Apparently, not so bad. But you might have to try it out yourself by grabbing a bottle of of Meteorito. The wine was basically a fusion of interests for Ian Hutcheon, who runs a vineyard and this astronomy center in Chile called the Centro Astronomica Tagua Tagua.

What he did was ferment the red wine by putting the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with the three-inch meteorite inside the wooden barrel. The wine is then bottled twenty-five days later.

So how does Meteorito taste compared to the non-meteorite version of the wine? According to Hutcheon, it is “livelier.” But hey, maybe that’s what something from space can do either to you (or to the wine.)

Each bottle of Meteorito costs just £7 (~$11 USD), and over 10,000 have so far been fermented.

[via Daily Mail]

The video was released this week but was actually filmed back in January. It begins in an impact basin known as Mare Orientale. That impact basin is massive at 560 miles wide. To capture the footage, NASA used one of the Grail spacecraft and the camera it’s equipped with called the MoonKAM.

The coolest thing about that camera is that NASA will allow students on earth to snap pictures the lunar surface as part of a project for education. MoonKAM is the first camera ever sent on a NASA probe that is completely dedicated to educational use. Camera control will be given to Middle School students starting in March.

You can check out the video above ore on the official NASA page here.

Right now the single biggest space hazard in orbit are the thousands of pieces of debris left over after the Chinese conducted an anti-satellite test with a missile back in 2007. Early Sunday morning this past weekend, mission controllers in Russia had to make a change in the orbital altitude of the ISS to avoid a chunk of that Chinese space debris that was coming perilously close to the ISS.

Mission controllers fired up the engines on the Russian Zvezda service module and over 64 seconds raised the orbit of the ISS by 1.7 km. The ISS is now orbiting at an altitude of 391.6 km above the surface of the Earth. The increased orbital distance was enough to get the ISS away from the chunk of space debris. It seems like we need to start coming up with a good plan to clean up all the junk orbiting the Earth.

[via SpaceDaily]

According to the Russian, the object is an organism with the body of a scorpion or a crab, a disc shape and a back flap that changed position from one shot to the next the probe took. Life on Venus is hard for most people to imagine, since the surface of the planet can reach temps of 464°C, and the gravity is nine times that of Earth.

A scientist that works with the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University doesn’t believe the Russian is seeing what he thinks. According to Jonathon Hill, who processes images NASA takes of Mars, what Prof. Ksanfomaliti sees is a piece of mechanical equipment which broke off on landing. He also thinks that the reason it looks like it changed positions is that the images were taken by two different cameras on the craft.

Hill also says that the same object shows up in photos taken by another probe called Venera 14 that landed nearby. Venera 14 and Venera 13 are identical, and likely both dropped the same bit of debris on the ground. What do you think from the blurry images here? I can certainly see something you might think are legs, but the mechanical equipment theory seems much more logical.

[via Telegraph]

STEREO-B is one of a pair of spacecraft near the sun that watch the inner solar system and provide images and video. NASA has decided to step up and debunk the rumor on the cover-up and existence of this particular UFO. According to space agency, in the video you can see the bright planet Venus come into view and the “UFO” moves along with Venus.

The triangular shaped “UFO” is nothing but reflected light from inside the telescope on the spacecraft. NASA says that this sort of triangular pattern is not uncommon and that sometimes the reflections manifest as circles too. In other words, calm down UFO nuts. NASA said, “The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image,” the scientists wrote. “At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the [telescopic camera's] field-of-view from the lower left.”

“This is not a coincidence. The strange-looking geometrical ‘object’ is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before.”

[via CSMonitor]

It is made from 120,000 bricks and was built by LEGO pro Ryan McNaught, who may or may not be compensating for something with this enormous spacecraft.

The details are amazing. He even included the liquid fuel tanks and the NASA Astrovan. Here’s a fun fact that has nothing to do with LEGOs: Did you know the Saturn V is the only launch vehicle to transport human beings beyond Low Earth orbit?

This amazing LEGO creation will be on display at the Melbourne (AU) Town Hall on the 21st and 22nd of January. If you happen to be in the area be sure to look for it.

