Note: I'm not including the Star Wars prequels here, because the big letdown was The Phantom Menace in 1999. After that, the other two movies couldn't really be letdowns.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again. This was the moment we realized Frank Miller wasn't really Frank Miller any more. He agreed to do the long-awaited sequel to his most famous and groundbreaking graphic novels, the story that redefined Batman for a generation — and he turned in a bland caricature of his earlier brilliance. You can complain all you want about the assitude of All-Star Batman And Robin and The Spirit, but TDKSA was the start of the hackery. Worst moment: When the Joker turns out to be the much-abused Dick Grayson, and Bats kills him without a second thought.

Fox's Reign Of Terror. Firefly should have been one of the great success stories of the 2000s. It's hard to remember now how invincible Joss Whedon seemed going into Firefly — with two hit shows under his belt, he was the writer of several huge movies. And now he was bringing his patented mixture of rollicking adventure and twisted artiness to a space opera. Sure, Firefly's "Cowboys in Space" thing may have confused people at first, but the show really does sell itself, after just a few minutes' viewing, thanks to vivid characters. The failure of the TV show didn't just damage Joss Whedon's career — it damaged media SF as a whole, helping to push us towards canned remakes and reboots. And Firefly's demise was just the first of a trail of broken dreams and disappointments, culminating in the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the burial of the promising Virtuality.

NASA and the space program. The decade did hold some great achievements for NASA, including the Mars rovers and some probes traveling outwards into the solar system. But it's hard not to feel a bit crushed by the fact that NASA is retiring its fleet of space shuttles without having a replacement lined up. We're going to have to hitch a ride with the Russians from here on out, and it feels a bit, well, disappointing. Especially with science-fiction promising us that this is our time to explore the solar system and beyond it, the stars themselves.

Ang Lee's Hulk. Before this movie came out, I would have sworn that Ang Lee never made a bad film. His track record included arthouse sensations like The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm and Sense And Sensibility, but also the brilliant actioner Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. He was also perhaps the most artsy director to take on a superhero icon to date (no offense, Tim Burton). There was every reason to believe Hulk would be both epic and heartfelt — but instead, we got gamma-irradiated poodles, daddy issues and a Hulk who sulked. We probably won't ever get a really great Hulk movie now, after two failures, which sucks. The Hulk deserves a proper outing, in which he fights monsters and marauders and crushes buildings. The Hulk needs to discover that he's not the worst monster in his world, and have larger-than-life adventures. Ang Lee just wasn't capable of giving that to us.

The Matrix sequels. This seems like a no-brainer in retrospect, but maybe you need cyber-Colonel Sanders to take you back and explain to you how much we were all looking forward to The Matrix 2 & 3. Ten years ago, The Matrix was the freshest thing to come out in ages, despite playing on ideas that books had explored for years. Its blend of fetish and noir and cyberpunk and Hong Kong action felt viciously original. And there were just so many ideas for the sequels to explore, so many mysteries about the machine world to uncover. And then... we just sort of descended into muddle. And long rave scenes. And blind Jesus. Walking out of The Matrix Reloaded, I remember someone turning to me and saying, "Well, that wasn't even the best powerpoint presentation I've sat through lately."

Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis. DC Comics' biggest "event" storylines of the mid-2000s seemed to be groping towards a more adult, more flawed view of their major superheroes, with some of comics' most talent writers on board. But they overshot, landing in angstville and bombarding us with retcons that rewrote the "Satellite era" of the Justice League. As if in an attempt to capture the cachet of Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke two decades earlier, these stories gave us female heroes being raped or abused, and turning into murderers. And Batman saying to Superman, "The last time you inspired anyone was when you died." The melodrama was thicker than the walls of Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and yet when it was all over, it was hard to understand what any of it had been about. The superheroes were closer to a bickering family (calling each other by their first names all the time) and the threats they faced seemed more existential and less external.

