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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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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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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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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Two disparate concepts can sometimes join together to create a perfectly harmonious third. Few people would have thought that peanut butter and jelly would taste good together, but they do. No one would have guessed that combining two gases -- hydrogen and oxygen -- would produce the liquid called water. But they do.

The verdict is still out on what exactly will be the outcome of a paleontologist, Sankar Chatterjee, putting his scientific head together with that of an aeronautical engineer named Rick Lind. But so far the results have been intriguing. The object of their collaboration is a project called the pterodrone, an unmanned aerial vehicle modeled on the flying prowess of an early Cretaceous pterosaur, Tapejara wellnhoferi.

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