Check out more pics of the giant LEGO rocket over on Ryan’s flickr album.

[via The Brothers Brick]

The 13-ton probe failed to get into space far enough to continue its journey and will now fall back to Earth sometime this coming weekend. The swath of land that the remnant satellite parts could fall onto include some of the most populous cities on Earth. The Russian space agency director Vladimir Popovkin has now hinted that some sort of weapon might have caused the satellite to fail.

Previously, a retired commander that was in charge of a missile early warning station said that strong radar signals from Alaska could have damaged the spacecraft. Russia didn’t accuse the US or any other countries of attacking its satellites. However, the insinuation was there. Popovkin said, “We don’t want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now. The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out.”

[via NYTimes]

The ISS crew is excited because this isn’t only a visit by a new ship; the Dragon will also be bringing supplies like food, clothing, and other supplies for the crew. The Dragon flight is being funded in part by the NASA Commercial Orbiter Transportation Services (COTS). The Dragon is an automated ship and one of the most important things about Dragon’s arrival is that it will allow items from the ISS to return to Earth.

The Dragon craft will allow the return of “significant” payloads to Earth. That means broken equipment can be sent home and repaired and samples can be returned to Earth. The first visit by the Dragon ship will be unmanned, but it was designed to carry people as well.

SpaceX expects to launch the Dragon from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 booster on February 7th.

[via space.com]

That’s an iPad – no doubt peeing itself while passed out and dying – wrapped in G-Form’s Extreme Edge case, kidnapped and taken for a balloon ride up to a height of more than 100,000ft. Watch the video below to watch the gimmick unfold:

Of course, there’s really no reason they needed to do drop it from such a great height, since the iPad hits terminal velocity at a much lower altitude, and the impact would have been the same.

Everyone order an Extreme Edge before G-Form launches the poor iPad to the Sun. Wait no hold your purchase. I’d actually like to see that.

Lovell apparently signed an affidavit that asserted he owned the title to the ring-bound checklist. However, NASA says that there is no indication that Lovell was ever assigned the title to the document. NASA’s legal eagle noted that only NASA has the right to sell NASA property.

The auction firm, Heritage Auctions, is keeping the document in its vault and has suspended the sale until the legal wrangling is over. Lovell had sold the checklist at the auction house for $380,000. Apollo 13 was the moon mission that had a tank explosion 200,000 miles from Earth, which forced the crew to return home. NASA is also disputing the legal right to several other space items Heritage Auctions has sold in the past.

[via ABCNews]

Scientists Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University have proposed that a crowd-sourcing system like SETI@home should be used to pour over the photos of the Moon taken by various NASA missions, looking for leftover artifacts from aliens that might have visited in the past. While they admit the likelihood of alien technology on the Moon is low, they figure if some vastly advanced aliens ever made their way here and wanted to watch us, the Moon would have been the perfect base. I suspect that if they could cross the interstellar void, they could pick up their trash and hide their footprints.

They say that the Moon is a good place to start because artificial changes to the landscape from hardware or foot traffic stay for decades or more. NASA has already shown that you can still clearly see where the Apollo astronauts once walked and where they left hardware. What do you think; will they find signs of alien life on the moon? I think not.

[via Discovery]

The satellite fell back into the atmosphere and was destroyed, adding to the already hundreds of millions of dollars of lost space investments this year. The satellite aboard the unmanned rocket was called the Meridian military communications satellite. The failed launch took off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. There are other rockets set to launch from the same location in the coming weeks, but these recent failures definitely call into question the Russian’s ability to launch rockets successfully.

[via Space.com]

Apparently, the ball is a pressure vessel of some sort that is used in spacecraft, so it’s simply space junk that didn’t burn up in the atmosphere. I wonder if the Meteor Men would want to sell the thing on eBay.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this was that 80′s comedy called The Gods Must Be Crazy where the tribesman that has never seen modern society gets hit in the head by a bottle dropped form an airplane. I think if this metal orb had hit someone it would have been a bigger issue, at least for the person nailed in the head by something weighing over six kilograms having a 43.3-inch circumference falling at terminal velocity.

