astroThink

Universe Today: “Across the Universe” Day for NASA and Beatles Fans

2008-02-03T15:53:00.000+05:30

NASA will use its Deep Space Network to transmit a song across the universe. And fittingly, the song is “Across the Universe” by the Beatles. On Feb. 4 at 7 pm EST, the song will be beamed towards the North Star, Polaris, located 431 light years away from Earth, and will travel across the universe at 186,000 miles per second. Former Beatle Paul McCartney thinks this is a great idea. "Send my love to the aliens,” he said in a message to NASA. If there are any beings near Polaris, they’ll hear the song in about 431 years.

The song’s transmission will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of both NASA's founding and the beginning days of the Beatles. Two other anniversaries also are being honored: The launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports missions to explore the universe.

Feb. 4 has been declared "Across The Universe Day" by Beatles fans to commemorate the anniversaries. As part of the celebration, the public around the world has been invited to participate in the event by simultaneously playing the song at the same time as the transmission by NASA.

John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, characterized the song's transmission as a significant event. "I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe," she said.

Even though radio and television signals on Earth “leak” out into space all the time, hopefully NASA can use this event to generate enthusiasm and promote awareness of its history, as well as its plans for future missions. Additionally, this is a chance for the public to learn more about the Deep Space Network, NASA’s incredibly reliable system of radio antennas that is critical in supporting lunar and planetary exploration. The DSN is used for tracking of spacecraft, sending telemetry and commands, and for deep space navigation. Learn more about the DSN here.

Original News Source: NASA Press Release

Universe Today: Mercury is Less Like the Moon than Previously Believed

2008-02-03T15:47:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

With Mercury fading in MESSENGER's rear view mirror, scientists are just starting to pore through the torrent of images sent back. And as you can probably guess, the new mysteries are piling up fast and furious. The planet is much less like the Moon than scientists previously thought.

MESSENGER made its closest approach to Mercury on January 14, passing just a few hundred kilometres above its surface. During the flyby it captured a total of 1,213 images.

One of the most unique features discovered by MESSENGER has been dubbed "The Spider" by scientists. And that's what it looks like. The feature has a central crater surrounded by more than a hundred narrow, flat-floored troughs (called graben) radiating away.

Unlike the Moon, Mercury has huge cliffs or scarps, which can snake hundreds of kilometres across the planet's surface. They trace the lines of old volcanic faults, from when the planet was still geologically active.

Because of its small size and high density, Mercury has a surprisingly large pull of gravity. Astronauts walking around its surface would experience 38% of the Earth's gravity. This higher gravity means that the impact craters look different. Material doesn't splash out from the impact craters so far, and there are many more secondary crater chains.

“We have seen new craters along the terminator on the side of the planet viewed by Mariner 10 where the illumination of the MESSENGER images revealed very subtle features. Technological advances that have been incorporated in MESSENGER are effectively revealing an entirely new planet from what we saw over 30 years ago,” said Science Team Co-Investigator Robert Strom, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and the only member of both the MESSENGER and Mariner 10 science teams.

MESSENGER wasn't just taking pictures. It also had a suite of scientific instruments measuring many features of the planet. Perhaps the most puzzling of these is its magnetic field. Even though Mercury cooled down and solidified eons ago, it still has an magnetic field. This was first detected by Mariner 10, and MESSENGER confirmed it.

This is just the beginning. MESSENGER will return to Mercury on October 6, 2008 to make a second flyby, and then a third on September 29, 2009. The spacecraft make its final return to the planet on March 18, 2011 when it'll begin a year-long orbital mission.

Original Source: MESSENGER News Release

Universe Today: ‘Suits and Ties’ Collaborate on Successful Space Station Repair

2008-02-03T15:08:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

At the end of Wednesday’s successful spacewalk to change out a faulty motor on one of the International Space Station’s solar array positioning devices, the astronauts outside the ISS and flight controllers in Houston were congratulating each other on the group effort it took to pull off this particularly tricky and potentially dangerous repair job.

“You guys looked really good to us. Thanks for making it look so easy,” Mission Control in Houston radioed up to the spacewalkers after their seven-hour and 10 minutes EVA.

“Yeah,” said ISS astronaut Dan Tani. “And we didn’t even have to put on a tie.”

This spacewalk really was a collaboration between the “suits and ties” at NASA. The suits – spacesuits, that is – were worn by astronauts Tani and Peggy Whitson. The ties were sported by the engineers and astronauts in Mission Control who planned the repair and guided the spacewalkers during the entire EVA.

Tani and Whitson were thanking one tie-wearing astronaut in particular. Tom Marshburn had practiced the choreography of the spacewalk in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, and shared his insights with the spacewalkers. Usually astronauts get to practice their own EVA’s in the enormous pool that contains a mock-up of the ISS. But the Bearing Motor Roll Ring Module on the starboard solar array quit working in December when Whitson and Tani were already on board the station. So the plan and nuances of the EVA were tested in the pool by Marshburn and former ISS resident Suni Williams and relayed up to Tani and Whitson.

The spacewalk was especially hazardous because of the risk of electrical shock from 160 volts of electricity that flows through the arrays. For safety, Whitson and Tani waited until the International Space Station was on the dark side of Earth, giving them only 33 minute increments to complete their tasks. Whitson had to squeeze inside the station's truss girder to swap out the 250 pound (113 kilograms) garbage can-sized motor.

The new motor successfully performed a 360-degree test spin during the spacewalk. It's power-generating capabilities were tested successfully as well.

"Yay, it works!" exclaimed Whitson as she and Tani watched the solar wing turn. "Excellent, outstanding…isn't that cool?"

The successful repair means the station should be able to generate enough power to support the new modules that will be brought on the next shuttle missions, the European Columbus science lab, and the Japanese Kibo labratory.

"Given the complexity of this spacewalk and the risks that we had to manage … we are exceptionally pleased with how things went," flight director Kwatsi Alibaruho said after the EVA.

In addition to the motor repair, Whitson and Tani also performed another inspection of the station's starboard Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, a 10-ft wide gear that keeps the solar wings pointing toward the sun The SARJ is not working and is contaminated with metal shavings. The spacewalkers evaluated damage from the debris and collected samples from areas previously unseen.

Alibaruho said the new debris samples will help determine what repairs will be done, perhaps later this year. NASA hopes to launch up to five shuttle flights to the ISS this year.

Wednesday's EVA was the final planned spacewalk of the Expedition 16 mission and the 101st dedicated to space station assembly and maintenance. The spacewalk also marked the sixth career EVA's for both Whitson and Tani.

So, there’s just one question for Dan Tani: Which is harder — donning a 280 lb spacesuit or tying a Windsor Knot?

Original News Source: NASA TV

Universe Today: 50 Years Ago: Explorer 1

2008-02-03T15:05:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

The launch of Sputnik in October 1957 changed the world overnight. And with the Soviet Union’s second successful launch of Sputnik 2 the following month, Americans were feeling a little left behind in the dust, especially after the US’s first satellite launch attempt with the Vanguard rocket exploded on the launchpad. But space pioneer Werner Von Braun, shown in this picture with JPL Director William Pickering and scientist James Van Allen, came through with his Jupiter C rocket that launched the US’s first satellite, Explorer 1, into space on January 31, 1958.

Explorer 1 was not all that big, with a length of 203 centimeters (80 inches), a diameter of 15.9 centimeters (6.25 inches), and a weight of 14 kilograms (30.8 pounds). But it did its job, which was, first and foremost, to reach orbit, and then return scientific information.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory got the assignment of designing and building a scientific payload for the launch, which they accomplished in three months.

The primary science instrument on Explorer 1 was a cosmic ray detector designed to measure the radiation above the atmosphere. Dr. James Van Allen designed the experiment, which revealed a much lower cosmic ray count than expected. Van Allen theorized that the instrument may have been saturated by very strong radiation from a belt of charged particles trapped in space by Earth’s magnetic field. A subsequent launch by Explorer 3 two months later confirmed the existence of these radiation belts, which became known as the Van Allen Belts, in honor of their discoverer.

There were other scientific findings from Explorer 1 as well. Because of its symmetrical shape, Explorer 1 was used to help determine the upper atmospheric densities.

Two other instruments on board looked for micrometeorites in orbit, a micrometeorite detector and an acoustic microphone to detect the sound of an micrometeorite imipact. The micrometeorite detector was made of grid of electrical wires. A micrometeorite of about 10 microns would fracture a wire upon impact, destroy the electrical connection, and record the event. One or two of the wires were destroyed during launch. The equipment worked for about 60 days, but showed only one possible meteorite impact. Data from the acoustical sensor microphone were obtained only when an impact occurred while the satellite was over a ground recording station. However, over an 11-day period (February 1, 1958, to February 12, 1958), 145 impacts were recorded. The high impact rates on one portion of the orbit and the subsequent failures in the satellite's electronic system were attributed to a meteor shower.

The batteries ran out on Explorer 1 on May 23, 1958 when the last signal was recorded. The US’s first satellite burned up in re-entry of the atmosphere in March of 1970.

Original News Source: JPL

Universe Today: Carnival of Space #39

2008-02-03T15:04:00.001+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

We've got another first-time host for the Carnival of Space this week: Sean Welton and his website, Visual Astronomy. So please take a moment, visit his site, and enjoy the space articles prepared for your education and entertainment. Thanks Sean!

Click here to read the Carnival of Space #39

And if you're interested in looking back, here's an archive to all the past carnivals of space. If you've got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community - and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, let me know if you can be a host, and I'll schedule you into the calendar.

Finally, if you run a space-related blog, please post a link to the Carnival of Space. Help us get the word out.

Universe Today :The Environmental Impact of a Return to the Moon

2008-02-03T14:53:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

There are many ways space exploration can affect our environment right here on Earth: toxic chemicals used to manufacture the rocket, carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere and the energy used to manufacture the equipment and vehicles, just to name a few. For the next era in space exploration, the Constellation Program, NASA has released a 500-page document detailing its effect on the environment.

Back in September 2006, NASA solicited feedback from the public about their plans for the Constellation Program. They were looking for environmental issues and concerns that the people might have. The agency released a draft of their reply to these concerns in August 2007.

The document released Wednesday, is called the Final Constellation Programmatic Environmental Statement (PEIS), and it addresses the comments made to the draft version of the document.

The document explores each NASA centre across the United States, what parts of the Constellation Program it will work on, and the environmental impact the centre might have. This part of the document is fascinating to show how the whole program will come together - where each part will be built.

• Risks to the public associated with launch and Earth atmospheric entry
• Environmental impacts of the use of solid rocket fuels on the ozone layer and impacts associated with the deposition of combustion products near the launch area
• Impacts on local animal species (e.g., sea turtles and manatees) associated with construction and launch activities in the John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) area
• Noise impacts associated with launch events
• The relationship between the Constellation Program and the Space Shuttle Program, including how the socioeconomic impacts of the Space Shuttle retirement and the Constellation Program overlap.

