these suits are lighter and sleeker."

Cohen said DKNY also wanted to make sure the pilots had the mobility, ventilation and safety margin they would need for riding a rocket.  "This is the first time DKNY has ever worked with the flame-retardant fabric Nomex, which is essential for rocket flight," she told me.

The league's executives and staff members will be sporting DKNY duds as well. "So I'll be well-dressed," Whitelaw quipped.

The rocket report
Two rocket racers will be on display at the Oshkosh show: One is equipped with a kerosene-fueled engine developed by California-based XCOR Aerospace, whle the other will have an alcohol-fueled engine from Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace.

XCOR and Armadillo both hope to parlay their work for the Rocket Racing League into even more powerful craft for suborbital spaceflight.

XCOR has been working with the league for a long time, and its plane is fully cleared for takeoff for demonstration flights, Whitelaw said. Armadillo got into the game much later, and it's not yet clear whether the plane it has been working on will fly in Oshkosh.

Whitelaw said on Monday that the Federal Aviation Administration "has not given us the releases for the Armadillo-powered racer yet, just the XCOR-powered racer thus far … but the 'Dillo plane is and has been 100 percent flight-ready for two weeks now."

FAA spokesman Les Dorr told me that both planes have special airworthiness certificates for experimental research and development. However, he said it was "highly unlikely" that the Armadillo-powered plane would be cleared for takeoff in Oshkosh.

Whitelaw's plan calls for both planes to fly at a succession of air shows that follow Oshkosh, including September's Reno Air Races and November's Aviation Nation in Nevada. That would lead up to the first televised races no earlier than the end of 2009, he said. "We'll be adding planes as we go forward now," he said.

Art of the deal
If the races match Whitelaw's expectations, it should be quite a show: The rocket planes would spew 15-foot plumes of flame as they roar around a "raceway in the sky" at speeds in excess of 300 mph.

But it will take more than a good show to get the league off the ground, and that's why Whitelaw places so much importance on the art of the deal. He's hoping that the DKNY sponsorship will set a model for the future - not only for the Rocket Racing League, but for suborbital space ventures to come.

"We all in the space arena talk about commercial space and the privatization of space, but what the conversation boils down to is, 'What's going to make the investors get involved?' No one really has an answer" he said. "And I say, 'Guys, you've got to get the people interested in it.' ... When you can get it down to a business model that Wall Street understands and commercial America understands, then you'll have success."

Update for 3 p.m. ET July 23: The FAA's Les Dorr expanded on the reasons why the Armadillo-powered plane probably won't be flying in Oshkosh. "They came to us relatively late, and we weren't able to work up limitations [for exhibition flight] similar to what we did for the XCOR airplane," he said.

Armadillo is not using the same airframe that XCOR is using, so the FAA needs to know how the two models differ, and get more details about how operations would be handled in flight and on the ground for an exhibition, Dorr said. The certification process is continuing, and it's conceivable that the Armadillo-powered plane would be good to go for air shows later this year.

I'm taking a few days of vacation, then heading out to the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wis. Among the headliners will be the Rocket Racing League as well as aerospace designer Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, fresh from their rollout of SpaceShipTwo's mothership, the White Knight Two.

For the rest of this week, the posting schedule will be as light as I can make it. Dispatches from the Big Sky Tour will begin on Monday.

• L.A. Times: Stumbling on the path to G-spot utopia
• BBC: Atom-smasher prepares for the Big Chill
• Science News: Magnetic sense linked to molecule
• Daily Grail: UFO 'heretic' revisits controversy

Pat Rawlings / NASA file

Click for video: Get a look at the future, as seen by advocates  of the space elevator concept.

If space elevators work out the way the idea's advocates hope, sending payloads into orbit would become as routine as, say, sending a shipment on a freight train - except that the train would travel straight up for hundreds or thousands of miles, powered by laser beams.

But will such a "railroad to the sky" ever be built? That's the big question hanging over the 2008 Space Elevator Conference, taking place this weekend on Microsoft's Seattle-area campus. And considering that this is an event primarily attended by elevator enthusiasts, you may find some of the answers surprising.

One of the biggest advocates of the concept, the late science-fiction seer Arthur C. Clarke, said back in 1979 that the first space elevator would be built "about 50 years after everyone stops laughing."

There wasn't much laughing to be heard as the talks got under way today at Microsoft's Redmond conference center (which happens to be a five-minute walk from my newsroom at msnbc.com, a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture). Instead, there was a long day's worth of serious talks about way-out subjects such as orbital debris threats and power-beaming lasers.

And there were a lot of predictions: On one end of the scale, Bradley Edwards, president of New York-based Black Line Ascension and one of the pioneers of the space elevator movement, said creating a space elevator would require much less time than 50 years - as long as you had $7 billion to $10 billion to spend.

"It's really a cost issue," he told me. "If you could get the money, you could have one up in probably 12 years, 15 years."

On the other end of the scale was Tom Nugent, project manager for Seattle-based LaserMotive, who said the space elevator would never be built, due to technical and safety concerns.

"We don't believe in the space elevator," Nugent told me. The way he sees it, all the activities spawned by the concept merely provide "a useful way to demonstrate our laser power beaming technology."

In between those extremes, there's a Japanese technological road map that calls for building a space elevator and a space solar power system by 2030, and a NASA projection that the elevator would take shape in 200 years or so.

Ted Semon, who presides over the Space Elevator Blog, sized up the potential players and concluded that the builder of the first space elevator would likely be either a U.S. industry consortium supported by the federal government - or an alliance involving the governments of Dubai and India.

"Dubai could fund it just like that," he told me. "And India would love to jump at the chance to leapfrog China."

Even if you scoff at the starry-eyed vision of riding a ribbon to outer space on a laser-powered lift, the technologies that form the foundation of that vision are far more down to earth - and likely to produce profits long before the space elevator sees the light of day. That's what Nugent and many of the conference's other attendees are going after.

