Planets scaled to sit on your desk, hold in your hand or collect in jar, these micro-wonders let you collect constellations, moons, even entire solar systems.

Made by the Little Planet Factory in London, these 3D-printed models come with various degrees of detail, from real (raised ridges for Earthen land forms) to speculative (terraformed versions of Mars).

Collectors can choose entire sets and series that work in tandem, illustrating just how big Jupiter is and how small our own Terra can be, or pick individual bodies, like a larger-sized version of the moon.

Their creations get particularly inventive when they enter Russian doll territory, allowing you to select versions inside other versions, like Venus with and without its surrounding gas clouds (open the shell to get the latter).

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After much speculation, research and confirmation, it is official: NASA scientists have announced that the Earth has a second moon, known as Asteroid 2016 H03, that has been orbiting the planet for around a century.

The wee asteroid is just a few hundred feet across and was detected earlier this year from a survey telescope in Hawaii. It follows an orbital pattern taking it on slow long loops. No one is quite sure how long the body will stay in our vicinity, but gravitational forces seem intent on keeping it around, at least for a while.

Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains that because of its distance, this object is “quasi-satellite” of Earth. “Its loops drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon. The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.”

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When Japan launched a groundbreaking black-hole-monitoring satellite, no one was quite sure what it would see, since black holes are, in many ways, truly the final frontier, impenetrable voids in space. The image above is the last thing the satellite saw before it died.

A series of errors sent the satellite out of control, but not before it was able to take some pictures and relay data back to Earth about black holes and their potential role in galaxy formation.

Hitomi’s final observations were of the Perseus Cluster around 240 million light years away with a super-massive black hole at its center. The surprise, for scientists, was the lack of activity. “The intracluster gas is quieter than expected,” said co-author Andrew Fabian of Cambridge University. “We expected that the level would be higher based on the activity of the central galaxy.” Instead, there was calm at the center of this spatial storm.

“The surprise is that it turns out that the energy being pumped out of the black hole is being very efficiently absorbed,” said co-author Brian McNamara of the University of Waterloo. “This hot gas that we’re looking at with Hitomi is the stuff of the future, it’s the gas out of which galaxies form. There is much more of this hot gas than there are stars in the galaxy, or there’s more stuff that wasn’t made into galaxies than that was.”

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Welcomed by an erotic female ‘mission control’ voice, this incredible array of space suites combines direct references to outer space travel while conveying the overall aesthetics of 2001: A Space Odyssey and other topical science-fiction thrillers.

Everything has something to do from space, from the starry carpets and paint jobs to seemingly-floating beds and even rocket-booster-shaped ceiling lights. Guests get the sense they are living in either a space habitat, space movie or both.

Other nice touches include a space glove valet sticking out of the wall, ready to ‘hold’ your keys or cellular phone. Mockups of historic rockets and photos of real lunar adventures decorate the place as well.

Space-referencing materials can be found subtly throughout like foil, while the bookshelves are filled with both scientific and fictional works about space. Seriously, there is a lot of space in this place. Visit for yourself at the Kameha Grand Zürich Hotel, and pack your spacesuit if you really want to get into the mood, though depressurization is unlikely.

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The same science-fiction ion drive engines found in TIE fighters and sub-warp Star Trek ships is being developed for real in Redmond, Washington, thanks to a $67 million grant from NASA to fund electronic propulsion system technology.

Over the next three years, Aerojet Rocketdyne will work on a solution that would improve fuel efficiency tenfold over chemical rocket systems, ultimately giving us greener and better ways to get to Mars, Saturn and asteroids (and be much safer than NASA-funded nuke-propelled rockets dating back to the 1960s).

Solar arrays on the spacecraft generate electrical power, which is used to produce positively charged ions and accelerate them through an electric field. After acceleration, electrons are injected into the ion beam to maintain a neutral plasma.

“Development of this technology will advance our future in-space transportation capability for a variety of NASA deep-space human and robotic exploration missions, as well as private commercial space missions,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

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