Perhaps more interesting than the things they considered where the issues that the document won't consider. For example, the document expressly refuses to study the environmental impact on outer space itself, such as orbital debris. It also doesn't consider any military aspects associated with the program and the environmental impact of that. (If the Constellation Program helps launch orbital space lasers, and they're used to zap sea turtle habitats, that's not NASA's problem.)

Although they put in their questions, several submitters won't get an answer. For example, the document won't address how the Kennedy Space Center could manage its light pollution, monitor bird strikes, or raise awareness of metals in the environment. And the environmental impact on the Moon is right out of the question.

Anyway, if you're interested in this topic… and who wouldn't be, you can access the whole document online.

Original Source: NASA

Universe Today : Will Earth Survive When the Sun Becomes a Red Giant?

2008-02-03T14:45:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

Billions of years in the future, when our Sun bloats up into a red giant, it will expand to consume the Earth's orbit. But wait, you say, the Earth travels the Earth's orbit… what's going to happen to our beloved planet? Will it be gobbled up like poor Mercury and Venus?

Astronomers have been puzzling this question for decades. When the sun becomes a red giant, the simple calculation would put its equator out past Mars. All of the inner planets would be consumed.

However, as the Sun reaches this late stage in its stellar evolution, it loses a tremendous amount of mass through powerful stellar winds. As it grows, it loses mass, causing the planets to spiral outwards. So the question is, will the expanding Sun overtake the planets spiraling outwards, or will Earth (and maybe even Venus) escape its grasp.

K.-P Schroder and Robert Cannon Smith are two researchers trying to get to the bottom of this question. They've run the calculations with the most current models of stellar evolution, and published a research paper entitled, Distant Future of the Sun and Earth Revisted. It has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

According to Schroder and Smith, when the Sun becomes a red giant star 7.59 billion years, it will start to lose mass quickly. By the time it reaches its largest radius, 256 times its current size, it will be down to only 67% of its current mass.

When the Sun does begin to bloat up, it will go quickly, sweeping through the inner Solar System in just 5 million years. It will then enter its relatively brief (130 million year) helium-burning phase. It will expand past the orbit of Mercury, and then Venus. By the time it approaches the Earth, it will be losing 4.9 x 10²⁰ tonnes of mass every year (8% the mass of the Earth).

But the habitable zone will be gone much sooner. Astronomers estimate that will expand past the Earth's orbit in just a billion years. The heating Sun will evaporate the Earth's oceans away, and then solar radiation will blast away the hydrogen from the water. The Earth will never have oceans again. It will eventually become molten again.

One interesting side benefit for the Solar System. Even though the Earth, at a mere 1.5 astronomical units, will no longer be within the Sun's habitable zone, much of the Solar System will be. The new habitable zone will stretch from 49.4 AU to 71.4 AU, well into the Kuiper Belt. The formerly icy worlds will melt, and liquid water will be present beyond the orbit of Pluto. Perhaps Eris will be the new homeworld.

Back to the question… will the Earth survive?

According to Schroder and Smith, the answer is no. Even though the Earth could expand to an orbit 50% larger than today's orbit, it won't get the chance. The expanding Sun will engulf the Earth just before it reaches the tip of the red giant phase. And the Sun would still have another 0.25 AU and 500,000 years to grow.

Once inside the Sun's atmosphere, the Earth will collide with particles of gas. Its orbit will decay, and it will spiral inward.

If the Earth were just a little further from the Sun, at 1.15 AU, it would be able to survive the expansion phase. Although it's science fiction, the authors suggest that future technologies could be used to speed up the Earth's spiraling outward from the Sun.

I'm not sure why, but thinking about this far future of the Earth gives an insight into human psychology. People are genuinely worried about a future billions of years away. Even though the Earth will be scorched much sooner, its oceans boiled away, and turned into a molten ball of rock, it's this early destruction by the Sun that feels so sad.

Original Source: Arxiv

Universe Today :Global Map of Iapetus

2008-02-03T14:26:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

Here's a cool global map of Saturn's moon Iapetus, stitched together from the various Cassini flybys. Cassini didn't see the entire moon, so the imaging team put in photographs from Voyager to cover the missing polar regions.

You can see its distinct equatorial ridge on the left-hand side of the image, and the mottled dark and light patches that give the moon its Yin-Yang look. The image scale is 803 km per pixel.

It's a little old, but check out this video of the most recent Cassini Iapetus flyby back in September 2007.

Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release

Space.com : Galactic Wi-fi?

2008-02-03T13:57:00.000+05:30

By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 31 January 2008
06:39 am ET

Incredibly, it's been only a bit more than a century since Oliver Heaviside consolidated the work of several 19th century physicists into the four compact mathematical formulations known as Maxwell's Equations. You may gleefully recall them from sophomore physics.

Aside from their display by the rabidly nerdy on pretentious t-shirts, the formulae have a splendid utility: they describe all electromagnetic radiation — in particular, light and radio. In the short time since their discovery, we have been able to milk these elegant equations to build crude spark transmitters, and eventually to develop the diminutive cell phones that allow you to blithely ring up your pals while comfortably seated in restaurants and movie theaters. We have exploited Maxwell's Equations like an old-growth forest, and many technical types aver that we know all there is to know about them.

Not true. And the fact that it's untrue may affect our thinking about SETI.

Today's SETI experiments generally look for what are politely termed "narrow-band signals." In other words, the receivers at the back ends of our radio telescopes search wide swaths of the spectrum looking for a signal that's at one spot on the dial — a signal that's very constrained in frequency. By putting all the transmitted power into this small bandwidth, the aliens can ensure that their signal will stand out like Yao Ming at a Munchkin picnic.

That makes sense — at least if the aliens want only to help us find their signal. But they might have other priorities. In particular, the history of earthly communication suggests that there is an inexorable pressure to increase the bit rate of any transmission channel. A half-decade ago, most readers accessed this web site with a simple dial-up phone line. Today, you're more likely to have some sort of wide-band service, which is to say, you're inhaling Internet bits at least ten times quicker than before.

More generally, in 150 years, we've gone from telegraph wires, capable of a few bits per second, to optical fibers that are billions of times speedier. The idea of "more bandwidth" is so compelling, the phrase has entered the lexicon of everyday speech — even among those who couldn't tell a hertz from a hub nut. Communication technology is always driven to send more bits — more information — per second.

Now consider the plight of aliens wishing to get in touch. Because the separation between one civilization and another is likely to be at least hundreds — and maybe thousands — of light-years, any interstellar pinging is effectively one-way. Back and forth conversations will take too long. So perhaps the aliens will opt to send, not the easiest-to-find signal, but a signal that says it all — a signal bristling with information. If you're going to stuff a message into a bottle, why not use onion-skin paper and write small?

The straightforward way to get more information down a radio channel is, as everyone knows, by using greater bandwidth. Nearly once a week someone sends me an e-mail pointing this out, saying that SETI should be looking for wide-band signals, not narrow-band ones. But there's a problem here. While sending a wide-band, information-rich signal between nearby stars is perfectly practical (assuming you're willing to pay the power bill), once the distance exceeds a thousand light-years or so the billowing hot gas that permeates interstellar space begins to wreak havoc and destruction on the transmission. A process of "dispersion" occurs, which works to slow the broadcast — but it slows different frequencies by different amounts. The result is to distort a wide-bandwidth signal in much the way that a highly reverberant hall would distort the music from an orchestra. A narrow-band signal (the acoustical analog is a simple flute note) would not be adversely affected.

So it seems that there may be difficulties in sending certain kinds of complex radio signals over significant distances in the Galaxy. Interstellar correspondence could be restricted to mere postcards, which would be a disappointment to aliens interested in heavy-duty data distribution.

However, some Swedish physicists are pointing out a possible scheme for beating this rap. In careful analyses of some of the subtle properties of Maxwell's Equations, Bo Thide and Jan Bergman at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Uppsala have explored a property of radio waves called orbital angular momentum. You can think of this orbital momentum as a twisting of the wave's electric and magnetic fields — a twisting that would show up if you were measuring the wave with an array of antennas. The technical details are intricate, but suffice it to say that the Swedish scientists are noting another way to send information in a radio signal — even a narrow-band radio signal — by encoding it in the orbital angular momentum.

It's as if they've found "subspace channels," a là Star Trek. Hidden highways down which additional bits can be moved. And there's reason to think that these momentum channels might be impervious to the interstellar jumbling that afflicts the usual types of wide-band signals when sent over great distances.

So it may be that our search for narrow-band signals is actually a very good SETI strategy, and not just an obvious one. While such monotonic messages may seem to be elementary and devoid of much information, they could be laden with additional, hidden complexity.

The investigation of new transmission modes by Thide and Bergman hints that if we do find a signal from ET, we may wish to reconfigure our radio telescopes to look for encoding of the message via such subtle effects as orbital angular momentum. A simple signal may only be a cipher for a more complex message, and there may be more things in heaven and earth than even Maxwell had dreamt of …

Space.com : Our Universe: Dark and Messy

2008-01-08T11:31:00.001+05:30

By Dave Mosher
Staff Writer
posted: 07 January 2008
06:55 am ET

Our universe is a mess — a colossal "cosmic web" of galaxies strung into filaments and tendrils that are millions or billions of light-years long.

Although this web's basic structure is resolved, astronomers say understanding it in more detail requires new observatories, better computing and a lot of luck.

"When you look into a large telescope, the reality of the cosmic web hits you in the face because you can see how galaxies are organized," said Rodrigo Ibata, an astronomer at the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in France. "We have clear evidence for the cosmic web's existence, but there is still so much we don't know about it."

Ibata explained that the cosmic web filaments are held together by dark matter, unseen stuff that makes up 85 percent of all mass in the universe.

"It's intrinsically tough to study something you can't see, so dark matter makes understanding the cosmic web an exceedingly difficult challenge," Ibata told SPACE.com.

Ibata and other astronomers detail some of the cosmic web's mysteries last week in the journal Science.

Intergalactic highway

The cosmic web is thought to funnel galaxies, gas and dark matter around the universe, something like a chaotic intergalactic highway. Ibata said he's looking to our own celestial neighborhood for effects of this network.

"We think cosmic web tendrils feed directly into galaxies, dump matter onto them and build them up," Ibata said.

Ibata hopes new star data gathered by the European Space Agency's GAIA spacecraft, set to launch in 2011, will help gather evidence of such activity near the Milky Way.

"It's going to make things very interesting over the coming years," he said of GAIA, which will finely measure the distances and movements of more than a billion local stars. Such data could reveal where — and what — cosmic web tendrils might be spilling into our neck of the celestial woods.

"The environment within these tendrils could be one of the most important factors in galaxy formation," Ibata said.

To use mountains of data that GAIA and other observatories are expected to deliver in the future, however, Ibata said computer technology will have to catch up. "If we were to get such data now, we wouldn't be able to efficiently process it," he said.