The technological road ahead
The two main technologies behind the concept are super-strong, ultra-lightweight materials and power-beaming systems.

A working space elevator would require tethers or ribbons of synthetic material that would extend from Earth's surface up to an altitude of perhaps 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers). Carbon nanotube fibers are the most popular candidates for the job.

The tethers would be sent into orbit aboard a conventional launch vehicle. One set of tethers would be lowered down from the orbiting craft for connection to an "attach point" on Earth's surface - for example, a floating platform in an area of the ocean that's relatively unaffected by weather. Counterbalancing tethers would spool out spaceward.

Those tethers would serve as the "rails" for robots climbing up and down to the orbital transfer station. Proponents say such robots could carry payloads at a cost of $100 per pound or less - compared with current orbital launch costs that range from $2,000 to $60,000 a pound, depending on what is launched and how high it goes. Other types of robots would build up the system and keep it in repair.

You can't really fuel up a robot for this kind of trek to space, so you'd need to find a wireless, tankless way to transmit power hundreds or thousands of miles. That's where the power-beaming systems come in: Laser light from below would be focused on photoelectric cells to keep the robots running, perhaps supplemented by solar power from above.

If those technologies come together, then what? "There are lots of things we want to do in space, but part of the problem is getting there," Edwards said.

Cheaper access to space could open the way for space solar-power satellite systems that can beam energy back down to Earth. Elevator operators could send people and payloads to orbital hotels, and then onward to the moon and Mars. The elevators might even revolutionize garbage disposal, Edwards said.

"There has been a lot of discussion about using space elevators to take radioactive waste and get rid of it by throwing it into the sun," he said.

Where are those technologies today?
The technological hurdles facing elevator enthusiasts are every bit as high as their hopes. This weekend's conference provided a progress report on how close the reality is coming to the dream.

Edwards pointed to advances in carbon nanotube fabrication, which he saw as essential for space elevator construction. "That's the only thing that's strong enough," he said. He hailed advances that have brought new records for nanotube length as well as new methods for spinning nanotube fibers.

"Some of the work being done is now becoming a business," Edwards said. Nanotubes are already being woven into the marketing hype for bikes as well as golf clubs, and Edwards predicted that a technological tipping point could come sometime in the next year. 

Are nanotubes safe? A recent study raised health questions about the stuff but Edwards said the safety concerns were not as serious as some have made them out to be, particularly for space applications.

Ben Shelef, director of the Spaceward Foundation, was hopeful that the nanotube hurdle would be overcome sooner than the skeptics think. "While we're definitely not there, we're not a factor of 50 away. We're a factor of 10 away," he said.

Shelef previewed Spaceward's plans for the fourth annual Space Elevator Games, a double-header competition that focuses on super-strong tethers as well as power beaming. This year, NASA is offering $4 million in prizes for the winners of the games' ambitious contests, and Spaceward is organizing the contests on NASA's behalf.

To take the top tether prize, the winning team will have to develop a material that can take more stress than the other competitors' offerings, and also best a "house tether" that has a 50 percent weight advantage.

Eleven teams have signed up for the power-beaming competition, which involves sending a beam-powered robot up a 0.6-mile-long (1-kilometer-long) tether suspended from a helicopter.

If the robot completes the required length with an average speed of 6 feet (2 meters) per second, it would be in the running for a $900,000 prize. If the average speed reaches 16 feet (5 meters) per second, the prize rises to $2 million.

Shelef said the tentative plan is to conduct the games at Arizona's Meteor Crater in mid-October, but the timing and the venue are still subject to change. So far, none of the teams has satisfied any of the requirements for a prize, and as a result NASA hasn't paid out any money in the Space Elevator Games. That may change this year, Shelef said.

"This is going to be the first year, I think, where [each] team's main enemy is the other teams," he said.

Just this week, LaserMotive announced that it satisfied the power-beaming contest's requirements in a treadmill test. However, the company is expected to face stiff competition from last year's favorites, including the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team.

If a viable power-beaming system could be developed, it would find almost immediate application. The U.S. military has talked about using beam power to energize balloon-based observation platforms or robotic drone aircraft. Point-to-point power beaming could cut down on risky fuel resupply missions in combat zones.

Beyond the battlefield, NASA could conceivably use power-beaming stations to boost rovers or bases on the moon or Mars. And beaming power down to Earth is key to the space solar power systems I've already mentioned.

So ... will it ever rise?
Even if these technologies bear fruit on Earth, the space elevator's success is not assured. Speakers weren't shy about raising additional questions during today's sessions:

• Will nanotube tethers ever be tough enough to endure buffeting by atmospheric winds? How long can they be expected to stand up to exposure to the elements as well as space radiation?
• Would the Earth stations for space elevator systems become prime targets for terrorism? Who will pay the cost of defending them from earthly threats?
• Will there be an acceptable safety margin for space elevator operations? Nugent said that if the space elevator is held to the same safety standards that other industries have to meet, the concept would clearly become financially untenable.
• Can space elevator systems be designed to stand up to collisions with orbital debris?

Ivan Bekey, president of Virginia-based Bekey Designs, said that last point was a potentially fatal flaw for the space elevator concept. "We've got a very fundamental problem for which I have seen no engineering or cost analysis to solve," he said.

Edwards said there were potential solutions to the debris-collision problem, such as repositioning the elevator's Earth station, which would in turn move the system's tether out of the path of the occasional piece of space junk. However, he conceded that more analysis was needed.

"There's no funding," he said, "and this is a real falling-down for the entire program."

Edwards said several new initiatives were in the works to pool together information and raise public awareness, including a Space Elevator Wiki and a Japanese movie titled "Space Elevator: The Future as Foreseen by Scientists." You can watch a trailer for the movie (in Japanese) as well as a mini-interview with Edwards (in English).

Edwards also hopes to see the rise of a Florida theme park celebrating the space elevator concept. Visitors to the attraction would take a ride on a virtual space elevator to a virtual space station, all enclosed within a 10-story-high structure. Edwards said the land has already been selected for the facility, outside Orlando, and he's working on getting the first $300,000 in seed capital by Nov. 30.