[via Gizmodo]

The Lovejoy comet was on a path that many in the scientific community thought would mean the end of the comet. The comet was headed on a journey that would take it right through the corona of the sun. The scientists expected the comet to be vaporized. So scientists were shocked when the comet actually barreled through the corona and zipped right back into space.

Lovejoy was watched by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory as it headed toward the sun. The SDO followed the path of the comet, expecting nothing but a dust trial to survive, but it appears to have emerged from the other side. It lost a significant amount of its mass, but part of the comet still made it through. Given the fact that the corona of the sun is estimated to reach a temperature of nearly 2 million degrees Farehnheit, that’s no small feat.

Prior to the fly-by, Lovejoy had a core that was 660-feet wide and is in a class of comets called “Kreutz sungrazers” because they orbit so close to the sun.

[via Space.com]

The crossbow is six feet long and made from a pair of truck carriage springs. The string that holds the giant “arrow” to the crossbow is a thick piece of cable. I have a hard time believing that cable will withstand the forces of shooting into a comet moving 150,000 mph, but stranger things have happened.

The crossbow can launch its ammunition with 1000 pounds of force, and one engineer says if the crossbow were aimed straight up, it would likely shoot a mile into the air. A prototype harpoon even penetrated a 250 liter drum of dirt in testing, and the actual space harpoon will be fired by an explosive cannon, not just a mechanical crossbow like their test model, so it’s likely to be even more powerful and precise. Where was this technology when Captain Ahab was around?

[via Wired]

The checklist calculations that commander James Lovell used to work out the spacecraft’s position and the angle to entry back into Earth’s atmosphere were hand written on this chart. One miscalculation and the astronauts would have been killed, so the data on this chart was instrumental in saving the astronauts’ lives.

This authentic original checklist recently grabbed over $380,000 (USD) at auction, making it the most expensive moon mission era item to never have landed on the moon.

[via The Australian]

Alianoid looks like an alien robot that keeps on venting steam in anger. It’s got stubby little legs, a rotund body and bulbous head. There are some simple controls at the bottom to indicate water levels and the desired steam output.

For now, this is just a concept design, but hopefully someone will make it a reality so that we can all have this little space guy keeping our nasal passages clear someday.

[via Yanko Design]

NASA has been following this one asteroid closely since the close fly-by will put the asteroid measuring 1,300 feet across only about 201,700 miles from the Earth. That means that the asteroid will be very visible to astronomers with high-power telescopes.

Normal folks with telescopes will not be able to see the asteroid, but the giant telescopes at observatories will be able to view YU55 with a resolution of about 13 feet. That is as good a resolution as we get with a spacecraft fly-by.

[via Newsok]

Armstrong apparently denied ever selling or giving space rock to anyone. The piece of rock in question is apparently inside a dome made of acrylic meant to be a paperweight and has been authenticated as real. NASA maintains that any moon rocks were brought back from Apollo missions and therefore are property of the government. Davis contacted someone at NASA to ask for help selling the rock to raise money for a sick child.

She is said to have acknowledged that the rock couldn’t be sold legitimately and hinted at selling it on the black market. When Davis went to a restaurant, in southern California to compete the sale, NASA’s inspector general and law enforcement swooped in and seized the rock and scared Davis so badly she apparently lost control of her bladder. Davis says the rock is her property and that she ended up with bruises on her body from being held by the police. I am sure a lawsuit in the case is coming soon. Davis was not arrested, but wasn’t allowed to keep the rock either.

[via CSMonitor]

Phoenix is intended to cruise around up in orbit, targeting satellites that have failed. The idea is that on most of the satellites that aren’t working, the issue may be with one small part leaving the main antenna dish, solar panels, and other large parts perfectly functional. The catch is that you can’t just shoot a repairman up into geosynchronous orbit to fix these satellites.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

This is where Phoenix comes in. This sub-component of a satellite (or “satlet”) would find those up there that aren’t working, and link up next to the defunct satellite, detaching defective components, then attaching itself to the working parts to build new satellites in orbit. Phoenix would need to be able to cut through the metal outside of a satellite and reach the sensitive innards to take them apart. The actual disassembly would likely be done by a person on the ground using a telepresence system.

[via Dvice]