Simulating the universe

Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, a graduate student in astrophysics at Harvard University, agrees.

"We need powerful computers to deal with raw astronomy data," Faucher-Giguere said. "But another aspect is that once it's processed, we need to be able to learn something from it."

Faucher-Giguere said computer simulations help with the task by giving astronomers grounds for comparison. If a simulation fits a set of observations, it helps astronomers pick the best theoretical track to explain what they see.

Our current big-picture view of the universe is based mostly on optical light, Faucher-Giguere said, but new observatories will look deep into the cosmos in wavelengths such as infrared and radio.

"We'll need new, better simulations to make sense of data we haven't yet learned how to analyze," he said. "We need to be prepared or else we won't know what we're looking at."

Faucher-Giguere expects astronomers to increasingly team up with computer-savvy theoreticians to extract the latest knowledge about our universe in an efficient way.

"Astronomy is driven by new observations," he said, "but to make use of these new windows onto the universe, we really have to keep up with the theoretical work."

ESA : N° 1-2008: Overview of ESA communication activities in 2008 relevant to the media

2008-01-08T11:26:00.000+05:30

Press conferences, exhibitions, launches, political rendezvous and much more ... the list of the main communication activities that ESA will be involved in this year is a long one, but not an exhaustive one. You should pencil these dates into your diaries.

January

14
ESA’s Director General, Jean-Jacques Dordain, meets the press at ESA Headquarters in Paris, France to give a status report on ongoing activities and an overview of upcoming events.

17
Opening of the new Santa Maria Tracking Station to follow Ariane 5 launches, Azores Islands, Portugal.

18
Contract signing for ESA’s Mercury mission, BepiColombo, at EADS Astrium, Friedrichshafen, Germany.

2nd half
STS-120/Esperia Post-Flight Tour by ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli. Tour of various sites in Italy.

tbd
Space shuttle mission STS-122/Columbus. With ESA astronauts Leopold Eyharts and Hans Schlegel on board.

February

5 - 6
Future Launcher Preparatory Programme workshop at ESA/ESTEC research and technology centre, Noordwijk, Netherlands.

7
Inauguration of the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESA/ESAC) near Madrid, Spain.

12
Kick-off of the “International Year of Planet Earth” at ESA Headquarters and UNESCO Headquarters, Paris.

2nd half
Launch of ESA’s first Automated Transfer Vehicle “Jules Verne” to the ISS onboard an Ariane 5, from CSG Kourou, French Guiana. Several local events will be organised at ESA sites across Europe.

tbd
A few days after launch, the “Jules Verne” docks with the International Space Station. Events at ATV Control Centre in Toulouse and at ESA HQ Paris and other ESA sites across Europe.

tbd
Zefiro 23 engine firing test for the future Vega launcher at “Salto di Quirra” test range, Sardinia, Italy.

tbd
GOCE Earth observation mission: media day at ESA/ESTEC research and technology centre, Noordwijk.

tbd
Workshop on satellite communication applications at ESA/ESTEC research and technology centre.

March

tbd
Opening of new ESA/ESTEC laboratory building at Noordwijk.

tbd
“Open Day” at ESA/ESRIN Earth observation centre in Frascati (Rome), Italy as part of Italian Science Week.

April

tbd
Launch of GIOVE-B satellite for the Galileo system onboard a Russian Soyuz, from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Events in several ESA centres in Europe.

tbd
Start of ESA’s astronaut selection campaign.

tbd
Launch of Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission onboard an Indian PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle), from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, India (by Indian Space Agency ISRO).

tbd
40th anniversary of ESA's ground station at Redu, Belgium.

May

14-16 (tbc)
GMES conference: “Briging the gap”, Portrose, Slovenia

15
Launch of ESA’s GOCE satellite (Earth gravity field) onboard a Rockot launcher, from Plesetsk, Russia.

tbd
40th anniversary of the Guiana Space Centre, Europe’s Spaceport (CSG), in Kourou, French Guiana.

tbd
Conference on the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme, Prague, Czech Republic.

27 May - 1 June
ILA2008 international aerospace fair in Berlin, Germany. Joint ESA / DLR / BDLI pavilion in "International space village".

end
Post-flight tour for ESA astronauts Hans Schlegel (Germany) and Léopold Eyharts (France) in the context of ILA2008, Berlin.

July

31
Launch of ESA’s Herschel-Planck spacecraft onboard an Ariane 5, from CSG, Kourou. Launch coverage at several ESA establishments across Europe.

August

tbd
“ Night of Exploration” in Copenhagen, Denmark. ESA space show/public event, with space experts and scientists.

September

5
Steins Observation by ESA’s comet-chaser Rosetta. Event at ESA’s Operations Centre, ESOC / Darmstadt, Germany.

16-18
GMES conference “The operational phase”, Lille, France

29 Sept. - 3 Oct.
IAC - International Astronautical Congress - in Glasgow, UK.

30 (tbc)
5th ESA/EC joint Space Council in Brussels, Belgium.

tbd
"Ciencia Viva" space exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal.

October

tbd
Launch of ESA’s SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission onboard a Rockot, from Plesetsk, Russia.

tbc
Launch of ESA’s Proba-2 microsatellite, together with SMOS, onboard a Rockot, from Plesetsk.

November

25 - 26
ESA Council meeting at ministerial level in The Hague, Netherlands.

December

tbd
Announcement of initial findings of Herschel-Planck mission.

tbd
Maiden flight of ESA’s new small launcher Vega, from CSG, Kourou.

tbd
Inauguration of "Looking for Life" exhibition at NEMO science centre, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Dates of certain events, especially launches, depend on various factors, such as readiness of the spacecraft and/or launcher. In the calendar of activities, they remain tabled as 'to be determined' (tbd) or 'to be confirmed' (tbc). Definite dates are confirmed by Arianespace (for Ariane launches), Starsem (for Soyuz launches), Eurockot (for Rockot launches) and NASA (for Space Shuttle launches).

Bad Astronomy : Asteroid to miss Earth January 29

2008-01-08T11:24:00.000+05:30

This is interesting: an asteroid named 2007 TU24 will pass roughly 560,000 kilometers (330,000 miles) from the Earth on January 29, 2008. That’s close enough to be interesting, but far enough not to worry about it. Funny coincidence: that’s almost the same time 2007 WD5 will pass very close to Mars. The odds of a Mars impact are still not zero, but there is no chance at all of TU24 hitting us.

I don’t usually track such news, but I actually found out about this at Digg.com, where some folks were digging up a misleading video about the asteroid. The video wasn’t hugely popular, but it’s had a few thousand viewings which isn’t bad. But I have some beefs with it, and I think they point to some misconceptions people have about asteroids.

First, though, the video is a bait-and-switch to talk about how Ron Paul isn’t getting press. OK, feh. My thoughts on Paul are pretty clear, and I’ve seen little to change my mind.

But the science too is misleading. The first thing the video author shows is the well-known asteroid Ida, claiming it’s TU24, which is incorrect.

Then he shows how close it will pass, with a grossly misleading graphic of the Earth and Moon sitting right next to each other, making it look like this asteroid will just barely miss us. Make no mistake: this is a pretty close pass for an asteroid, but it has no chance at all of hitting us, so it’s no big deal. Looking at the list of recent and upcoming close approaches by asteroids, you can see this one is on the nearest for a while, but there are many other near misses… stress the word "miss".

In the description, he also says

It will be 1.37 Lunar Distances from earth on January 29, 2008. Let’s hope they’re right. Gauging trajectory on something coming right at you isn’t easy.

Nope, it’s not heading right for us. It’s heading to a point in space where the Earth will be on January 29. Actually, it’s headed to a point in space more than half a million kilometers from where the Earth will be at that time. Either way, that spot in space is currently more than 60 million kilometers (40 million miles) away from us right now; a fair ways off. So actually, getting the orbit is just a matter of getting good observations, like it usually is.

Asteroids are a real threat, and need to be taken seriously. This video — and they way I see the media treat the threat in general — in my opinion, make matters somewhat worse. Perhaps I’m hammering this particular video a little hard, but to me it represents a whole class of misleading coverage of asteroids. And c’mon, if you want to make a point, just make it. (Mis)Using astronomy this way isn’t helping any.

Universe Today : New Solar Cycle Begins With New Year…

2008-01-07T11:31:00.000+05:30

Written by Tammy Plotner

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a new solar cycle is about to begin. The original forecast for Solar Cycle 24 was slated for March 2008, but the action is already under way as the first magnetically reversed sunspot of the new 11-year cycle has already appeared in the Sun's northern hemisphere! Will it be strong or will it be weak? Time will tell… But if you live in a high latitude northern area? Be on alert tonight!

Last April an international panel of solar experts forecast that Solar Cycle 24 would start in March 2008, plus or minus six months. Upcoming solar storms definitely lay ahead, but neither the NOAA Space Environment Center in coordination with an international panel of solar experts predict a record-breaker. The most recent activity forecast was predicted for March with the peak occurring in late 2011 or mid-2012—up to a year later than expected. While original forecasts put the beginning activity a last Fall, the delay has simply left the experts guessing.

During a solar cycle, the frequency of sunspots rises and falls and spotting new activity may mean that the action is just heating up. These areas of intense magnetic activity on the Sun, can affect Earth by disrupting electrical grids, airline and military communications, GPS signals and even cell phones. During periods of intense sunspot activity, known as solar storms, highly charged radiation from the Sun may head toward Earth…

"Our growing dependence on highly sophisticated, space-based technologies means we are far more vulnerable to space weather today than in the past," said NOAA Administrator Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr.

What does that mean for the Blue Planet's inhabitants? There's nothing to fear… except perhaps that it might be cloudy! Increased activity is a wonderful time to begin studying sunspots for yourself and to keep a eye out for aurora activity. Solar cycle intensity is measured in maximum number of sunspots—dark blotches on the sun that mark areas of heightened magnetic activity. The more sunspots there are, the more likely it is that major solar storms will occur.

"By giving a long-term outlook, we're advancing a new field—space climate—that's still in its infancy," said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. David L. Johnson, director of the NOAA National Weather Service. "Issuing a cycle prediction of the onset this far in advance lies on the very edge of what we know about the Sun."

NOAA, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, is celebrating 200 years of science and service to the nation and the world. The NOAA Space Environment Center also is the world warning agency of the International Space Environment Service, a consortium of 11 member nations that generate a first alert of solar activity and its affects on Earth and you, too, can check out the information here! Stay tuned as "Universe Today" brings you guidelines on how you can solar observe and when you can possibly expect aurora in your area! As it stands, a high-speed solar wind stream is already buffeting Earth's magnetic field and this could spark a geomagnetic storm. For high latitude observers, this means you may see the aurora tonight!!