Is the space elevator concept worth the cost of a theme-park ticket? Is it worth the multibillion-dollar cost of building the real thing? Feel free to register your opinion in our unscientific Live Vote, and weigh in with your comments below. 

The 2008 Space Elevator Conference continues through Sunday, July 20, at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Wash. For updates, check in with Ted Semon's Space Elevator Blog. The conference is sponsored by Microsoft Corp., Black Line Ascension and Industrial Nano.

• Angry Astronomer: Carnival of Space 63
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Mystery of the Megaflood'
• Chicago Tribune: Sleuths work on the Fermilab code
• RLV and Space Transport News at NewSpace 2008

NASA / ESA / NMSU / JPL These pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope show the passage of Red Spot Jr. and Baby Red Spot in a band of clouds below the Great Red Spot. Junior (the two- toned spot at the very bottom) survived unscathed, but Baby (indicated by the arrow at far right) wasn't so lucky. Click on the image for a larger version.

Back in May, the scientists behind the Hubble Space Telescope announced the birth of a bouncing Baby Red Spot in Jupiter's turbulent clouds. Unfortunately, some creatures eat their young: The latest Hubble imagery reveals that the Baby Red Spot is being gobbled up by the planet's larger and older Great Red Spot.

Baby Red's sad fate is the consequence of the complex storm patterns in Jupiter's atmosphere. The spots are actually cyclones swirling within a band of clouds. Over the past couple of months, Baby Red and a slightly older storm nicknamed Red Spot Jr. have been catching up to and passing around the Great Red Spot.

Imagery from Hubble and from ground-based telescopes revealed how the baby was caught up in the big spot's spin. "It was torn in two," Amy Simon-Miller, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told me today.

A pale remnant of Baby Red may survive the encounter, but it's at least as likely that the shrunken spot will be pulled into the Great Red Spot's powerful blender and merely add more energy to the longer-lived storm. That's probably how the Great Red Spot has been able to hang around for hundreds of years: by gobbling up smaller storms in its path.

Junior lives on
For Simon-Miller and her Hubble team colleagues, including New Mexico State University's Nancy Chanover and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Glenn Orton, the short-lived baby was a bonus. When they requested their telescope time, their primary objective was to track Red Spot Jr.

"The little guy popping up was not known when we started doing the observations," Simon-Miller said.

Unlike Baby, Red Spot Jr. appears to be a survivor: It was formed several years ago by the merger of three smaller, white-colored storms, and earned its nickname in 2006 by turning from white to red. So far, Junior has steered clear its bigger rival, and Simon-Miller thinks it will hold its own in Jupiter's atmospheric clash.

"The Great Red Spot's never going to eat it," she said.

Why a Red Spot?
One big question remains: Exactly what makes the Red Spots red? The prevailing view is that some sort of reddish material containing sulfur, phosphorus or hydrocarbons is churned up by a change in atmospheric dynamics. Scientists even know there are differences between the Great Red Spot and Junior - but they haven't yet identified the mechanism or the material.

Simon-Miller said Hubble could check the chemical signature of the cloud tops in Jupiter's chilly, hydrogen-rich atmosphere. However, there's nothing on Earth to compare it to. "We have to have a lab space on Earth that can measure things at the same temperature and pressure," she said.

As a result, the life and death of a storm on Jupiter is still a mysterious thing. Baby Red, we hardly knew ye.

Update for 4:40 p.m. ET July 18: It looks like a bit of Baby Red may live on, Daniel Fischer notes in the latest edition of The Cosmic Mirror. Amateur observations, made after the Hubble images were captured, appear to show a remnant of the little spot on the other side of the Great Red Spot. In a comment below, Fischer maintains that the reports of the Baby Red Spot's death are premature.

For different perspectives on Jupiter and the Great Red Spot, check out our "Jewels of Jupiter" slide show as well as recent views from NASA's New Horizons probe.

• Improbable Research Video: The bug you're sleeping with
• The Onion: Hubble Kaleidoscope proves space is freaky
• Cracked: If everyday items were designed for Batman ...
• The Star: Stephen Hawking mulls Canada move? | Not really 

Warner Bros. Pictures

Batman (Christian Bale) gets the cool gadgets in "The Dark Knight."

The Joker may be the scene-stealer in "The Dark Knight," but it's still Batman who has the cool gadgets. As the movie saga continues, some of the Caped Crusader's once-outlandish technologies are looking more and more realistic.

Batman has always been one of the more down-to-earth superheroes in the comic-book universe: He is supposed to have no special advantages, other than his brains, brawn and whatever can be bought or built with the aid of a billion-dollar bank account.

"We'd all like to think that if our parents were gunned down when we were young and left us a billion dollars, we'd go out and dress up like Dracula and fight crime," joked University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios, author of "The Physics of Superheroes."

So are the feats that Batman performs in the movies physically possible?

Most of the good news on that score is on the technological side of things, starting with the Batsuit.

"They did a great job justifying the suit," Kakalios told me. He cautioned that he's basing his opinion only on "Batman Begins," director Christopher Nolan's first foray into the saga, but the second movie sticks with the same premise.

Zapping the Batcape
Take the cape, for example. Kakalios said the movie made clear that the cape was supposedly capable of changing from loose-flowing to aerodynamically stiff with a mere jolt of electricity.

"That is definitely within the realm of technological plausibility," he said. "Although there is no specific material that can do that, there are materials that produce structural changes upon the application of an electric field. They're called piezoelectric materials."

Some shape-memory materials can change their properties when they're heated or cooled (or even exposed to light). That's the secret behind shrink wrap, or eyeglass frames that bend themselves back into shape, or even surgical sutures. "There are certain polymer fibers that have been developed for surgical applications where a surgeon can make a loose knot, and then upon warming, the knot tightens," Kakalios said.