Superman Returns. There were a slew of other disappointing superhero movies in the past decade — but mostly you knew going into them that they were going to be ass. Who really thought Brett Ratner would make a good X-Men movie? Even Spider-Man 3 showed every sign of being ass-flavored long before it came out, despite Sam Raimi's involvement. But this film was Bryan Singer coming off two great X-Men films and The Usual Suspects, and he was doing the gutsy move of making it a sequel to the two Donner movies instead of going for the standard-issue reboot. Singer doing Donner — how could it be bad? Uh. Well, there's the part where he changed Clark Kent into Stalkerman. And then there's the Son Of Superman thing. But also, maybe, there's just the fact that the Donner movies were of a different era, and you can't bring that back.

Heroes seasons 2-4. Just imagine, for a moment, if this show had lived up to the promise of its first season. I know it's almost impossible to picture it, but just try. This mutant soap opera thrived on showing us the complications and craziness that come from secret super powers, against the backdrop of a sinister mutant-hunting conspiracy and a super-powered serial killer. But the show wrote checks it couldn't cash, including showing us Claire growing into her heroic destiny and Hiro becoming a future shaved-headed badass. Most of all, the show ducked out on its very title, opting to show us histrionics and family squabbles in place of actual heroism.

Watchmen. It was perhaps the greatest graphic novel of all time — almost certainly the greatest superhero comic of all time — lovingly recreated on screen by the ultimate OCD nerd. Every panel of the comic, recreated as concept art, then as storyboards, then as living, breathing people in costumes, surrounded by CG. Finally, a movie made by us for us. Except. The result, though lovely as anything, looked sort of lifeless once you took it out of the Smashing Pumpkins music-video trailers. The characters didn't quite live and breathe — especially Silk Spectre II, who needed to be the heart of the story. And the ending wasn't just missing a giant squid, or some other huge monstrosity to replace it — it was also lacking a certain coherence and urgency. Once people start talking about power signatures, it suddenly turns into an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Maybe Watchmen could never have lived up to the book, but it could have been more thrilling than this, with a different Silk Spectre and a more thunderous ending.

Battlestar Galactica's big finale. I know that opinions will differ on this one — but just consider. BSG's finale was one of the most hyped things of recent years. We read endless interviews in which Edward James Olmos, Ron Moore and various others told us that the final episode would shake us to our very cores, and make us weep and smear paint and throw up on ourselves. Meanwhile, Syfy ran promos over and over again that said that "All Will Be Revealed," and I don't remember an asterisk leading to a disclaimer explaining that "All" in this context actually meant a limited number of things, not including how Starbuck came back from the dead or what the hell was up with the Opera House. Even if you think this was the most brilliant conclusion in history, you have to admit BSG promised too much.

STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights from mike interbartolo on Vimeo.

[via Laughing Squid image via NASA]

Download ginormous versions of the image at the link. [Spacetelescope.org via Wired]

According to NASA:

After forming as a tropical storm over the Southern Indian Ocean on November 14, 2009, Anja strengthened to a cyclone one day later. By November 16, 2009, Anja was a Category 3 cyclone, with maximum sustained winds of 105 knots (195 kilometers per hour), and gusts up to 130 knots (240 kilometers per hour). Anja was located near 14.7 degrees South and 68.3 degrees East.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this true-color image on November 16, 2009. Far away from any major landmasses, Anja sprawls over the Southern Indian Ocean, her long arms spiraling outward, and her eye easily detectable.

via SpaceGadget

The Titan Saturn System Mission, a joint endeavor between NASA and the European Space Agency, hopes to launch probes to Titan by 2020 with the aim of better understanding the seas, atmosphere, surface composition and subterranean dynamics of Saturn's largest moon. One of the probes would be a seagoing vessel, designed to sail on Titan's hydrocarbon lakes. Since the surface of Titan is so wildly varied, though, TSSM is also planning to set a hot-air balloon drifting for six months at an altitude of 10 kilometers, recording as it goes.

Proposals for sending a balloon to Titan have existed for a few years now. NASA reports use the term "montgolfiere" to describe the craft, a reference to the hot-air balloon design pioneered by the Montgolfier brothers in 1873. Like these nineteenth-century airships, Titan's balloon would achieve loft by capturing heated gas in a bulbous overhead bag, called an envelope. While the first hot-air balloons kept live fires burning in their gondolas, the heat for Titan's balloon would be generated by an onboard plutonium isotope.