Universe Today : Former Astronaut Herrington Resigns from Rocketplane

2008-01-07T10:48:00.001+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

Former NASA astronaut John Herrington has resigned from the commercial space company Rocketplane Global, Inc. Herrington left NASA in 2005 to join Rocketplane as vice president and director of flight operations. He was slated to pilot the company’s passenger-carrying suborbital XP spaceplane. His resignation was effective on December 21, 2007.

Herrington said he plans to continue working in the commercial space industry, because he believes “commercial space is the next great adventure in aerospace." Herrington will also continue as a motivational speaker to both industry and educational institutions, and as an advisor to the University of Colorado’s National Institute for Space, Science and Security Centers. In addition, he’ll also work with the Chickasaw Nation, of which he is a member.

"I was fortunate during my tenure at Rocketplane to work with an incredibly talented group of professionals,” said Herrington. “My decision to leave was a difficult one.”

Rocketplane has had its troubles recently, with several top officials leaving the company, including former company president Randy Brinkley.

But in an interview in October, Herrington was optimistic about Rocketplane’s future. “If we can be successful, then hopefully we can make spaceflight more routine, then more people can experience what a unique environment it is,” he said. “And if we can be successful doing both then we provide a market to the consumer that’s looking for high adventure.”

Rocketplane’s company structure consists of the parent corporation Rocketplane Limited, under which are two separate entities: Rocketplane Kistler which is developing a reusable two-stage orbital unmanned spacecraft called the K-1 while Rocketplane Global is building the XP.

In August 2006 Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) won a contract with NASA for the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program, to bring cargo and eventually crew to the ISS. But in October of 2007, NASA terminated its agreement with RpK, citing the company’s failure to meet financial and design review milestones per the agreement. Rocketplane had threatened to sue NASA over the termination of the contract, but several sources now indicate that the commercial space company will not file a lawsuit against NASA.

Herrington said that while working at both NASA and Rocketplane was a dream come true, he spent a lot of time away from home, which took a toll on his family. “There’s an aura associated with being an astronaut, but the reality is that it’s a lot of hard work,” he said. “When the thrill wears off, you stick your head in the books and you spend a lot of time learning what you need to know and then performing in a hostile environment. But it was a dream I had as a kid, and when you fulfill a dream like that it’s a phenomenal feeling.”

Original News Source: Chickasaw Nation Press Release

Universe Today : Shuttle Launch Date Still Uncertain

2008-01-07T10:28:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

NASA officials are hoping that the repairs to space shuttle Atlantis’ fuel sensor system will be completed in time for a January 24 launch date for the STS-122 mission to the International Space Station. But in a January 3rd press briefing, John Shannon, deputy manager of the shuttle program told reporters that a February 2nd or 7th launch date is more probable given the testing and the work required.

"There's no way we're going to be earlier than Jan. 24," Shannon said. "I would say it is a stretch to think we would make the 24th, that would require the weather to cooperate out at the Kennedy Space Center, it would require no hitches in any of the testing.”

A suspect connector in the engine cutoff (ECO) fuel sensor system was removed from the shuttle’s external tank and is being tested at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. If the tests there don’t replicate the false readings that occurred during two launch attempts in early December, another on-pad fueling test might be required to collect additional data. If so, the launch could be delayed to Feb. 2 at the earliest.

A fueling test performed on December 18 isolated the problem to the 1 ½ -by 3 inch connector called a pass-through connector, located both inside and outside the tank. The wires for all four ECO sensors pass through the same connector. From the data of that test, engineers believe the problem lies in gaps between pins and sockets on the external side of the pass-through connector when the system is chilled to cryogenic temperatures, as when the tank is filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

"It's a difficult problem," Shannon said. "I'm not making excuses here, but at liquid hydrogen temperatures is the only time it shows up so you have to set up a test that uses liquid hydrogen. We're very interested. This is the first time we've removed the hardware from a vehicle and had the opportunity to test it without disturbing it before hand. So it will be interesting to find out."

Engineers are now working on installing new connectors to the tank.

"All of those changes, it's fairly simple, it's a fairly elegant change and we feel very confident that if the problem is where we think it is, between the external connector and the feed through, that this will solve that," Shannon said. "Now, if you look at the schedule, we're going to have new external connectors and feed-through assemblies at KSC this weekend and we're going to proceed with installing that on external tank Number 125, which is the one Atlantis is currently mated to. We expect that work to be done by next Thursday.”

"But I asked the team to go ahead and protect that date (Jan. 24) as the earliest date that we could possibly go," Shannon continued. "I think it is much more likely that we'll be ready to go somewhere in the February 2 to February 7 timeframe, given we don't have any additional findings as we go through our testing."

Another timing issue to deal with is the scheduled Feb. 7 launch of a Russian Progress supply ship to the ISS. Joint U.S.-Russian space station flight rules don’t allow a Progress docking during a shuttle visit. If the Russians won’t change their launch date, Atlantis would have to take off by Jan. 27 or the flight would slip to sometime around Feb. 9 in order to get the Progress docked before the shuttle arrives.

Also, NASA originally planned to launch the shuttle Endeavour on the next mission to the ISS on Feb. 14. But the Atlantis delay will force a subsequent delay for Endeavour. Shannon said that NASA typically needs five weeks between launches to get ready for the next flight.

Original News Source: NASA News Audio

Universe Today : Organic Molecules Found Outside our Solar System

2008-01-07T10:25:00.002+05:30

Written by Nicholos Wethington

Organic molecules are thought by scientists to be instrumental in kickstarting life as we know it on Earth. Within our Solar System they can be found in comets, and they cause the redness of the clouds of Saturn's moon Titan. New observations of a planet-forming disk around a star 220 light-years from Earth reveal for the first time that these molecules exist elsewhere in the Universe.

Astronomers at the Carnegie Institute have detected the presence of organic molecules in the dusty disk surrounding HR 4796A, an eight-million year-old star in the constellation Centaurus. Using Hubble's Near-Infrared Multi-Object Spectrometer they analyzed the light coming from the disk and found that its red color is due to large organic carbon molecules called tholins. The analysis ruled out other causes of the red light, such as iron oxide.

“Until recently it’s been hard to know what makes up the dust in a disk from scattered light, so to find tholins this way represents a great leap in our understanding,” said John Debes of the Carnegie Institute's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, one of the authors of the study.

Just as in our early Solar System, the disk of dust is in the process of forming planets. The collision of small bodies like asteroids and comets creates the dust in the disk, and the organic molecules present on these objects could then be scattered on any planets orbiting the star. This discovery makes it clear that it is possible for organic molecules to exist in the early stages of planet formation, paving the way for the possible development of life later on.

Organic molecules are thought to be essential to the development biological organisms because they are made up of carbon, the building block of life on Earth. The discovery of these molecules elsewhere in the Universe does not mean that life exists there yet – or even that it will in the future – but it does increase the tantalizing prospect of life forming outside our Solar System.

The study was published in the current Astrophysical Journal Letters by John Debes and Alycia Weinberger of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism with Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona.

Source: Carnegie Institute Press Release

Universe Today : Podcast: The Large Hadron Collider and the Search for the Higgs-Boson

2008-01-07T10:25:00.001+05:30

Written by Astronomy Cast

When it was first developed, the standard model predicted a collection of particles, and thanks to more and more powerful colliders, physicsists have been able to find them all except one: the Higgs-Boson. It's an important one because it should explain how objects have mass. The European Large Hadron Collider should have the power and sensitivity to find the Higgs-Boson.

Click here to download the episode

The Large Hadron Collider and the Search for the Higgs-Boson - Show notes and transcript

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

Universe Today : Meteor Shower Throws Over 100 Meteors per Hour

2008-01-07T10:24:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Houser

With over 100 meteors per hour, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower is one of the latest mergers between Google and NASA, a major asset to space research due to their successful combination of ideas and plans. This peak shower began around 0200 UTC on Friday morning, January 4th, with the jet owned by the founders of Mountain View-based Google flying amongst big science players, such as the SETI research team.

To see this spectacular sight and to partake in a scientific mission, Google carried a team of NASA scientists and their high-technology instruments on board the Google owned Gulfstream V jet, which left the Mineta San Jose International Airport on Thursday late afternoon about 4:30 p.m. Plans were made for a ten-hour flight over the Arctic, returning to home base when the meteor shower mission was accomplished with the resulting data.

The GOOG Google.com Stock Message Board is full of the things that Google has been doing to improve the world—a real biggie was to develop a cheaper solar, wind power for Earth—excellent idea from a company whose corporate motto is to “do not be evil.” That plan involved the creation of a research group to develop energy sources that was a cheaper renewable alternative which focuses on solar, wind and any other forms of power through the Renewable Energy “Cheaper Than Coal” project. And of course, lowering Google's power bill was top of the list before anyone else as a huge incentive.

Last September, as most are aware of, NASA and Google had launched a $2.6 million dollar agreement to let the Google co-founders house their aircraft at Moffett Field while NASA was to be allowed to use it for their science work, such as that of the Quadrantid Meteor Shower. Other prospective plans for Google are to hand out $30 million dollars to any company that successfully comes up with a plan to bring people to the moon. Another plan is to fund a space race through Google's Lunar X Prize competition.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Universe Today : Book Review: Our Changing Planet

2008-01-07T10:21:00.000+05:30

Written by Mark Mortimer

A butterfly's flapping wings may alter the weather a thousand kilometres away. This marvel of chaos also symbolizes Earth's many interconnections. Such connections appear again and again in the book Our Changing Planet – The View From Space edited by M. King, C. Parkinson, K. Partington and R. Williams. Its collection of essays and vibrant depictions allow a reader to grasp meaning from random variability and arrive at a comprehension about the system that supports our lives on Earth.

The space age brought two great assets to weather forecasting; the satellite and computers. These tools allowed us to detect trends and relationships. For example, cold air over the Pacific Ocean during the spring time may lead to overly dry conditions along the west coast of the Americas. And, at a smaller scale, we see cities causing heat islands that effect their immediate climates. Through this experience, we can take current conditions and extrapolate them into the future. The goal is thus to ameliorate conditions, like tsunamis, that may be disadvantageous to human existence. However, this is a new field, so making predictions beyond a year, or perhaps a decade, still come with a great deal of uncertainty.

Nevertheless, we can make connections, and this book gives the reader an appreciation of what's been done with our knowledge and where we might be going. The four editors; King, Parkinson, Partington and Williams have included within their book over 60 independent essays so as to provide a perspective of the dynamics of Earth. Most of these are weather related, though selections on plate tectonics, glaciers and vegetation show how weather affects and is affected by so much. For example, aerosols from ship's exhaust cause a plume that satellites can detect well after the ship's moved on. As well, Ebola outbreaks have a direct association with the end of rainy seasons. Also included within the book are little tidbits of information. An average hurricane will condense 20,000 million tons of water a day. And, over 1% of global total emission of man-made sulphur dioxide come from a few smelters at Noril'sk in north central Siberia. As these demonstrate, there's little that can hide from today's satellite technology, and this book readily shows this to great avail.