Holy nanotubes, Batman!
In "The Dark Knight," Batman complains that he needs a better suit - and that's a concern for the real-life knights in the U.S. military as well. The Pentagon would love to have Wayne Enterprises' secret for lighter, more flexible body armor. Nanocomp Technologies, based in New Hampshire, is among several companies working on carbon-nanotube composites for military applications.

"We're really focused on trying to create layers of protection that would improve things for our troops," Peter Antoinette, Nanocomp's president and chief executive officer, told me. "It would take a number of years before you could order up a suit, and then a billionaire would have to pay seven figures for a suit that would work the way they do in the movies."

As an initial step, Nanocomp is working on nanotubes for next-generation wiring in satellites and aircraft. Carbon nanotubes are highly conductive and could replace copper wire in settings where reducing weight is crucial. "We're less than one-tenth the weight of copper, so if you can take 1,000 pounds off these satellites or aircraft, you'd be saving a huge amount of money," Antoinette said.

Commercialization of nanotube wiring could begin as early as next year, Antoinette said. He added that Nanocomp's materials are already undergoing military testing, and body-armor applications could start emerging in 2010 or so.

Kakalios agreed that nanotubes are a technology to watch: "Compared to steel cables, it's about 100 times stronger. Whether you can make this in large enough quantities, in long enough length scales ... that work is still in progress."

Not your father's Batmobile
The current incarnation of the Batmobile, also known as "the Tumbler," looks more like a low-slung armored vehicle than the high-finned flivver that Adam West drove back in the '60s. But that hews much more closely to the real-life vehicles being developed for the military, such as the Ultra-AP prototype.

In the three years since the Tumbler was unveiled in "Batman Begins," autonomous vehicles have taken giant leaps: Last year, a robo-SUV won a $2 million Pentagon prize after negotiating an urban obstacle course without any human intervention, and the technologies developed for that race are already finding their way into next-generation robo-transports such as the Humvee-size MULE, which can drive autonomously or under remote control.

In "The Dark Knight," Batman's ride clearly has some smarts of its own, and someday similar vehicles could be riding the roads in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Other technologies make their appearance in the new movie - ranging from a rescue system that was actually tested by the military (spoiler alert) to a cell-phone echolocation system that strains credulity. But in the end, the important thing is to build in just enough plausibility that you accept the truly implausible premise of a superhero movie.

"The more everything else can be realistic, the greater the chance that people will just accept it," Kakalios said.

Bad news for Batman
One of the less plausible aspects of a Batman movie would have to be that a mere mortal - even one who has gone through years of mental and physical training - could survive the punishment that he has to take in the course of a superhero career.

"Consider the number of times that Batman has been knocked unconscious in his over 60 years of fighting crime, and it is clear that he should be severely brain-damaged by now," Kakalios wrote in a Q&A about super-science.

The biomechanics of what Batman does would be a killer in real life: Kakalios recalled a scene from "Batman Begins" in which the budding superhero pulls someone else up from a potentially fatal fall with one hand. "For something like that, you'd need pectoral muscles that would get you an R rating," he said.

In a pinch, Batman has also been known to leap off tall buildings, cushioned only by the sproinnng of a taut cable. That wouldn't work in real life, for Batman or for other superheroes. Kakalios has repeatedly called attention to the problem with stopping falls in midair - so much so that he thinks comic-book writers are finally getting the message.

"It all depends on the time you have to stop him," Kakalios said. "The longer the time, the less force is needed to bring you to rest. This is why bungee cords are very stretchy. You go from a force that is lethal to one that is merely insane."

The biomechanical realities would be Batman's biggest challenge in real life - as detailed in Scientific American's Q&A with E. Paul Zehr, a kinesiologist and karate practioner who is the author of "Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero."

But Batman's gizmos just might get him through - and if the crime-fighting gig ever gets old, Bruce Wayne could always find work in a lab.

"As Homer Simpson pointed out, 'Batman's a scientist,'" Kakalios said. "I would have to say chemical engineering and materials science seems to be his strong point. It's not enough to have those wonderful toys; you have to know how to use them." 

NASA / JPL-Caltech The Peony nebula star was found in the crowded, dusty center of our Milky Way galaxy, seen here in a false-color infrared view from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Click here for higher-resolution imagery from the Spitzer team.

Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have uncovered a star that could be a contender for our galaxy's brightest light - and they say there might be even brighter bulbs out there, shrouded in cosmic dust.

The Peony nebula star, heralded today in an image advisory from the Spitzer team, doesn't look all that bright to the naked eye. Sirius is still the undisputed local champion, based on what we can see in the night sky. But a big factor behind Sirius' apparent brightness is its relative proximity to Earth - a mere 8.7 light-years, or roughly 50 trillion miles.

If you were to put all the stars observed in the heavens on an equal footing distance-wise, the gold medal for brightness would go to Eta Carinae, which is more than 7,500 light-years away but is thought to shine 4.7 million times brighter than our sun.

Now consider the star recently spotted by Spitzer: It's a whopping 26,093 light-years away, in the Milky Way's crowded center. The Peony nebula star (so named because it's wrapped in a flowery-looking nebula) is so shrouded in dust that you might not be able to tell just how bright it shines even if you were up closer.

L. Oskinova / Potsdam U. / NASA / JPL-Caltech

The Peony Nebula star, highlighted by a white circle in the inset photograph from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, is considered the second-brightest star in our galaxy. Click on the image for a larger version.

Spitzer's infrared camera was able to pierce the clouds of dust and get a better fix on the star's luminosity. Infrared readings from the European Southern Observatory in Chile were also factored into researchers' calculations.

"Infrared astronomy opens extraordinary views into the environment of the central region of our galaxy," Potsdam University astronomer Lidia Oskinova explained in today's advisory. Oskinova is the principal investigator behind the research as well as the second author of a paper about the star, due for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Oskinova and her colleagues estimate that the Peony nebula star shines 3.2 million times as brightly as the sun. That would merit a silver medal, based on current standings. And because there is some uncertainty built into the luminosity estimates for the Peony as well as for Eta Carinae, it's conceivable that the two stars are roughly equal in brightness.

