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NASA said Wednesday that it has made available a series of video updates on the Ares rocket program available to the public via iTunes.

There are 10 videos--which have been produced quarterly since August 2006--in the series. NASA's move Wednesday means that all 10 will be viewable on Apple's service immediately, with forthcoming progress reports to be added as they are finished.

The Ares rocket is the space agency's next-generation launch vehicle, intended to carry the Orion crew capsule--and its astronauts--to the moon, as well as to the International Space Station.

The first space station launch is … Read more

Fans of the planet Jupiter have something new to get excited about.

On Monday, NASA announced that it is planning to launch a mission, titled Juno, to conduct a large-scale survey of our solar system's biggest planet.

According to NASA, the new mission will involve an unmanned spacecraft that is planned for an August 2011 launch onboard an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It is expected that the rocket will reach its destination, orbit around Jupiter, in 2016.

Once there, the plan is for the spacecraft to orbit Jupiter 32 times over the course of a year at … Read more

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--NASA celebrated the 75th anniversary of this iconic airfield and research center on Friday by dedicating a brand-new zeppelin from a private company called Airship Ventures.

The zeppelin NT ("new technology"), which is one of just three currently functioning zeppelins that exist in the world, and the biggest, at 246 feet, was named "Eureka," a name that relates to the fact that the ship is based in California, as well as the fact that it is "rooted in scientific principles," said Brian Bell, a co-founder of Airship Ventures, the ship's … Read more

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected what NASA scientists believe are huge glaciers of water ice lying beneath a layer of rocky debris.

The finding is significant because it helps scientists better understand a feature of the Martian surface that has puzzled them for decades. In the 1970s, the Viking orbiters sent back images that showed what have been dubbed "aprons," or large, gently sloping deposits of debris situated at the base of tall geographic formations like cliffs. Several theories for what created these aprons have been posed over the years. This research indicates that what's just … Read more

Justin kicks off the show with some fresh haterade for Fox "personality" Bill O'Reilly and his views on the godless liberal city of San Francisco. Also on the show, Wilson goes hands on with the Blackberry Storm, an inmate gets $300 K for his lost genitals, NASA installs a fart detector in the space station, same sex couples can join eHarmony and PETA releases "Cooking Mama: Mama kills animals." We conclude with a geeked out discussion about X-Men.

Dan the Mantern here. In case you haven't seen it already, you should check out the above "documentary" from the O'Reilly Factor that claims that, should the Christian right not remain vigilant, all of America will begin to resemble San Francisco, the modern-day Sodom. If you analyze the video, you'll notice that several interviews were conducted with homeless people and burnt-out hippies, precisely the type of people who would make any city seem like an undesirable place to live. Obviously O'Reilly is running out of material. You better watch your back, Bill, because I know a 130-lb. Asian man who loves skinny jeans and ass-whupping, and his skinny jeans are in the wash...

UPDATE: If you're having problems listening to today's episode of the show, please re-download the episode. We apologize, but there was an error in the MP3 encoding, which caused the file to not play passed the 7 minute mark.

British prime minister Gordon Brown spoke on Thursday (at least indirectly) about the future of Gary McKinnon, a 42-year-old UFO enthusiast accused of hacking into several U.S. military sites. It was the prime minister's first public comments on the case which, after six years, took a twist over the summer.

McKinnon lost his last fight against extradition in July but has yet to arrive in the United States to stand trial. His lawyers are continuing to appeal within the E.U. courts. McKinnon, who has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, has said he would prefer to stand … Read more

The interplanetary network that Vint Cerf envisioned years ago got its first real test recently. The EPOXI spacecraft, which carried the Deep Impact probe to Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, had its software reconfigured after delivering the payload to work as a test bed for NASA's new Disruption-Tolerant Networking protocol. As the craft dropped back toward Earth for one of the gravity assists that will ultimately sling it back toward another comet in 2010, it transmitted simulated images of the Martian moon Phobos using the new protocol.

The trial turned EPOXI into one of 10 nodes in a test … Read more

It's 404 time! Wilson, MTI and the Mantern hijack the show while Jeff tours Canada and Justin suffers from radiation poisoning. With Wilson at the helm, the show starts to sound like NPR, but a few below-the-belt comments from the Mantern get things back on track. We talk golden earbuds (not showers), unarmed German thieves, astronaut fitness and Chinese spies. For the show's second half we gear up for the new Xbox Live Experience that launches tomorrow.

Dan the Mantern here. I must say, I'm pretty excited about the launch of the new Xbox Live Experience. Having canceled my cable subscription because I can't afford an additional gajillion dollars every month to surf 700 channels of crap, I'm hungry for a new way to entertain myself. I can't wait to start streaming to my big screen in full HD. As for the new "avatar" features, I'm petrified. Almost nothing is worse than getting pwned by an 8-year-old in Call of Duty 4 and having to listen to him trash talk. Getting pwned by a cutesy cartoon avatar of an 8-year-old who has a mouth like a sailor? Completely humiliating. Here's to the last hours of a Mii-free Xbox Live.

NASA has posted a series of photos of the Southern California wildfires that were taken with one of its research satellites.

The images show smoke from the fires being blown west over the Pacific Ocean from a portion of the state stretching from Santa Barbara to Riverside County. They were taken with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, which specializes in measurements including cloud cover, ocean color, and water vapor, and has delivered pictures of notable events including Hurricane Katrina and Bangladesh flooding in the past.

Another way to look at the affected area is through Google Earth. Available maps include … Read more