Yet, this book particularly shines through its illustrations. The book is physically of an overly large format. With this, the editors provide broad, expansive colour images, usually from satellites. For instance, a dramatic two page spread shows the mighty Lambert Glacier flowing out to the ocean. However, the book's true bread and butter are the many GIS themed maps. Whether showing net primary productivity on a global scale or tsunami wave heights in the Indian Ocean, the reader is given simple yet informative visual pictures of the data. By providing a series of these maps, all annotated with dates, the reader can then easily grasp how our planet's features change over time and how they effect all of Earth's residents.

With the illustrations and their associated essays, the reader will see that the Earth changes. But, this isn't news to anyone. And, this is a weakness of the book. The editors have omitted the inclusion of a common theme to drive the reader through the book. General interest and appreciation of great illustrations will start the reader into the book, but it may not be enough to keep them going. There's an implicit understanding throughout the text that any change will affect humans. But, as people cover the globe, this comes as no surprise. Thus, the editors have missed an opportunity to build upon the knowledge. Especially, they've shied away from trying to combine trends seen from the individual case studies. It is apparent that the editors have gotten essays from very knowledgeable writers, but the writers appear to have worked mostly in isolation. Hence, aside from a general theme of a changing Earth, the essays have little that relate to each.

Nevertheless, this book makes for a great reference. In particular, it epitomizes the value of geographical information systems (GIS). With only rudimentary geographical knowledge, any reader can appreciate ebbs and flows across our globe. And, by the very nature of satellites, the reader will quickly forget about national boundaries and appreciate the inter-connected nature of our existence. However, this book keeps science within easy reach, more for the student or general reader than a researcher. Thus, though a wonderful reference either for data or for themes, this book is a starting point and a typical reader will be looking elsewhere to build upon the presentations.

With the Earth spinning by at well over 1600 kilometres an hour, many things get tossed and turned about. Add to this the effects of the occasional volcano and some very active residents, and, changes will abound. Such becomes readily apparent in the book Our Changing Planet – The View From Space edited by M. King, C. Parkinson, K. Partington and R. Williams. Through glowing illustrations and bright essays within it, our Earth becomes much more complete and more precious.

Science magazine : A Baby Planet's First Steps?

2008-01-06T10:20:00.000+05:30

Baby fat.
This artist's impression shows a very young and still-forming massive planet just discovered orbiting its parent star.

Credit: Johny Setiawan

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
2 January 2008

Astronomers think they have found the first "baby" exoplanet--a world so young it could provide insight into the earliest stages of planet formation.

Over the past decade and a half, astronomers have identified 270 planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system (ScienceNOW, 10 January 2007). Using ever-more-powerful telescopes, they have also detected hundreds of nascent stars surrounded by clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have presumed that these protoplanetary disks, as they're called, coalesce into rocks, asteroids, and eventually planets, but so far direct evidence has been lacking.

Now a team from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, claims to have landed the proof. After scanning disks surrounding about 200 stars, the researchers detected a periodic wobble in the motion of TW Hydrae, located about 180 light-years away in the constellation Hydra. The wobble means that something with significant gravity is tugging at the still-forming star on a regular basis. Further analysis suggested a planet with about 10 times the mass of Jupiter tightly orbiting its parent star about every 4 days.

More striking, the team reports in the 3 January issue of Nature, the data suggest that the planet's age is less than 10 million years--only about a tenth as old as any other extrasolar planet found so far. "Before this discovery, it was not clear what the real time scale of planet formation was," says astronomer and lead author Johny Setiawan. But the detection of this young planet around TW Hydrae suggests a much faster process than scientists had thought, and it "shows us that what we call protoplanetary disks are indeed protoplanetary," he says.

Perhaps, but the object may not be a planet at all, says planetary scientist Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. He's not convinced by the data regarding the size of the object, and if it ends up being just a little larger than the German team estimates--say, 13 times the size of Jupiter--it could instead be a starlike body known as a brown dwarf.

Whether or not the object is a planet, the finding "demonstrates that it is now possible to observe planets orbiting very young stars," says planetary scientist Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. And that, he adds, will help researchers to "test current hypotheses about planet formation."

Related sites

More about known exoplanets

More about protoplanetary disks

Universe Today : SETI@home Needs You!

2008-01-05T13:42:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

If your New Year’s resolutions include trying something new, expanding your horizons, or doing something to benefit humanity, this is for you: SETI@home needs more volunteers to help crunch data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And the easy part is that your desktop computer does all the work.

SETI uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow band-width radio signals from space. Since these signals don’t occur naturally, a detection of such a signal would indicate technology from an extraterrestrial source.

The SETI project at the University of California-Berkley gets data from world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which has recently been updated with seven new and more sensitive receivers. The improved frequency coverage for the telescope is now generating 500 times more data for the SETI project than before, and more volunteers are needed to handle the increase in data.

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all the volunteers," he said. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history."

The SETI@home premise is simple but brilliant: Instead of using a monstrously huge and expensive supercomputer to analyze all the data, it uses lots of small computers, all working simultaneously on different parts of the analysis. Participants download a special screensaver for their home computers, and when the computer is idle, the screensaver kicks in to grab data from UC Berkley, analyze the data and send back a report. SETI@home was launched in May of 1999.

The SETI@home software has now been upgraded to deal with all the new data generated by the updated Arecibo telescope. The telescope can now record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. It also has greater sensitivity and 40 times more frequency coverage.

So, if the phrase “to search out new life and new civilizations” inspires you, here’s your chance to be part of the largest community of dedicated users of any internet computing project. Currently SETI@home has 170,000 individuals donating time on 320,000 computers.

"Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the sky; we're looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are scanning the right radio channels," said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "The good news is, we're entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them."

Check out SETI@home here.
Original News Source: UC Berkley Press Release

Universe Today : Carnival of Space #35

2008-01-05T13:37:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

We took a bit of a break over the holidays, but we're back with the Carnival of Space #35. This week it's over at the Music of the Spheres. And there's a second bonus edition with a few entries that I somehow let slip through the cracks.

Should we reach out to extraterrestrials, or just keep our mouths shut? Is Asteroid 2007 WD5 going to hit Mars later this month? These topics and more are covered in a collection of space and astronomy stories, so check them out.

Universe Today : The Moon Meets Antares On January 5

2008-01-05T13:31:00.000+05:30

Written by Tammy Plotner

Although no one likes to get up early, it will be worth it on the morning of January 5. For dedicated SkyWatchers, you'll enjoy the pleasing view of Venus and the last phases of the waning Moon… But look closely, because you'll see brilliant red Antares is also joining the show! Whenever a bright star like Antares is so close to the lunar limb, chances are an occultation event is about to happen for some area of the Earth. Would you like to learn more? A photographic and scientific opportunity awaits you!

Less than half a degree away from the lighted edge of the crescent Moon, Antares will make a picturesque scene for many of us that only nature can create. For a few lucky viewers in the south-western portion of South America, this could be an occultation event! If you've ever wondered about occultations, then it's time to learn more about what an occultation is, when it happens, how to view it, record and report.

Several times a year the natural progress of the Moon against the progress of the starry background means a chance to see the lunar disk occult (or cover up) a bright star or planet. If the object is bright enough, you can watch this happen with only your eyes, but even binoculars or a small telescope will greatly improve the view. What a pleasure it is to see a star simply disappear behind the Moon's limb! But it's not just the Moon that occults stars - so do asteroids. Occultations happen anytime one celestial body passes in front of another - a type of eclipse. For those of you who enjoy doing a little bit of science, there's a whole lot more to do… and contributions you can make!

Thanks to great folks at the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA), you can learn how to predict, time, record and submit your observations by downloading the free ebook: "Chasing the Shadow: The IOTA Occultation Observer's Manual - The Complete Guide to Observing Lunar, Grazing and Asteroid Occultations" available here! It's the only book of its kind that shows observers how to get started in occultations and what equipment to use. Whether you are a novice observer, or an advanced observer with a video system, you can assist in the search for asteroidal moons, help discover new double stars and help determine the size of the Sun during solar eclipses.

Let the beauty of the morning on January 5 inspire you! During the month of January you'll be treated to great things like an occultation of the Pleiades stars on January 18 in northern North America and Northern Asia. On January 19 in southern Africa you'll see Beta Tauri disappear. If you live in Alaska, January 20 means an occultation of Mars. For southern observers in Australia and New Zealand, be sure to check out the Moon and Regulus on January 24. To get times and locations, all you have to do is check with IOTA. If watching a asteroid pass in front of a star takes your fancy, then stop by here where you can get multitudes of information for events in your area!

In the meantime, get your cameras and fingers ready. We'd like to share in your success! See if you can capture the view on the morning of January 5 and post it here. Even if you're not able to photograph the event, we'd love to hear your reports and impressions. Watch the "Universe Today" in future months as we bring you more!

Space.com : Old Comets for a New Year

2008-01-05T13:28:00.000+05:30

By Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
posted: 04 January 2008
06:24 am ET

As we kick off the year 2008, Comet Tuttle is putting on a nice show for backyard skywatchers. It had not been seen since 1994, but you'll have an excellent opportunity to pick it up with binoculars or small telescopes during the next two weeks.

Tuttle can even be glimpsed by sharp-eyed observers under pristine skies without any optical aids, for it is one of the brightest of the short-period comets, those that orbit the sun often enough to be seen again and again from Earth and identified as such.

And speaking of short-period comets, Comet Holmes continues to delight observers more than two months after its stupendous explosion to naked-eye visibility.

Discovery

As we all know, Halley's was the first comet-to be recognized as periodic, but it had been seen on many previous returns before Edmund Halley announced that fact in the year 1705. Similarly, although Encke's comet was discovered in 1786, it was observed on three more returns before Johann Franz Encke determined that it had an orbital period of 3.3-years.

The object that we today call Comet Tuttle had a similar history.

On Jan. 9, 1790, the renowned Parisian comet hunter Pierre Méchain discovered a fairly bright telescopic comet in the western evening sky. His friend and rival Charles Messier described it on the following night as resembling an unresolved star cluster or nebula without a nucleus. It was followed for just over three weeks; just not enough time for a sufficient number of observations to determine an accurate orbit.

Astronomers assumed that the object was traveling in a parabolic orbit and would never be seen again, and entered the literature simply as "Comet 1790 II." It wasn't to be seen again for nearly 70-years.

Tuttle's turn

Horace P. Tuttle, an assistant at Harvard College Observatory, discovered three comets by telescope during the year 1858. Tuttle found the first of them on Jan. 4 in the constellation Andromeda. Still approaching the perihelion point of its orbit (its least distance from the sun), the comet was favorably placed relative to the Earth, and this made possible a long series of positional measurements.

Comet Tuttle was brightest during February at about magnitude 7, meaning it was just below the threshold of naked eye visibility, though a relatively easy object to see with binoculars or a small telescope.