Astronomers estimate that the star started out with a mass 150 to 200 times that of our sun. That would be around the theoretical limit for the mass of stars. If you go much heavier, the star would break up into a multiple-star system during formation, astronomers say.

The Peony nebula star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star, with a diameter roughly 100 times that of our sun. If it were placed where our sun is, its outer layers would extend to about the orbit of Mercury, the Spitzer team said. Such stars shed an enormous amount of material over a relatively short lifetime of a few million years. Winds of stellar radiation drive this material outward at speeds of up to 1 million mph.

ESO

The blue variable star Eta Carinae is shrouded in dust and gas in a view from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. Eta Carinae is considered the Milky Way's most luminous star. Click on the image for a larger version.

Like Eta Carinae, the Peony nebula star appears to be on the very brink of going supernova. That's the way it is with superstars: The brightest lights often burn out the fastest.

"When this star blows up, it will evaporate any planets orbiting stars in the vicinity," Oskinova said. "Farther out from the star, the explosion could actually trigger the birth of new stars."

And that's another thing about being the best and the brightest: There's always someone waiting in the wings who may be even better and brighter. "There are probably other stars just as bright, if not brighter, in our galaxy that remain hidden from view," Oskinova said.

Other authors of the study include Andreas Barniske and Wolf-Rainer Hamann, both of Potsdam University in Germany. For more cosmic views, check out our Space Gallery.

• Hamilton Sundstrand protests NASA spacesuit contract
• Washington Post: Send the space station to the moon
• N.Y. Times: Taking a cue from ants for human evolution
• Discovery.com: Giant laser in the works to achieve fusion

NASA

This plaque, placed on NASA probes in 1972 and 1973, depicts humans and Earth's location.

We've been listening for the signs of extraterrestrial civilizations for nearly 50 years - and if E.T.s are out there, they just might have picked up on the radio signals that we've been transmitting for even longer. More recently, some broadcasters have been sending intentional shout-outs to the aliens.

Is that so wrong?

Yes, in the opinion of physicist-novelist David Brin and other scientists who say such transmissions could bring unwelcome consequences.

For years, Brin has been concerned about the idea of phoning E.T. - a practice he calls METI. That stands for "messages to extraterrestrial intelligence," as opposed to SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In an essay titled "Shouting at the Cosmos," written for the Lifeboat Foundation, Brin said the idea of sending high-powered messages to E.T. represented a worrisome turn in the SETI search:

"If aliens are so advanced and altruistic ... and yet are choosing to remain silent ... should we not consider following their example and doing likewise? At least for a little while? Is it possible that they are silent because they know something we don't know?"

One worry might be that the aliens who respond to the phone call won't look like the cute little fellow in the movie "E.T.," but more like the villains of "Independence Day" or "War of the Worlds." (Or, for that matter, "The X-Files," which returns to the big screen next week.) Brin doesn't explicitly mention an alien invasion, but he does voice deep concern about "shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand."

Over the past couple of years, there's been a good deal of cosmic shouting - or, more accurately, singing and shilling:

• Signals ranging from whale songs to Craigslist classifieds have been sent upward via TV transmission dishes.
• In February, NASA used its Deep Space Network to send a Beatles tune toward Polaris.
• Just last month, a Doritos commercial was beamed to Ursa Major.
• There's even been a discussion about broadcasting signals on a regular basis to nearby star systems that are thought to possess habitable planets, a strategy known as active SETI.

TV broadcasts probably don't make that much of a dent in the cosmos, as the SETI Institute's Seth Shostak reported in a 2004 research paper. But Brin is worried that the high-powered signals just might get the wrong kind of attention, and for the past couple of years he's been trying to get something done about it.

Cornell

This schematic shows the coded message sent out from the Arecibo Observatory in 1974. Click here for the graphic's meaning.

One opportunity came and went in 2006, when a study group for the International Academy of Astronautics discussed SETI issues at a meeting in Spain. Brin and other participants hoped that the group would come up with a procedure for considering and clearing messages meant for E.T., but the issue wasn't addressed to his satisfaction.

Since then, retired U.S. diplomat Michael Michaud and John Billingham, former chief of NASA's SETI office, reportedly resigned from the study group in protest - and Brin is gearing up for another opportunity to get some exposure for the issue. The IAA is due to discuss active SETI and other topics during a September symposium in Paris.

"It looks likely to be yet another staged, Potemkin exercise," Brin told me in an e-mail exchange. "Those who are not present will be ridiculed as 'panicking over Cardassian war fleets' and seeking 'censorship' (neither of which have even remotely been mentioned)."

The possibilities could include setting up a procedure for transmitting messages to target star systems, just as there is an IAA-approved procedure for spreading the word about a confirmed message from E.T. The process might bring in the United Nations or the International Astronomical Union, but the important thing for Brin is that the issue gets a serious airing.

He's already gotten some support from some corners of the blogosphere as well as from space exploration advocates such as Space Policy Consulting's Charles Miller. In an e-mail, Miller said transmissions to E.T. risked exposing Earth to catastrophic consequences, and thus could constitute "crimes against humanity."

Most experts on SETI would reject that indictment. They argue that Earth is already signaling its presence through high-powered military radars, that the vast distances between star systems would insulate civilizations from each other, and that any civilization capable of communicating with others would likely have already gone through its awkward phase.

I realize this is starting to sound like a "Star Trek" episode. It might seem crazy to be concerned about the coming alien invasion when there are more immediate problems to worry about, such as the price of gasoline and the housing crisis.

Even when you consider cosmic threats from space, there's a big distinction between the threats that are already known to occur - such as huge asteroid impacts or supernova blasts - and the threats that depend on what appears to be a string of unlikely propositions. How do you weigh the chances that inimical intelligent life exists on other planets that are close enough to possibly pose a threat?

