IEEE Spectrum: Aerospace

iCandy

Spectrum's monthly slideshow proves that a picture is worth a thousand bytes

CPU, Heal Thyself

A fault-monitoring microprocessor design can save power or allow overclocking

Mars Satellite Spies Signs of Ancient Lakebed on Red Planet

Images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter offer glimpse into planet's watery past

A Sonic Black Hole

HOLE MAN:

Jeff Steinhauer's team made an acoustic black hole.

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A laboratory black hole, made using sound waves and exotic matter, might prove Stephen Hawking right

Could the Earth Collide with Mars?

A new computer simulation concludes: maybe--but not for a few billion years

Researchers Propose InterGalactic Positioning System (IGPS)

Lost in space? Use signals from four pulsars and you can determine your exact location

NASA Planet Hunter to Search Out Other Earths

The Kepler satellite, scheduled to launch this month, will spend more than three years hunting for planets that might support life

Engineering the Big Bang

One last look at the guts of CERN's Large Hadron Collider before it was sealed up.

Powering the Large Hadron Collider

BIG DRAW

It is estimated that the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest physics experiment in history, will use 1000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2009.

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When the LHC starts up tomorrow, it will draw twice the power of nearby Geneva

CERN to Start Up the Large Hadron Collider. Now Here's How It Plans to Stop It

How the LHC stops a proton beam that can melt a half ton of copper

Earth-Size Radio Telescope Opens Its Eye

Arecibo, Puerto Rico

The 1000-meter radio telescope dish at dawn.

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Seven telescopes act as one to produce finest radio images ever

Physicists Make Artificial Black Hole Using Optical Fiber

Scientists in Scotland say they have created a black hole's event horizon using laser pulses and microstructured optical fiber

Killer Electrons From Outer Space

Accurate space-weather forecasts could come from knowing the cause of superfast electrons in the Van Allen belts

First Matter-Antimatter Molecule Created

Positrons and electrons still want to destroy each other, but physicists force them into groups

Stellar Performer

The Big Picture

Big Magnet Glitch at World's Top Particle Accelerator

Could failure delay the intended start-up of CERN's Large Hadron Collider next spring?

CERN's Discerning Detectors

GETTING READY FOR THE HUNT: Roland Horisberger demonstrates the bonding machine developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute. It fits 16 CMOS readout chips to each high-purity silicon pixel sensor with an accuracy of 1 to 2 micrometers.

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Novel pixel sensors will be key to capturing quarry

The Case of Earth's Incredible Shrinking Field

Tangled Story

This simulation of a geomagnetic field reversal was done at Los Alamos National Lab.

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Naval logs reveal a weird history

Space Mountain

High in the Chilean Andes, the southern hemisphere's biggest radio observatory sets up shop