Tuttle himself was among the first to suggest that his object was identical with Comet 1790 II. A 13.7-year period was proposed by several astronomers, and it soon became clear that Comet Tuttle of 1858 had been missed at four intervening apparitions. At three of those returns (1803, 1817, and 1844) it was too close to the sun in the sky to be seen, while conversely, in 1830 it should have been an easy object in the morning sky but was somehow missed.

Comet Tuttle became the eighth comet to be recognized as a periodic object hence it is now designated as 8P/Tuttle.

The perihelion distance of 8P/Tuttle places it just outside of the Earth's orbit at 95.5 million miles (153.6 million kilometers). Also, around Dec. 22 of each year the Earth passes through the dusty trail left behind by the comet from its previous visits. This encounter gives rise to an annual display of meteors known as the Ursids, which appear to diverge from near the bright star Kochab in the bowl of the Little Dipper.

Because 8P/Tuttle was observed at each return following its 1858 rediscovery except in 1953, this time around will go down in the record books as its 12th observed apparition. And as it turns out, this apparition will be among its very best.

Where and when to look

On New Year's Day, 8P/Tuttle passed closest to Earth; a distance of 23.5 million miles (37.8 million kilometers). Although it is now slowly moving away from the Earth, it will continue to slowly approach the sun, passing closest to it on Jan. 27. Comets are most visible when they near the sun, which lights up material that boils off the comet.

So, during these next two weeks, the comet will hold nearly steady in brightness at around magnitude 6. For those blessed with clear, dark skies far from significant light pollution, the comet might be even glimpsed with the unaided eye. But good binoculars or a small telescope will easily bring 8P/Tuttle into view if you know where to train them; it should appear as a small fuzzy star possibly sporting a faint, narrow tail.

The comet will be situated against the rather dim stars that compose the so-called "watery region" of the sky, passing through eastern Pisces (the fishes) into Cetus (the whale) during the night of Jan. 6-7. On that night, it will lie not far to the west from one of the brightest stars in Pisces: fourth magnitude, Al Rischa, located at the point where the two fish are tied. In fact, the name comes from the Arabic word for "cord."

For the next couple of weeks both Pisces and Cetus can be conveniently found well up in the southern sky between 6 to 8 p.m. local standard time.

Comet 8P/Tuttle will appear to skid south in its orbit against the background stars of these two constellations. After moving through Cetus, 8P/Tuttle will pass into the dim, shapeless constellation of Fornax (the furnace) on Jan. 16. It will continue to plunge south thereafter, gradually becoming unfavorably placed for viewers in the Northern Hemisphere, although those living south of the equator will be able to follow the now fading comet right on into February.

A reminder about Comet Holmes!

While the spotlight is now on Comet Tuttle, we should not forget about our old friend, Comet Holmes which continues to be dimly visible to the unaided eye as a diffuse, circular cloud, roughly twice the apparent diameter of the moon against the stars of the constellation Perseus.

This comet was no brighter than magnitude 17 in mid-October — that's about 25,000 times fainter than the faintest star that can normally be seen without any optical aid. But late on Oct. 23, the comet's brightness suddenly rocketed all the way up to magnitude 2.5, brightening nearly one million times in less than 24 hours!

In attempting to explain why Comet Holmes exploded, comet expert, John Bortle suggested that this comet's nucleus consists of low-density material that, over time developed into a large region with a very tenuous structure, like a honeycomb. At some point, the highly fragile bonds connecting the honeycomb of material reached a failing point and a sudden crushing collapse occurred, expelling a gigantic volume of dust into space, making this dim comet suddenly appear impressively bright.

Back in 1892, Comet Holmes suffered two major outbursts separated by about 75 days. This leads to the question as to whether this comet will undergo a similar "cosmic aftershock" in the wake of its recent late October explosion.

Bortle thinks it's a possibility, based on the theory that there may be a large amount of residual instability which might lead to a second major collapse of material on the comet nucleus. If what happens now parallels what happened in 1892, another possible explosive outburst may be imminent, so it might be wise to keep a close watch on Comet Holmes in the coming days ahead.

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Space.com : 4 Years on Mars: Rovers Continue to Amaze

2008-01-05T13:07:00.000+05:30

By Dave Mosher
Staff Writer
posted: 03 January 2008
06:28 am ET

Two robots the size of golf carts were given 90 days to squeeze as much science as possible from the barren, dust-swept terrain of Mars. After that, scientists expected nothing more from them than death.

Nearly four years after their warranties expired, however, the Mars Explorations Rovers (MERs) "Spirit" and "Opportunity" continue to play productively in the red dirt.

Spirit celebrates its fourth anniversary of Martian work on Jan. 4, the day it landed in 2004, followed by Opportunity on Jan. 25. Those four Earth years since landing convert to 2.25 Martian years, or 1,422 Martian days called "sols."

"We never thought we'd still be driving these robots all over Mars," said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover science team. "We joked about driving Opportunity into Victoria Crater, but now we're there, and we're looking at doing even more science. Each day they still work is an amazing one."

Happy anniversary

Since the rovers bounced onto Mars' surface, they have collectively driven more than 11.8 miles (19.1 kilometers) and snapped more than 210,000 images. That's roughly 55 standard DVD movies worth of uncompressed data.

Scientists have used this information through the years to crank out more than 100 studies about the planet's geologic past "with many more in progress," Lemmon said.

"It's been a great year for the rovers and we're getting deeper into Martian history than we've ... done before," Lemmon said. "These robots have entirely changed the way we view Mars."

Those views include support for the existence of water on Mars, at least in the past, in the form of silica and meteorites.

In addition to that evidence, the year 2007 inflicted a global dust storm on the rovers. Although indirect sunlight powered the rovers through the dusty conditions, more than 96 percent of direct sunlight to their solar panels was filtered out.

"It was scary there for a while," Lemmon said of the low-light conditions that nearly drove the rovers to a permanent standstill.

Despite the nerve-wracking task of keeping both rovers power-positive — and their electronic circuits from snapping in the Martian cold — Lemmon explained that new science is still trickling out as a result of the weather event.

"The Mars orbiters looked down on the dust storm when it happened, but they didn't measure changes on the ground like the rovers did," he said. "The rovers are really helping us to better understand these storms."

Winter parking spot

Now that the dusty, five- to six-month Martian summer is waning and winter is creeping up, earthly operators have pinned down an over-winter parking spot for Spirit.

The rover suffered software glitches early in the mission, and now drives backward as its front right wheel is indefinitely stuck. Making matters worse is the literal fallout from the recent dust storm.

"Right now, we're working with the dustiest rover we've ever had," Lemmon said, who does not expect whirling dust devils to clean off the rover's coated solar panels any time soon. "As a result, we pretty much consider Spirit parked."

Lemmon said Opportunity, however, is in good shape to continue exploring and the team has no definitive date for parking the adventurous machine.

"Opportunity has much cleaner [solar panels] than Spirit," Lemmon said, "so there's no discussion of racing it to a north-facing slope for the winter."

Scientists used the north-facing-slope trick in the past, which helps maximize direct sunlight to the rover's solar panels during the dim Martian winter.

While Opportunity continues to maneuver around Victoria Crater, Spirit is presently resting on a slope of Home Plate — a layered outcrop of rock in the shape of a baseball home plate. "It'll stay in one place for a long time, but we'll still be able to do some science," Lemmon said.

That science includes watching the sky for water-crystal clouds and taking atmospheric measurements, but the rover may also witness a potential asteroid impact later this month.

"I'm not optimistic for the rovers seeing anything ... [but] we have some hope of seeing the impact cloud as it disperses around the planet," Lemmon said. "I like the thought of a birthday present from Mars. It'll certainly contribute more excitement to the mission."

Astronomy Magazine : White dwarf pulses like a pulsar

2008-01-05T13:02:00.000+05:30

Current knowledge of white dwarfs is being challenged by new discoveries.

Provided by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The white dwarf in the AE Aquarii system is the first star of its type known to give off pulsar-like pulsations that are powered by its rotation and particle acceleration. Casey Reed [View Larger Image]

January 3, 2008
New observations from Suzaku, a joint Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA X-ray observatory, have challenged scientists' conventional understanding of white dwarfs. Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away, but the new data tell a completely different story.

At least one white dwarf, known as AE Aquarii, emits pulses of high-energy (hard) X-rays as it whirls around on its axis. "We're seeing behavior like the pulsar in the Crab Nebula, but we're seeing it in a white dwarf," says Koji Mukai of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Crab Nebula is the shattered remnant of a massive star that ended its life in a supernova explosion. "This is the first time such pulsar-like behavior has ever been observed in a white dwarf."

White dwarfs and pulsars represent distinct classes of compact objects that are born in the wake of stellar death. A white dwarf forms when a star similar in mass to the Sun runs out of nuclear fuel. As the outer layers puff off into space, the core gravitationally contracts into a sphere about the size of Earth, but with roughly the mass of the Sun. The white dwarf starts off scorching hot from the star's residual heat. But with nothing to sustain nuclear reactions, it slowly cools over billions of years, eventually fading to near invisibility as a black dwarf.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star, a collapsed core of an extremely massive star that exploded in a supernova. Whereas white dwarfs have incredibly high densities by earthly standards, neutron stars are even denser, cramming roughly 1.3 solar masses into a city-sized sphere. Pulsars give off radio and X-ray pulsations in lighthouse-like beams.

An artist depicts the Suzaku X-ray observatory in Earth's orbit. JAXA [View Larger Image]

The discovery team, led by Yukikatsu Terada of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Wako, Japan, was not expecting to find a white dwarf mimicking a pulsar. Instead, the astronomers were hoping to find out if white dwarfs could accelerate charged subatomic particles to near-light speed, meaning they could be responsible for many of the cosmic rays that zip through our galaxy and occasionally strike Earth.

Some white dwarfs, including AE Aquarii, spin very rapidly and have magnetic fields millions of times stronger than Earth's. These characteristics give them the energy to generate cosmic rays.

To find out if this is happening, Terada and his colleagues targeted AE Aquarii with Suzaku in October 2005 and October 2006. The white dwarf resides in a binary system with a normal companion star. Gas from the star spirals toward the white dwarf and heats up, giving off a glow of low-energy (soft) X-rays. But Suzaku also detected sharp pulses of hard X-rays. After analyzing the data, the team realized that the hard X-ray pulses match the white dwarf's spin period of once every 33 seconds.

The hard X-ray pulsations are very similar to those of the pulsar in the center of the Crab Nebula. In both objects, the pulses appear to be radiated like a lighthouse beam, and a rotating magnetic field is thought to be controlling the beam. Astronomers think that the extremely powerful magnetic fields are trapping charged particles and then flinging them outward at near-light speed. When the particles interact with the magnetic field, they radiate X-rays.

"AE Aquarii seems to be a white dwarf equivalent of a pulsar," says Terada. "Since pulsars are known to be sources of cosmic rays, this means that white dwarfs should be quiet but numerous particle accelerators, contributing many of the low-energy cosmic rays in our galaxy."