Brin himself has written about some way-out doomsdays, such as the possibility that a microscopic black hole could destroy the earth. He used that plot device in his 1990 science-fiction novel "Earth." Since then, scientists have gone through a lot of effort to argue that such a scenario couldn't happen in reality.

In one of his e-mails, Brin drew a parallel between the black-hole controversy and the discussion over sending messages to extraterrestrial intelligence:

"The mini-black hole threat is similar to the METI threat in that both are examples of 21st-century quandaries concerning low-probability, high-consequence potential failure modes.

"There is an active discussion site concerning 'existential threats' on the Lifeboat site.  And Nick Bostrum and others have been cataloguing such threats in a way that might lead to improved risk analysis. But we are still in early days and it seems a devilishly vexing problem.

"At one end, you have Bill Joy, Michael Crichton and Ted Kaczynski, variously proposing 'renunciation' as our only way to avoid a 'bad singularity.'  The far right turns anti-science while the far left despises Big Engineering.

"At the other extreme are those who blithely assume that troglodyte-luddites will be proved wrong by accelerating intelligence.

"For more, see: http://lifeboat.com/ex/singularities.and.nightmares

"It puts pragmatic-enlightenment civilization in a bind.  One that I am portraying in my new novel.

"It really ought to be the topic of a major, major conference. Ah, well. Let me know if possibilities occur."

What do you think? Should there be a First Amendment right to phone E.T.? Should broadcasts to the aliens be regulated? Or is this an issue not worth caring about? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 3:30 p.m. ET July 15: Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, got back to me and pointed out that the issue of detecting our signals is really a question of how big a detector the aliens might have. If the antenna is sensitive enough, even early TV signals could be picked up tens of light-years away from Earth.

There's also the question of Earth's unconcealable atmospheric signature: Click through the comments below for insights from Brian McConnell, author of "Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating With Alien Civilizations."

Right now, the controversy is playing out over theoretical what-ifs, and it's hard to tell whether any intentional signals would have an effect. The discussion would have a sharper focus if a signal from an alien civilization were ever detected.

"If you find a signal, then you know where you would want to send a response," said Shostak, who chairs the IAA's SETI Permanent Study Group. The proposed reply would become the subject of intense scientific - and political - discussion.

The procedures for handling any messages to and from E.T. would likely be discussed at the September symposium in Paris, as well as a meeting that will follow in Glasgow, Scotland.

"The current protocols are in fact a gentleman's agreement among some of the SETI folk, and they really don't have the force of international law," Shostak pointed out. "In fact, not all practitioners of SETI have signed onto the current protocols. The fundamental purpose of the protocols is merely to reassure the public that there will be no secrecy, and they will know what's going on."

• The New Yorker: Turf War
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'The Great Inca Rebellion'
• Plus: Bird brains and bionic woman on 'Nova ScienceNOW'
• Science News: Astrocytes are the brain's rising stars

NASA / JPL / UA /TAMU / James Canvin This is just one small part of a panorama showing Phoenix Mars Lander's surroundings, produced by weather researcher and former astronomer James Canvin. Click on the image for a zoomable HD View version (free plug-in required).

It's prime time for the Mars probes: NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is at the halfway point of its 90-day primary mission, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is sending back a flood of images from orbit. The pictures contain an incredible amount of detail - as the latest jaw-dropping panoramas illustrate.

One of the coolest views is a work in progress that's being put together by amateur image wizard James Canvin. He's a weather researcher and former astronomer who often posts his work to Unmanned Spaceflight and Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society Weblog. As more raw imagery come in from the Phoenix lander, Canvin adds it to a home-brewed mosaic that shows a 360-degree view of the probe's surroundings in Mars' north polar region.

The latest version of the Phoenix's mission success panorama (a.k.a. the Peter Pan, in honor of Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith) appears on Lakdawalla's blog as well as on Martian Vistas, Canvin's own home on the Web. With his permission, we've created a zoomable HD View version - but if HD View doesn't work for you, you can still check out Canvin's 10,000-pixel-wide version on Martian Vistas.

"I'd better get working on the final version!" Canvin told me in an e-mail.

In today's posting, Lakdawalla explains why Canvin and other amateurs can get their own versions of NASA imagery on the Web before NASA does. Mission scientists use a more painstaking system for processing their images precisely and scientifically - while the amateurs (and, truth be told, most of us in the outside world) are interested primarily in a good-looking picture.

A thrilling view of Victoria Crater's Cape Verde, based on data from NASA's Opportunity rover, provides a prime example: The wide reddish sky and thin Martian clouds add to the drama of the scene, but they're artistic enhancements rather than the real thing.

Art plus science
Producing pictures of Mars in color is an art as well as a science. Sometimes the technical limitations of spacecraft operating tens of millions of miles from Earth limit what they can do. Even if everything works perfectly, it can take a while to combine the imagery taken through different filters. That's why you'll almost always see the black-and-white versions of Martian scenes first.

A prime example is the stunning picture that Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured on May 25, showing the Phoenix lander descending toward its landing spot on the end of a parachute. The black-and-white version of the image was released a day after the landing, but the partially colorized version didn't come out until this week.

NASA / JPL / UA This partially colorized picture, captured by the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows the Phoenix Mars Lander descending on the end of its parachute. The inset photograph highlights the parachute and lander. Click on the image for a larger version. Can you spot the heat shield falling away?

The scientists who control the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, could get the color data only for a narrow strip of the panorama. Unfortunately, the lander was outside that target strip when the picture was taken.

"For this reason, processing the color bands did not take a high priority in the days following acquisition of this image," the HiRISE team explained.

Nevertheless, the color strips reveal extra information about the crater in the background: There's a slight bluish tint along the right edge of the rightmost strip, indicating that the bowl of the crater contains a dusting of ice or frost.

The high-resolution version of the image holds another surprise: The HiRISE team says the picture appears to show the spacecraft's heat shield falling away, as a tiny black speck below and to the right of the drifting parachute and lander. Can you find it? This detail image from the HiRISE Web site helps you spot the speck.

