The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.

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Laser weaponry is a hot topic lately (excuse the pun), especially for those who question the ethics of using them on the battlefield. In late September, the Senate approved a Defense Authorization Bill that would provide new funding for military laser weapons.

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Almost 13 months after adventurer Steve Fossett disappeared in a single-engine plane over Nevada, and a year to the day since the search was suspended, the wreckage of his Bellanca 8KCAB (N240R) has been discovered in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Fossett's body is still missing.

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It sounds like a Hollywood concept, but DARPA wants to make the submersible aircraft a reality -- and they need your help. This week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency put out a request for designs: they want a vehicle with a 2,000-pound capacity that can cover an area of about 1,000 nautical miles, fly that distance in just eight hours, and -- by the way -- fly both above and below water.

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After decades of staying in Earth orbit, NASA hopes to return to the moon. There, astronauts will drive Chariot, the newly designed replacement for the lunar rover that transported astronauts and moon rocks during the Apollo 15 through 17 missions in 1971 and 1972.

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The "termination shock" sounds like the stuff science fiction movies are made of. In reality, it marks the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. The invisible "shock" forms as our sun's solar winds begin to encounter the gases and magnetic fields of outer space, which slows the winds down abruptly.

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When the newest commercial imaging satellite opened its eye in the sky, this is the first thing it saw: a university campus located midway between Reading and Allentown, Pennsylvania. GeoEye, the Virginia-based company that owns the satellite, released the image on October 8.

Named GeoEye-1, the satellite was launched on September 6 but spent its first month undergoing initial testing. The quality of its pictures may get even better as its owners continue calibrating the onboard camera.

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On Monday, for the second time this year, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft will fly by the hot, cratered surface of the planet Mercury. The craft will come within 125 miles to take pictures and gather data while it uses the gravitational pull of the little orb to keep it on the right track for it’s mission to eventually become the first thing to orbit Mercury in 2011.

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