"Hot-air" is a relative term in this case. Titan's mean surface temperature is about -290 Fahrenheit, so a balloon flying over Titan would require only about 1 percent of the heat it would need on Earth. This is one reason a ballooning mission makes sense, though there are others: Titan's slow rotation produces generally calm weather, and a system of trade winds would carry a drifting aircraft all the way around the moon. Just in case the wind doesn't do the trick, the team at TSSM is considering a mechanical propeller to help guide the balloon.

Titan features some of the most diverse terrain to be found anywhere in the solar system. Aside from the massive lakes (the only stable bodies of surface liquid in our system besides Earth's own), Titan also sports deserts, craters, cryovolcanoes and mountains of water ice. A terrestrial rover would be impractical on a world with such eclectic geology. It's hoped that not only could a balloon cover more ground than a wheeled vehicle, but it might even be able to land and scoop a bit of surface material for study.

Most current projections don't put the balloon or the boat on Titan sooner than 2029. An overview of the Titan Saturn System Mission's plans and goals is available online.

The first image consists of a near-infrared view from the Hubble Space Telescope, an infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and an X-ray view from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, all mashed up. This is one of the most detailed images ever of our galaxy's mysterious core, and exposes the whole range of stellar evolution, from areas bursting with star birth, to hot new stars, to cooler old stars, to black holes.

The X-ray light reveals gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by outflows from the supermassive black hole as well as winds from nearby stars and stellar explosions. The infrared light reveals all of the areas teeming with bright newborn stars.

Check out the other images in our gallery.

Hubble Space Telescope image

Spitzer Space Telescope image

Chandra Observatory image

[NASA]

The Power Beaming Challenge was founded in 2005 (and seeded with $2 million in prize money by NASA) to discover the remotely-powered robot that could best ascend a cable as quickly and safely as possible; this year's winner, built by a team from Seattle's LaserMotive, was the first ever to complete the climb at a speed greater than 2 meters per second, and therefore the first to win one of the Challenge's two prizes (The remaining $1.1 million is for any robot that can climb faster than 5 meters per second; the top speed of LaserMotive's robot was 3.9 meters a second).

While the space elevator dream remains a long-term dream, NASA say that there are much closer goals for wireless power beaming, including powering solar powered lunar vehicles when they're in areas where solar energy is unavailable.

'Space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize [New Scientist]

[The Big Picture]

According to The Register, this is the tallest rocket NASA has built in three decades, and it has 700 sensors on board to understand how a rocket this tall can fly. Photos by AP/John Raoux.

The image was captured by the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft, which was closely following the rocket when it hit the moon. According to LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete, it was this closeness that allowed them to capture the image at all:

The ejecta had to only come out and get into the sunlight a little more than a kilometre [high] for us to see it. It only had to rise half as high [as it would have for it to be visible to Earth-based viewers]... I think we are the only ones that have images.

Sounds a little suspicious to us, but maybe we're just cynical. According to Colaprete, analysis of the image and other data from the impact will be available mid-November.

Elusive lunar plume caught on camera after all [New Scientist]

With the LCROSS mission failing to produce the expected eye-catching explosion on lunar impact, many were disappointed, but LCROSS team member Peter Schultz of Brown University wasn't one of them. In simulations before Friday's impact, he projected that debris would be sent flying at 30 degrees, instead of the suggested 45... making it less likely to catch sunlight and be visible.

Part of the problem may have been the size of the rocket, according to New Scientist's post mortem:

[T]he 10 metre-long rocket was expected to produce a crater only 20 to 30 m in diameter. That crater size is small enough for the shape and orientation of the rocket to have played a role in how the debris was ejected, confounding expectations.

Was the whole mission a mistake? According to Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, it depends on what you believe the actual aim was:

LCROSS was not a sound strategy to pursue if your objective was to answer the question, is there water ice on the moon? ...Instead, [NASA] came up with a PR stunt, and it kind of backfired.

Was moon-smashing mission doomed from the start? [New Scientist]

Things were a bit chaotic on the carpet last night but we managed to get a few moments with Hollywood's favorite everyman. Including how he got involved in Where The Wild Things Are, and hints about the Toy Story 3 storyline.

How did you get involved in this production?

