Fifty years after the fact, details about Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's historic first mission into space are still creeping out from behind a shroud of secrecy. (Check out this post.)

But there is something we'll never know about the flight, even in the age of Wikileaks: What did the farmer's son from Klushino, Russia, see from 200 miles above Earth on April 12, 1961?

More concerned about survival than documentary footage, Gagarin brought back sparse imagery of his monumental voyage—and obviously nothing in full-color HD.

"What Gagarin did is something of galactic significance, and it needs marking in some way other than crackly, black-and-white footage," said film director Christopher Riley.

Graphic: A rich lunar portrait—and an early history of our solar system—is emerging from a wealth of fresh topographic data. See the enlarged lunar-surface map. Sam Pepple. Source: NASA Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter

Move over, man in the moon. Now there's more to see, thanks to the first detailed lunar-surface map. Since 2009 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been bouncing laser beams off the moon to gauge elevation. Last fall the results emerged as a high-resolution map, including a point over a mile higher than Mount Everest and a complete catalog of 5,185 craters wider than 12.5 miles. The impact pattern suggests that around 3.8 billion years ago two asteroid storms pelted the moon and the Earth, whose dynamic crust retains fewer celestial fingerprints.

Also newly found: frozen water in craters at the lunar poles—the coldest known spots in our solar system. "This is a renaissance period in moon studies," says NASA's Richard Vondrak. With surveys of Mars and Mercury also under way, more cosmic folklore may soon be jettisoned as well. —Jeremy Berlin

With the release of a full HD trailer for Apollo 18, Dimension Films wants you to think they made a movie out of actual footage from a secret moon landing. Studio chief Bob Weinstein is already making headlines with his marketing claims that "we didn’t shoot anything ... We found it."

Whether you buy that line may depend on if you believe in aliens. "There's a reason we've never gone back to the moon," according to the promotional poster. And with footage that looks like a mashup of NASA TV and Paranormal Activity, it's a good bet this won't be a movie about politics and budget woes.

The truth about Apollo 18 won't be out there until the film opens on April 22. In the meantime, we asked Allan Needell, Apollo curator for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, to walk us through the montage of "found footage" and put things in historical perspective.

Photo (Composed of 55 Calibrated Images): Miloslav Druckmuller, Peter Aniol, Vojtech Rusin.

Total solar eclipses occur every 18 months or so and are visible for just a few minutes from any one spot. As knowledge about them has trumped superstition, legions of fans have been flocking to the narrow strips on Earth where the moon can best be seen obscuring the sun.  The reward for these so-called umbraphiles, says Williams College astronomy professor Jay Pasachoff, is “the most dramatic natural phenomenon ever visible. It’s spectacularand fills you with awe. A primal feeling comes over you.”

This year Melita Thorpe, owner of an astronomy-themed travel agency, saw a hundred slots fill up by spring for a $6,000 July freighter trip to the South Pacific; dozens more devotees signed up for a sunset viewing of the same eclipse in Patagonia. Her biggest crowd in the agency’s 26 years: the 700 people she ferried to view a 1991 eclipse off the coast of Mazatlán, Mexico.

Indeed, Hubble's story definitely has all the elements of a Hollywood epic: high expectations dashed by a crushing blow, a comeback against all odds, a tragic loss, and ultimate success through hard work and camaraderie.

Earth may get more moon rocks in 2018, when NASA plans a manned lunar landing. Until then, as scientists and collectors know, supply and demand are worlds apart. The only sources? Rare lunar meteorites, soil from Soviet probes, and the 842 pounds of rubble carted back by Apollo astronauts from 1969 to 1972. NASA keeps most of its 1,500-rock cache in Houston, lending out 400 samples a year for research and display. Presidents Nixon and Ford gave pea-size “goodwill” slivers to 134 countries, 50 states, and Puerto Rico. For other interested parties, auctions can be a legal option—if the rock for sale isn’t U.S. government property. At Sotheby’s in 1993, a Soviet sample fetched $442,500. On eBay, a meteorite cut can go for $40 to $100,000, depending on size, quality, and authentication. Then there’s the black market. Joseph Gutheinz, a former NASA investigator, says Apollo rocks that have vanished over the years can turn up with five-million-dollar tags. “They simply mean more and more as the years go by.” —Jeremy Berlin

Photograph by Tyrone Turner



If we aren’t alone in the universe, how would we treat our intergalactic neighbors?

The new movie District 9 considers this question by envisioning a present-day Earth where humans and extraterrestrials coexist, albeit uneasily.

Two decades after a colossal spacecraft has stalled over Johannesburg, South Africa, its passengers—millions of confused, malnourished aliens called “prawns” by disparaging humans—have been ghettoized into a grimy, apartheid-echoing militarized zone known as District 9. Then an evil corporation called Multi-National United decides to relocate them to an even more bantustan-like tent city. The subsequent eviction process touches on a host of legal and ethical issues like: What would earthlings do to ET visitors? Kill them? Conduct medical experiments? Attempt to extract valuable weaponry? All of the above?

To aid in our speculation, Pop Omnivore talked to Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the nonprofit SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and author of the new book Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The new movie Moon is a sci-fi throwback—a simple, hermetic story of isolation, identity, and (in)sanity.

In a matter of minutes, the 2001-indebted scene is set: It’s the near future, and a guy named Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is toiling alone in a mining station on the moon, where he harvests a clean-energy substance called Helium-3 to power a depleted Earth. His only company is a HAL-like robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). His only goal is to play out the last two weeks of his three-year contract.

Even though the film is set in the future, some things about the space station look familiar to children of the television age. When Sam gets a haircut, GERTY uses a gadget that looks a lot like a Flowbee.

In zero gravity, astronauts crave earthly comforts. That’s why they strap their heads to foam “pillows” at night. Alas, liquids pool or slosh and must be ingested from a pouch via straw. “You feel like an insect sucking juices out of another insect,” says astronaut Don Pettit. So, on a mission last November, he made a cup from a plastic sheet sealed with tape.