High-Tech Advancements For 2005

Fasten your seat belts, we're off to Saturn, where one of the most anticipated celestial events of 2005 is already underway.

A probe launched Christmas Eve from a spacecraft orbiting Saturn is now hurtling towards the planet's moon Titan, on track for a parachute landing in mid-January.

As CBS News Correspondent Jerry Bowen reports, this month's San Francisco gathering of top scientists was shown tantalizing images of Titan, which may mirror a very early Earth.

"Titan is a body that is regarded as the closest we can come to seeing what the Earth was like before life evolved here," says Carolyn Porco of the Saturn imaging team.

In another feat of engineering, NASA's preparing for the May return to flight of a retooled space shuttle, the first mission since Columbia was destroyed upon re-entry last year.

"They've improved their ability to see the shuttle, both with cameras on the spacecraft and on the ground and in orbit, to make sure if there was a problem that they will in fact see it," says CBS News Space Consultant Bill Harwood.

And very high on the gee-whiz scale, testing will continue on the next generation of unmanned war planes, like Boeing's X45, which is designed to do it all on its own: fly into battle, find a target, take it out and come on home.

And when it does, you can catch it on your new cell phone TV, a hit now all over Japan and headed to the United States.

Also, get ready for wristwatch TV so you can watch commercials anywhere.

And you know about Pay-Per-View. Well, how about paper thin view: a paper-thin TV screen slated for more fine tuning in a Japanese lab in 2005.

Now, remember the home video format wars in the 1980s pitting Beta vs. VHS, and VHS won? Well, there's a new war brewing over the DVDs you're going to be buying next Christmas.

It's a choice between high-definition DVD formats that are totally incompatible and require different players. It's the Blu-ray, with greater storage capacity vs. the HD-DVD that's cheaper to make. Which side wins? Stay tuned. The Hollywood studios are lining up on either side.

Everyone's watching Toshiba's test of high-speed downloads of movies to the home. The goal: a two-hour movie delivered in ten minutes. Test results premiere in March.

There's also high-tech help on the way for golfers. A radical new golf ball, created with space-age nanotechnology. The molecules in the core and surface are altered to reduce the spin rate, which reduces hooks or slices by one-third.

And remember "Titanic" director Jim Cameron? He caught some very big and exotic creatures on film for an IMAX movie out next month called "Aliens of the Deep." NASA astro-biologists were invited on the high-tech, high-ticket expedition to study extreme life forms in 700-degree thermal vents two miles under water.

"A lot of scientists believe that what we look at when we see this vent activity on the bottom of the ocean is really like looking back in time 3 billion years, at the actual sort of dawn of life on Earth," says Cameron.

Sound familiar? It's all part of a year promising discovery and innovation much to wrap your mind around in 2005.