Well, you still can’t play Halo 3 on it, but a UMass professor has a more practical use in mind for his PS3. Dr. Gaurav Khanna, an assistant professor at UMass, created an 8 node cluster using PS3s to run models to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for nearly 100 years but never observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day.
In the past, Dr. Khanna had rented time on various supercomputing sites across the US, typically using a couple hundred processors and costing as much as $5,000 of his grant money.

Khanna’s cluster has been up and running for a little over a month. He says that the cluster is roughly equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on. Read more at Wired…

PS3 clusters have been created by other researchers as well. One of the pioneers is a North Carolina State University Professor, Dr.Frank Mueller, who created an 8 node PS3 cluster back in March of this year for a total cost of about $5,000.

Interested in the idea, but not sure about where to begin? Terra Soft Solutions is offering turnkey PS3 clusters. An 8 node cluster will set you back about $21,500 and a 32 node cluster $52,250. Besides the obvious cost of the consoles, for that price you also get a dual-proc Power Mac G5, a 48 port switch, Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed (developed and maintained by Terra Soft for the Power architecture family of CPUs), 7 cat 6 cables, mouse, keyboard, 19″ display, and 20 hours or technical support.

NASA is likely to close its Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funds research into way-out spaceflight and aeronautics. The move is a result of the budget problems that NASA are facing as they struggle to retire the shuttle and get a replacement ready in time. It’s already likely that there will be a gap in launch capability of at least a year.

The institute receives only $4 million per year from NASA, whose annual budget is $17 billion. That budget has recently produced the conceptual development of spacecraft that could surf the solar system on magnetic fields, motion-sensitive spacesuits that could generate power and tiny, spherical robots that could explore Mars.

The move in another sad chapter in the NASA story. The commercial space industry is now, in my opinion, a more interesting arena and is far more likely to produce something exciting in the next few years.

For example, a rocket developed by Elon Musk, the PayPal founder, blasted into space on Tuesday. The 21-metre (68-foot) booster rocket called Falcon 1(shown above) lifted off from a US military missile test-range in the Marshall Islands and arrived in space soon after. There were problems five minutes into the flight with the booster’s second-stage engine, but the mission was still a success. The booster carried a pair of engineering experiments from DARPA, who funded the flight. Space Exploration Technologies, also called SpaceX, is offering launches at about $7 million. SpaceX’s debut mission a year ago ended shortly after lift-off when a corroded nut cracked, triggering a disastrous fuel leak and fire.

Matthew Sparkes is a contributing author for MoT.

When we eventually colonize the moon, there will be a huge demand for water, oxygen and other resources. Supplying a base from Earth would be far too costly, and also defeat the object of creating a colony. If bases cannot be self sufficient then there is little point. Luckily, all these things can be extracted from the lunar soil.

Collecting moon-dust in a mechanical way could throw up lots of the abrasive material that can harm equipment and astronauts health, as well as ruining the brilliant view you get of Earth.

The answer may be to create a flexible trunk equipped with magnetic coils along its length, that could suck up the iron-heavy dust. The research was presented on Thursday at the Lunar and Planetary Society Conference in Houston, Texas.

Another area where this may be useful is in creating insulation for the habitats themselves. Another study presented at the conference suggested that burying lunar habitats with packaged moon dust could help regulate their temperature. On the Moon, the surface temperature ranges from over 100 Celsius during the day to -150 C at night. The magnetic trunk could be perfectly suited to creating this insulation.

Matthew Sparkes is a contributing author for MoT.

Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has successfully “launched and landed Goddard – a first development vehicle in the New Shepard program.”

According to Blue Origin, this launch (watch video below) actually happened on November 13, but they just made the news public yesterday. This leaves us curious as to how Branson’s Virgin Galactic is doing.

Via Boing Boing

NASA recently announced plans for a permanent base on our moon. Construction would begin once astronauts actually return to the moon around 2020. Also, NASA is thinking about making spacecraft that will be able to get people and supplies to the moon.

The base will be built at one of the moon’s poles, because of the mild climate with more sunlight. Four-person crews will spend short durations on the moon with teams constantly being rotated in and out, like the current routine at the International Space Station.

Scientists and researchers stationed at the moon base would be able to use the moon’s natural resources to maintain the lunar base. The base could bring us closer to future manned missions to Mars.

NASA has not released a specific cost for the program. NASA also plans on asking other nations and businesses to assist in the creation of the lunar base.

More via Daily Tech

To reduce Earth’s temperature, Roger Angel, a University of Arizona professor, wants to build a huge space sunshade made of 20,000 billion very small spacecraft weighing about a gram. This plan would cost $100 billion per year and would be deployed over a period of 25 years. Angel has received a grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts in July 2006 to do further research about this idea.

“The spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer. About 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet. The effect would be to uniformly reduce sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet, enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.”

And Angel says, “With care, the solar shade should last about 50 years. So the average cost is about $100 billion a year, or about two-tenths of one percent of the global domestic product.” An interesting concept indeed, but is it viable? Via ZDNet

NASA has created two robotic spacecraft known as Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories (or STEREO) to capture high-def 3D images of the sun and solar wind. The spacecraft, launched Wednesday evening, will take the first-ever stereoscopic measurements of the sun’s explosions a.k.a. coronal mass ejections.

Scientists believe that understanding solar storms will help them forecast weather in space and mitigate their negative effects on satellite operations, polar aviation, communication systems, power grids and astronauts in space. The STEREO spacecraft made the trip aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket. More via CNET and NASA STEREO Mission Site

We recently wrote about Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, summarizing what it entails and some steps they took to get to the point of SpaceShipTwo. They have just releaed images of the concept interior of SpaceShipTwo. Here is a video from Virgin Galactic showing some concept footage of SpaceShipTwo.

Founded in 2004, Virgin Galactic is based in New Mexico where it plans to construct a $225 million spaceport, due to begin construction in early 2007. Sir Richard Branson formed Virgin Galactic after watching SpaceShipOne, a craft designed by Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, become the first privately manned rocket to reach space last year.

Virgin Galactic has a deal with Rutan, founder of Scaled Composites, to build five spacecraft, licensing technology from Allen’s company, Mojave Aerospace Ventures. Virgin Galactic plans to operate its initial flights from the Mojave base ahead of the projected opening of the New Mexico spaceport in late 2009 or early 2010.

Virgin Galactic revealed that up to 38,000 people from 126 countries have paid a deposit, $20,000, for a seat on one of its manned commercial flights, including a core group of 100 “founders” who have paid the initial $200,000 cost of a flight upfront. Virgin Galactic plans to launch flights in late 2008 or early 2009.

The air-launched SpaceShipTwo a.k.a SS2 (interior concept shown above was recently revealed) is designed to seat eight people – six passengers and two pilots – and be hauled into launch position by WhiteKnightTwo, a massive carrier craft currently under construction by Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn said.