The heat shield also appears as a speck in HiRISE's latest view of the Phoenix landing site. Check out this high-resolution image to see the lander's parachute and backshell, the black dot of the heat shield, and the lander itself toward the lower right. If you've got your 3-D glasses handy, you'll get a kick out of HiRISE's red-blue stereo pictures.

HiRISE's pictures of the Phoenix site are just the tip of the iceberg. The full image catalog, updated weekly, shows a wide variety of Martian vistas - usually in false shades of blue and orange that are meant to emphasize the subtle differences in surface composition.

But wait ... there's more: Phoenix and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are only the latest probes on the Martian scene. To get the full picture, you'll want to keep tabs on NASA's Mars rovers as well as Mars Odyssey and Europe's Mars Express. And don't forget our special section on Mars exploration, "Return to the Red Planet."

One year after a famous man-vs.-machine poker tournament, the machine finally won out over a team of living, breathing poker professionals. The University of Alberta's Polaris poker-playing software came from behind for the victory in a six-round match held July 3-6 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The outcome wasn't clear until the final scores were tallied up from the final game. Each of the games involved 500 hands of limit hold 'em, with Polaris playing head-to-head against each of the professionals. In the end, Polaris won three of the games, the humans won two, and one was a draw.

Polaris' programmers rejoiced.

"It's hard to describe how good that felt," research team leader Michael Bowling said in a report from the University of Alberta. "As a group, we may not all be great poker players, but all of us really, really want to win."

Bowling pointed out that this was just a first step. "This was really the simplest form of poker," he said. "There's a lot more we can look at, such as playing without betting limits, or playing with more than two opponents. One of the reasons I got excited about this line of research is that it's not just a one-off. It's a really challenging path of research."

Historically, computers have been better at games where all the information is essentially out there on the board - for instance, chess and checkers. Poker is trickier, because players have to make judgments based on different amounts of information about the state of play.

"In general, problems in the real world are going to be more like poker than chess," Bowling said.

For more about the latest "man-vs.-machine" battle, check out the Web sites for the Polaris research team and the Stoxpoker team of elite players.

Polaris and other pokerbots have been around for years, and it's almost a given that some of those bots have been employed on online gaming sites against not-so-professional human players. Check out this archived report on the subject from Michael Brunker, one of my colleagues at msnbc.com, and this more recent report on a real-money pokerbot (it's actually the first part of an ongoing series).

If robo-poker isn't your cup of tea, here are some other weekend field trips you can take on the Web:

• The nonprofit Planetary Society says it is extending the deadline for sending your name to the moon. Now you have until July 25 to add your name to the list. The names will be digitized, stored on a microchip and placed on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is due for launch late this year. As I noted back in May, you can even print out a certificate recognizing your participation in the project.
• Something funny seems to be going on at the sun. Or more accurately, not going on. The sun is at the low point of its 11-year activity cycle, and it's been that way for going on three years. Some observers have wondered whether the solar minimum is lasting an abnormally long time, but on the Science @ NASA Web site, solar physicist David Hathaway says the current quiet phase "is well within historic norms for the solar cycle." Space.com had a story last month about the eerie calm and is passing along the calming follow-up today.
• So how are we doing? A survey of more than 1,300 scientists from around the world, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, indicates that scientists now think science writers aren't so bad after all. "Scientists actually see rewards in this process, not just pitfalls," study co-author Sharon Dunwoody, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in a news release about the survey. The respondents included scientists from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Japan. You can get the international perspective from University College London and the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers - and there's even an MP3 audio interview with study director Hans Peter Peters.

The last word, as always, is yours. What do you think about the rise of the pokerbots, the state of the solar cycle or the state of science in society? Feel free to add your comments below.

Update for 4:54 p.m. ET July 13: I've revised the reference to how pokerbots are being used on gaming Web sites, in response to comments below.

L. Bedin / STScI / NASA / ESA Click for video: Two background galaxies are visible amid a glittering array of stars in this detail from a Hubble image showing the open star cluster NGC 6791. Click on the image to watch a video that zooms in on the cluster.

The time is out of joint in the open star cluster NGC 6791: Three different types of stars show three different ages for the cluster, and that poses a puzzle for the scientists who use stars as celestial timepieces. Fortunately, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope - combined with some scientific sleuthing - go at least halfway toward setting things right in the cosmic clockwork.

Normal stars follow a well-known course of development as they age, and astronomers can figure out how old the stars are just by correlating their brightness and their color. There's a separate brightness-and-color scale for figuring out the ages of white dwarfs, which are the burnt-out embers of sunlike stars that gradually fade into darkness.

Usually, the two time scales confirm each other. But in NGC 6791's case, the normal, main-sequence stars indicated an age of 8 billion years, while the white dwarfs signaled significantly younger ages. Some bright white dwarfs indicated an age of 4 billion years. Other, dimmer dwarfs looked as if they were 6 billion years old.

So what do you go with? Four billion years? Six billion? Eight billion? All of the above? None?

"The age discrepancy is a problem because stars in an open cluster should be the same age," astronomer Luigi Bedin of the Space Telescope Science Institute said in an image advisory issued today. "They form at the same time within a large cloud of interstellar dust and gas. So we were really puzzled by what was going on."

The off-kilter clocks suggested that astronomers might have been missing something fundamental about the way star clusters work. Or is there something special about NGC 6791? When the Hubble research team analyzed imagery of the cluster in detail, they were intrigued to find that the bright white dwarfs were roughly twice as shiny as the dim white dwarfs.

Could the brighter stars actually be pairs of dim white dwarfs, positioned so close together that they appear to be single stars? That's what the researchers suggest in a report published in the May 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A. Feild / STScI / NASA / ESA

This chart shows the three scales that scientists used to calculate NGC 6791's age. One of the curves for the white dwarfs is twice as bright as the other. Click on the image for a larger version.

"It's a surmise, but things fall into place so beautifully," said the leader of the Hubble study, University of Washington astronomer Ivan King.