I called up Maurice Sendack about 10 or 12 years ago, and said, "look you don't know me but I'm a big fan of your book, and if you ever want to make it into a movie, let us help you...

They shot this in Australia. And once they got going they were working on it full force. I was just saying, "What can we help do?" There's nothing more extraneous than a producer on set saying, "Hey, what time's lunch?" I didn't need to do that, Spike was in good hands.

Will you bring your kids to see this movie?

Yes, well, all my kids were all grown up.

Who are the new Toys in Toy Story 3?

There's a ton of them and I think I'm not allowed to say.

Not even one little toy?

I think contractually if I say anything, the legal team of the Walt Disney company will swoop down and grab up all your [recorders] [Hanks then jokingly grabs up all the reporters' recorders].

You're a space fan, what did you think about NASA blowing up the moon?

Oh, that was fantastic, I wish we could have actually seen it — what a brilliant idea. You smash in a thing and make it cloudy, and fly the space craft through it. Who was the genius that came up with that?

The "Fifty Years of Exploration" map, created by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic, outlines humanity's journeys into space, starting from the early failed mission to Mars and Venus to the current flight of New Horizons. A complete, but scaled-down version of the map is shown below, but you can see the giant, full-sized map here.

Fifty Years of Exploration [National Geographic via Stevey via Metafilter]

Actually there will be no bombs involved. The LCROSS, or "lunar impacting probe," will itself smash into the Moon's surface near a crater-shadowed region where scientists have predicted that ice would form. Though radar of the Moon's surface lately has suggested strongly that such icy liquids are abundant on the Moon, the evidence remains inconclusive. Which is why we have to do the smash test.

The LCROSS will hit the Cabeus A site marked in the image below at 11:30 AM GMT October 9 - on the near side of the Moon, so you'll be able to see the explosion on impact if you have a decent telescope.

Phil "bad astronomer" Plait explains:

The plume from the impact should stretch up many kilometers. It will almost certainly be too thin to be seen by amateur instruments, but the impact itself should make a bright enough flash to be seen if you have a telescope. The crater itself will be in shadow, making the light flash easier to spot. It'll only last a second or two, so if you want to observe it, be prepared!

And if the plume contains melted water particles, tossed into the local volume of space on impact, that means a self-sustaining lunar colony is a more realistic goal than ever.

via Bad Astronomy

Laser eye treatment is two decades old, and adept surgeons have gone far beyond giving patients 20:20 vision. Times Online has profiled several such doctors, who offer to tailor their clients' eyesight to their occupation.

Julian Stevens, who practices at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, has given special forces members and fighter pilots the aforementioned ability to see a thousand meters in the dark, and he notes that taxi drivers could benefit from a similar procedure. Stephen Trokel, who helped pioneer laser eye surgery, operated on a soprano who wanted to be able to read the music in the front row of the orchestra, as well as a New York Yankees catcher who needed to be able to see the ball coming out of the light. Another group that favors the occupational ocular enhancements? US presidential candidates, several of whom have received "monovision," which allows them to easily read with one eye and see far away with the other. This combination eliminates the need for reading glasses or bifocals, and some politicians hope it creates a sense of youthfulness.

What do we have to thank for this custom technology? The space program. Wavefront technology, which was developed by NASA to improve the focus of the Hubble Space Telescope, has translated neatly to the human eye. The technology allows physicians to map the cornea and iris, enabling surgeons to make small, specific tweaks to the eye that result in custom eyesight made to order.

Surgeons offer eyesight tailored to an individual's life and career [Times Online via Reddit]

New Scientist reports on plans to microwave lunar soil to release water molecules trapped within, allowing vapor to rise, condense as frost on a metal plate placed above the soil, and then collected by thirsty astronauts. The theory, put forward by Edwin Ethridge of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and William Kaukler of the University of Alabama, could give astronauts drinking water or, more impressively, be used as the first stage in a process that would then split the water into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel, dropping launch costs as each launch would be lighter without the need to carry enough fuel for the ride home. Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, is excited by the possibilities:

It completely changes the spaceflight paradigm... It's like building a transcontinental railroad to space.

All that's required now is a coherent plan to return to the moon and start the process. That'll be the easy part, right...?

How astronauts could 'harvest' water on the moon [New Scientist]