Launched in 2005, Suzaku is the fifth in a series of Japanese satellites devoted to studying celestial X-ray sources. Managed by JAXA, this mission is a collaborative effort between Japanese universities and institutions and Goddard.

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Space.com : Hot on the Trail of Cosmic Rays

2008-01-03T17:05:00.000+05:30

By Jeremy Hsu
Staff Writer
posted: 02 January 2008
06:31 am ET

The mysterious origins of cosmic rays that slam into the Earth's atmosphere could soon be revealed, thanks to a better ground-based sensor that costs less than balloons or satellites.

Cosmic rays are thought to come from either the center of the galaxy or a nearby supernova, and knowing which is true will help astrophysicists paint a more accurate picture of the cosmos.

"Cosmic rays are not a spectator phenomenon in the galaxy — they have a role in galactic dynamics," said Scott Wakely, a University of Chicago physicist. "To understand the galaxy in a full sense, you need to understand cosmic rays."

That understanding depends on ground and space-based instruments. Satellites and balloons first detect a blue flash — known as Cerenkov radiation — when cosmic rays smash into the upper atmosphere and release energy.

The cosmic ray particles then break into a shower of smaller pieces and produce a second blue flash. Ground sensors usually only detect the second flash.

Tens of thousands of particles may bombard an area the size of a small parking lot on Earth daily, while rarer high-energy particles strike less than once a year in the same area. Satellites and balloons do a better job of detection by rising above the atmosphere, but they can only cover a small area.

"A $400 million satellite is only a couple particles per year, and you want hundreds of thousands," Wakely told SPACE.com. "You always want to look for new ways to do this."

Wakely set out with colleague Simon Swordy, a physicist at the University of Chicago, to create a ground-based instrument that could detect both the first and second blue flashes. The instrument will have roughly 10 times the resolution and power of current ground-based detectors.

Scientists can use information from both blue flashes to identify a particle as a certain element and maybe even its origin. For instance, some elements will more likely come from the fiery outburst of a supernova.

"We can say that was iron or that was uranium," noted Wakely. "Those are the kinds of data you need to make progress in this business."

No one thought ground-based instruments could detect the first blue flash, until Wakely and Swordy proposed the idea with other colleagues in 2001. A team of researchers in Namibia confirmed the concept using a telescope array called HESS. Wakely later made his own observations using a telescope array called VERITAS.

"That was direct evidence that it [the technique] works," said Wakely. "The goal of this [new] instrument is to combine large area detection with the high precision of space-based sensors."

An improved instrument could also help solve at least one mystery about the energy range of cosmic ray particles. Higher energy particles — such as those from the nuclei of heavy elements like iron — are rarer than common, lower-energy particles such as protons. But physicists have puzzled over a sudden drop-off in frequency of high-energy particles at a certain point in the energy spectrum, labeling the strange kink "the Knee" because of its shape.

Some researchers suggest that supernovas which they claim produced all the cosmic rays suddenly run out of energy at "the Knee," and a new source of cosmic rays takes over on the other side. Others think that a new model of physics takes over that is beyond current scientific understanding, but no one knows for sure, without more measurements of high-energy particles from "the Knee" region.

If all goes well, Wakely and Swordy plan to submit a proposal in three years to build the instrument they are designing. The National Science Foundation has already given a five-year, $625,000 grant to start drawing up the concept.

Space Weather

2008-01-03T17:04:00.000+05:30

METEOR SHOWER: Earth is about to pass through a debris stream from near-Earth asteroid 2003 EH1, producing the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. Forecasters expect a brief but intense peak of 50+ meteors per hour over Earth's northern hemisphere sometime between 0200 UTC and 0700 UTC on Friday morning, Jan. 4th. (Subtract 5 hours to convert UTC to EST.) The timing favors observers in the eastern USA, Europe and western parts of Asia: sky map.

Winter storms frequently hide this shower from observers on the ground. To avoid such problems, a team of astronomers led by Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute will fly a plane above the clouds where they can train their cameras on the Quadrantids. Their data may reveal whether asteroid 2003 EH1 is a fragment of a long-dead comet: more.

ORION--WARP 5! "While at the San Antonio Astronomical Association's New Year Eve Star Party, I was taking a widefield image of Orion and thought that I would vary the focal length of the lens," says Bryan Tobias of Fredericksburg, Texas. "This is what I ended up with!"

Photo details: Nikon D300, 14-24mm lens, f/2.8, ISO 1600 20 seconds

"I call this shot Number 1, Orion--Warp 5!" he says. "I used a Nikon D300 with a Nikon lens at all focal lengths from 14mm to 24mm."

This is a good time of year to see Orion--even at impulse speed. The constellation rises in the east at sunset beneath the campfire-red light of Mars: sky map. Watching Orion ascend, you may experience the little-known "constellation illusion." The idea is the same as the Moon illusion; constellations viewed near the horizon look abnormally large. Go outside tonight and look. Can you believe your eyes?

NEW YEARS COMET: Tonight, after sunset, take your binoculars outside and scan the sky right above your head. You may find a little emerald fuzzball--Comet 8P/Tuttle. The comet is making its closest approach to Earth (24 million miles) this week. Shining like a ~6th magnitude star, it is barely visible to the unaided eye, but a fine target for binoculars and backyard telescopes. Sky maps: Jan 2, 3.

On Dec. 30th, in the mountains of northern Italy, Giampaolo Salvato photographed the comet gliding by spiral galaxy M33:

more galaxy-comet encounter photos

"This is a 2 x 5 minute exposure at ISO 1600," says Salvato, who took the picture using his backyard telescope and a Canon 5D digital camera.

The colors in this photo are truly heavenly: The galaxy is blue because of a great number of young and massive blue-white stars outlining the spiral arms. The comet, on the other hand, is green because of cyanogen (CN, a poisonous gas) and diatomic carbon (C₂) present in the comet's atmosphere; both substances glow emerald-green when exposed to UV sunlight in the near vacuum of space.

Universe Today : Shuttle Launch Decision on Tap

2008-01-02T20:05:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

NASA engineers continue to repair a faulty electrical connector on Space Shuttle Atlantis’ external fuel tank which has delayed the launch of the STS-122 mission to the International Space Station. An update of the progress on that work will be presented at a mission management team meeting scheduled for Thursday, January 3 and mission managers will perhaps then be prepared to announce a proposed launch date for Atlantis.

The repairs could take several days or even weeks. At a press briefing last week, shuttle program manager Wayne Hale declined to offer a probable launch date. “We’re in the middle of troubleshooting and repair,” he said. “Until that gets a little bit further along, I actually have no valid dates to give you… To avoid what I think would be a totally misleading headline along the lines of ‘NASA Delays the Space Shuttle Again’ we’re just not going to give you a launch date because that, in fact, would not be accurate.”

The engine cutoff (ECO) fuel sensor system transmitted false readings during two launch countdowns for Atlantis earlier in December. A fueling test performed on December 18 isolated the problem to a 1 ½ -by 3 inch connector called a pass-through connector, located both inside and outside the tank. The wires for all four ECO sensors pass through the same connector. From the data of that test, engineers believe the problem lies in gaps between pins and sockets on the external side of the pass-through connector when the system is chilled to cryogenic temperatures, as when the tank is filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

Engineers have removed the connector and are bench-testing the components in similar cryogenic conditions to try to duplicate the failure. Meanwhile, new hardware is being installed on the tank as the shuttle sits on launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.

“We have allowed the team that did the troubleshooting to very thoroughly go through all the data,” said Hale. “They have told us they are sure the problems that we’re seeing reside in that series of connectors. Where exactly in that series of connectors is a little bit open to interpretation.”

The connectors on the inside of the tank are being visually inspected. “It is a possibility that the internal connector is involved,” Hale said. “However, all the physics based discussion of the kinds of things that can happen point to something happening on the external connector.” Problems with the internal connector would involve “more invasive” work, Hale said, that could possibly damage the tank.

A similar repair was done to the Atlas rockets several years ago to fix problems with circuitry in the Centaur stage. ECO sensors protect the shuttle's main engines by triggering engine shut down if fuel runs unexpectedly low. The Space shuttle main engines running without fuel would likely result in an explosion.

The STS-112 mission will deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus science module to the station along with a new crew member Leopold Eyharts from France who will take over for Dan Tani. Tani, whose mother was killed in a car accident on December 19, will return to Earth on Atlantis.

“These repairs and troubleshooting activities will determine when we will launch,” said Hale. “The plan to go forward will take as long as it takes, but we don’t think this will be a long-term thing. Probably something that will take a couple of weeks.”

Universe Today : Controversial NASA Aviation Report Released

2008-01-02T20:04:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

NASA released the results on Dec. 31 from an $11.3 million federal air safety study. The agency previously withheld the report, and came under fire from Congress and news organizations for doing so. Earlier reports said NASA was concerned the data in the report would upset travelers and hurt airline profits. But today NASA administrator Mike Griffin and the head of NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Bryan O’Connor said the release of the report was delayed to protect both pilot confidentiality and classified commercial aviation information.

“We came across instances in looking at the raw data where information was contained that could have compromised one of those two things,” said Administrator Griffin. “We determined that an independent review of that data was necessary in order to prevent such compromise.”

A panel led by O’Connor reviewed the 16,000 page report and data such as pilots’ names and other confidential information was redacted.

Also, Griffin said there are questions as to the validity of the data in the report, which has not been peer-reviewed.

“We consider the study was not properly organized and not properly reviewed, and that makes the results very difficult to interpret and to use,” he said. The study was conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute for NASA.

An independant review of the data will be done in the future by the National Academy of Sciences.

Griffin said the original press release highlighting the refusal to release the data used “inappropriate language” to explain the rationale for not releasing the report.

NASA's survey, the National Aviation Operations Monitoring System (NAOMS), interviewed about 8,000 pilots per year from 2001 until the end of 2004. The program was terminated before moving on to interview flight attendants and air traffic controllers, as originally proposed.

Approximately one million dollars a year was put into this study. Griffin said it is a small fraction of NASA’s overall work, and in retrospect, the study did not receive the attention that it should have.

The report can be found on NASA's website. Its length makes it difficult to wade through the data. Additionally, some portions of the report that have not yet been edited for confidential information have been left out. NASA will release the remainder of the report as soon as possible.

The original plan for the survey never called for NASA to interpret and analyze the data. The study’s purpose was to develop new methodologies for collecting aviation safety data, and then the data would be transitioned to the aviation safety community. “NASA conducts research, and this was one element of such research,” said Griffin. “NASA extended the research, which was originally to be concluded in 2004 in order to properly fund the transition of the data and its review. We’ve gone the extra mile with this data and we’ve gone well beyond our original intentions, which is why we’ve brought it to an end.”