The binary-star scenario solves half of the problem: If you assume that the doubly bright white dwarfs are actually double stars, that would result in an age estimate of 6 billion years.

"We've still got the problem that the white dwarfs are giving a younger age than the main-sequence stars," King told me. "It casts doubt on the whole white-dwarf method. We'd dearly love to know what's going on."

Theorists have already come up with an idea to explain away the discrepancy. It turns out that the white dwarfs in NGC 6791 are not your typical white dwarfs. "This is a very unusual cluster, in that it has more than twice as much of the heavy elements as the sun does," King said.

Perhaps the heavy-metal white dwarfs evolve somewhat more slowly than the more common, lighter white dwarfs. If that's the case, the star cluster would be 8 billion years old - with white dwarfs that are particularly good at hiding their age.

King said he and his colleagues should know more once they're able to look at another star cluster for comparison. That could happen as early as this year, if NASA's shuttle mission to repair Hubble is successful.

During the mission, scheduled for launch on Oct. 8, spacewalkers are due to repair and replace Hubble's cameras - including the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which sent back the data used by King's team but is now mostly out of commission. If the upgrades go as planned, Hubble should be in good working order until 2013 or so.

Like many other scientists, King can hardly wait to see the Hubble Space Telescope returned to full service. At the age of 18, the greatest of NASA's Great Observatories may be getting a bit long in the tooth for a space telescope - but it's still a youngster in King's eyes. 

"I expect to draw upon it for the rest of my career," he said. "I'm 81, by the way."

In addition to King and Bedin, the research team includes Maurizio Salaris of Liverpool John Moores University in Britain, Giampaolo Piotto and A.P. Milone of the University of Padua in Italy, Santi Cassisi of the Collurania Astronomical Observatory in Italy and Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

For still more glittering pictures from Hubble, check out our zoomable look at the Coma Cluster and msnbc.com's gallery of greatest hits from the cosmos.

• Technology Review: First detailed map of the human cortex
• HiRISE: Mars orbiter spots lander's heat shield in free fall
• Slashdot: Ask Aubrey de Grey about longevity research
• SLAC: Physicists discover the bottom-most 'bottomonium'

Jacob Vinther / Yale These images compare structures in a striped fossil feather (left side) and a woodpecker feather (right side). Under the scanning electron microscope there are melanosomes in the dark but not the light areas of the fossil (far left arrows). The corresponding areas are shown at far right. Click on the image for a close-up.

If dinosaurs had feathers, what did their plumage look like? Some artists have gone wild with their palette, decking out their dinos with parakeet pigments. But now there might actually be a way to figure out a dinosaur's true colors, thanks to a new technique for analyzing fossilized feathers.

The technique, pioneered by Yale researchers, involves looking at fossils with a scanning electron microscope for tiny structures that appear to be pigment-producing melanosomes. For years, it was thought that the imprints in the rock were fossilized bacteria, but in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers report that the spots are almost certainly melanosomes.

It makes sense that ancient creatures with feathers would have the same type of pigment-producing organelles that modern-day birds have, said Yale doctoral student Jacob Vinther, who conducted the research with paleontologist Derek Briggs and ornithologist Richard Prum.

"Birds frequently have spectacularly colored plumage, which are often used in camouflage and courtship display," Vinther said in a Yale news release. "Feather melanin is responsible for rusty-red to jet-black colors, and a regular ordering of melanin even produces glossy iridescence. Understanding these organic remains in fossil feathers also demonstrates that melanin can resist decay for millions of years."

The fossilized samples included a feather found in 100 million-year-old rocks from Brazil, and a 55 million-year-old bird skull from Denmark. The comparisons were made with a feather from a red-winged blackbird as well as with the retina of a whippoorwill, using a scanning electron microscope and an X-ray analyzer.

The imprints on both of the fossils matched up incredibly well with the modern melanosomes, which are found in the eyes and the skin as well as in the feathers. Melanin is also the coloring agent for mammalian fur - and your own hair, for that matter.

Could the 100 million-year-old fossilized feather have come from a dinosaur?

"In principle, it could be a dinosaur," Vinther told me. "We don't know. The [Brazilian rock] formation hasn't yielded any dinosaurs. They've discovered a few birds there. The most conservative answer, if you had to give one, is that it might be a bird."

msnbc.com file

This artist's conception shows what a feather-bearing dinosaur known as Caudipteryx zoui may (or may not) have looked like.

The larger point is that the technique could be used in the future with dinosaur feather fossils. Prum came right out and said it in the news release: "Scientists have a way to reliably predict, for example, the original colors of feathered dinosaurs."

OK, suppose we find melanosomes in dino feathers. That would indicate that the feathers bore patterns of colors - but how could you determine which colors they were?

Vinther explained that different types of melanin are produced by differently shaped melanosomes. The sausage-shaped structures found in the fossilized feather from Brazil would have produced shades of black, using eumelanin. Round-shaped melanosomes produce reddish colors, using phaeomelanin.

The shading depends on how concentrated the melanosomes were. For round melanosomes, the palette ranges from that rusty red to lighter shades of brown, and then blond. For the sausage-shaped type, you're looking at blacks and grays.

"If the alignment of the melanosomes is really organized, and with a distinct spacing, that can give rise to diffraction," Vinther told me. That could produce a hummingbird's shimmery look, and even exotic shades of blue and green.

Melanin isn't the only factor behind coloration, as this explanation from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology makes clear. "Definitely you can start getting some idea of the coloration of birds, but this is something that needs to be studied further," Vinther said.

And we're not just talking about the feathers of birds and dinosaurs. Theoretically, other fossil features could be analyzed for their true colors. Researchers have reported finding fossilized skin from a 200 million-year-old ichthyosaur, and Vinther said a close analysis of the tissue could colorize our current picture of those ancient deep-sea monsters.

"You could see the organic imprints, and they look like the cells that would have the melanin inside," Vinther said.