It remains uncertain whether any data from the report will ever be used by the aviation safety community. Griffin said it was his understanding that the FAA has “simply moved on from NAOMS,” and that the FAA has over 150 different programs to provide survey data from individuals involved in all areas of air flight.

While NASA didn’t analyze the data, Griffin offered his opinion of what the report surmises: “What the flying public should understand is that they have approximately the same risk of dying from a lightning strike as they do dying from an air transport accident in the United States, which means to say that this is one of the safest forms of travel that human beings have ever invented, and that no one should think otherwise.”

In testimony to congress earlier this year, Griffin characterized the data in the report as not as valid as he would prefer to have for a NASA report. Griffin said that he still feels that way, and that his concern is that this research work was not properly peer reviewed and the data that was extracted from the survey was not properly vailidated at its conclusion.

The survey purportedly unearthed approximately four times as many engine failures than the FAA has documentation for. “It calls into question the reporting mechanisms rather than the underlying rate of engine failures, which we believe we understand,” Griffin said, adding there are other inconsistencies, as well. “Those kinds of inconsistencies, when we looked at the data, gave us pause for thought, and still do.”

“The value of this will need to be determined by the larger aviation community, which I remind you, does not reside within NASA,”Griffin continued. “All that we at NASA have said is that this survey was not peer reviewed and the data was not validated at its conclusion….its up to others whether or not they believe this research has value.”

Griffin had promised to release the report before the end of 2007, and he did so without compromising confidential information that, by law, NASA is prohibited from releasing.

Griffin said this survey doesn’t cast any doubt in his mind about the safety of aviation in the United States. “I did not, having looked at a snapshot of the data, see anything that the flying public would care about or ought to care about,” he said. “But it’s not for me to prescribe what others may care about. We were asked to release the data and we did that.”

The report can be found on the NASA website.

Original News Source: NASA News Audio

Bad Astronomy : Repost: Happy New Year!

2008-01-02T19:59:00.000+05:30

I don’t usually repost blog entries, but it’s the end of the year, and my post at this time last year took me forever to research and write, and I like it so much I’m gonna just plop it down here to end 2007. Enjoy.

Yay! Tonight at midnight it’s New Year!

But what does that mean, exactly?

The year, of course, is the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun, right? Well, not exactly. It depends on what you mean by "year", and how you measure it. This takes a wee bit of explaining, so put down the champagne, take the lampshade off your head, and hang on.

First, I will ignore a few things. For example, time zones. These were invented by a sadistic watchmaker, who only wanted to keep people in thrall of his devious plans. So for now, let’s just ignore them, and assume that for these purposes you spend a whole year (whatever length of time that turns out to be) planted in one spot (though I’ll note that as I write this, it’s already 2007 in Australia and other points west of the international date line).

However, I will not ignore the rotation of the Earth. That turns (haha) out to be important.

Let’s take a look at the Earth from a distance. From our imaginary point in space, we look down and see the Earth and the Sun. The Earth is moving, orbiting the Sun. Of course it is, you think to yourself. But how do you measure that? For something to be moving, it has to be moving relative to something else. What can we use as a yardstick against which to measure the Earth’s motion?

Well, we might notice as we float in space that we are surrounded by zillions of pretty stars. We can use them! So we mark the position of the Earth and Sun using the stars as benchmarks, and then watch and wait. Some time later, the Earth has moved in a big circle and is back to where it started in reference to those stars. That’s called a "sidereal year" (sidus is the Latin word for star). How long did that take?

Let’s say we used a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time. We’ll see that it took the Earth 31,558,149 seconds (some people like to approximate that as pi x 10 million (31,415,926) seconds, which is an easy way to be pretty close). But how many days is that?

Well, that’s a second complication. A "day" is how long it takes the Earth to rotate once, but we’re back to that measurement problem again. But hey, we used the stars once, let’s do it again! You stand on the Earth, and define a day as the time it takes for a star to go from directly overhead to directly overhead again: a sidereal day. That takes 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds = 86,164 seconds. But wait a second (a sidereal second?) — why isn’t that exactly equal to 24 hours?

I was afraid you’d ask that — but this turns out to be important.

It’s because the 24 hour day is based on the motion of the Sun in the sky, and not the stars. During the course of that almost-but-not-quite 24 hours, the Earth was busily orbiting the Sun, so it moved a little bit of the way around its orbit (about a degree). If you measure the time it takes the Sun to go around the sky once — a solar day — that takes 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds. It’s longer than a sidereal day because the Earth has moved a bit around the Sun during that day, and it takes a few extra minutes for the Earth to spin a little bit more to "catch up" to the Sun’s position in the sky.

Here is a diagram from Nick Strobel’s fine site Astronomy Notes that will help explain this:

See how the Earth has to spin a little bit longer to get the Sun in the same part of the sky? That extra 4 minutes (really 3 m 56 s) is the difference between a solar and sidereal day.

OK, so we have a year of 31,558,149 seconds. If we divide that by 86,164 seconds/day we get 366.256 days per year.

Wait, that doesn’t sound right. You’ve always read it’s 365.25 days per year, right? But that first number, 366.256, is a year in sidereal days. In solar days, you divide the seconds in a year by 86,400 to get 365.256 days.

Phew! That number sounds right. But really, both numbers are right. It just depends on what unit you use. It’s like saying something is 1 inch long, and it’s also 2.54 centimeters long. Both are correct.

Having said all that, I have to admit that the 365.25 number this is not really correct. It’s a cheat. That’s really using a mean or average solar day. The Sun is not a point source, it’s a disk, so you have to measure a solar day using the center of the Sun, correcting for the differences in Earth’s motion as it orbits the Sun (because it’s not really a circle, it’s an ellipse) and and and. In the end, the solar day is really just an average version of the day, because the actual length of the day changes every, um, day.

Confused yet? Yeah, me too. It’s hard to keep all this straight. But back to the year: that year we measured was a sidereal year. It turns out that’s not the only way to measure a year.

You could, for example, measure it from the exact moment of the vernal equinox in one year to the next. That’s called a tropical year. But why the heck would you want to use that? Ah, because of an interesting problem! Here’s a hint:

The Earth precesses! That means as it spins, it wobbles very slightly, like a top does as it slows down. The Earth’s wobble means the direction the Earth’s axis points in the sky changes over time. It makes a big circle, taking over 20,000 years to complete one wobble. Right now, the Earth’s axis points pretty close to the star Polaris, but in a few hundred years it’ll be noticeably off from Polaris.

Remember too, that our seasons depend on the Earth’s tilt. Because of this slow wobble, the tropical year (from season to season) does not precisely match the sidereal year (using stars). The tropical year is a wee bit shorter, 21 minutes or so. If we don’t account for this, then every year the seasons come 21 minutes earlier. Eventually we’ll have winter in August, and summer in December! That’s fine if you’re in Australia, but in the northern hemisphere this would cause, panic, rioting, bloggers blaming each other, etc.

So how do you account for it? Easy: you adopt the tropical year as your standard year. Done! You have to pick some way to measure a year, so why not the one that keeps the seasons more or less where they are now? This means that the apparent times of the rising and setting of stars changes over time, but really, astronomers are the only ones who care about that, and they’re a smart bunch. They know how to compensate.

Okay, so where were we? Oh yeah– our standard year (also called a Gregorian year) is the tropical year, and it’s made up of 365.24 mean solar days, each of which is 86,400 seconds long, pretty much just as you’ve always been taught. And this way, the vernal equinox always happens on or around March 21 every year.

But there are other "years", too. The Earth orbits the Sun in an ellipse, remember. When it’s closest to the Sun we call that perihelion. If you measure the year from perihelion to perihelion (an anomalistic year) you get yet a different number! That’s because the orientation of the Earth’s orbital ellipse changes due to the tugs of gravity from the other planets. It takes about 100,000 years for the ellipse to rotate once relative to the stars! Also, it’s not a smooth effect, since the positions of the planets change, sometimes tugging on us harder, sometimes not as hard. The average length of the anomalistic year is ~~346.6 solar days, or 29,947,974 seconds~~ 365.26 days, or 31,558,432 seconds. What is that in sidereal days, you may ask? The answer is: I don’t really care. Do the math yourself.

Let’s see, what else? Well, there’s a pile of years based on the Moon, too, and the Sun’s position relative to it. There are ideal years, using pure math with simplified inputs (like a massless planet with no other planets in the solar system prodding it). There’s also the Julian year, which is a defined year of 365.25 days (those would be the 86,400 seconds-long solar days). Astronomers actually use this because it makes it easier to calculate the times between two events separated by many years. I used them in my PhD research because I was watching an object fade away over several years, and it made life a lot easier.

So there you go. As usual, astronomers have taken a simple concept like "years" and turned it into a horrifying nightmare of nerdy details. But really, it’s not like we made all this stuff up. The fault literally lies in the stars, and not ourselves.

Now if you’re still curious about all this even after reading my lengthy oratory, and you want to know more about some of these less well-known years, then check out Wikipedia. They have lots of info, but curiously I found it rather incomplete. I may submit something to them as an update (like how many seconds are in each kind of year; they only list how many days, which is useful but could be better).

I have to add one more bit of geekiness. While researching this entry, I learned a new word! It’s nychthemeron, which is the complete cycle of day and night. You and I, in general, would call this a "day". Personally, if someone dropped that word into casual conversation, I’d beat them with my orrery and astrolabe.

Incidentally, after all this talk of durations and lengths, you might be curious to know just when the Earth reaches perihelion, or when the exact moment of the vernal equinox occurs. If you do, check out the U.S. Naval Observatory website. They have tons of gory details about this stuff.

Hmmmm, anything else? (counting on fingers) Years, days, seconds, yeah, got those. Nychthemeron, yeah, Gregorian, tropical, anomalistic… oh wait! I know something I forgot to say!

Happy New Year.

Space Weather

2008-01-01T11:53:00.000+05:30

SOLAR ACTIVITY: On Oct. 31st around 0110 UTC, something exploded just behind the sun's eastern limb. The blast unleashed a C8-class solar flare and hurled a bright CME into space. These events may signal the impending return of large sunspot 978, which has spent the past two weeks transiting the far side of the sun.

Almost a full day after the explosion, astrophotographer Gary Palmer of Los Angeles trained his SolarMax90 on the eastern limb of the sun and saw "no more flares, but plenty of undulating plasma."

The blast site is still seething with activity. But what is it? An old sunspot? An unstable magnetic filament? We should get a better view later today or tomorrow as the sun's rotation brings the tempest over the limb into a direct line of sight from Earth. Stay tuned for updates.

more images: from John Nassr of Baguio, the Philippines

HEAVENLY MEETING: On Sunday night, Oct. 30th, Comet 8P/Tuttle passed by spiral galaxy M33. It was, well... a picture is worth a thousand words:

more galaxy-comet encounter photos

"The emerald-colored comet and M33 were a fantastic late Christmas gift for me," says Gerald DeShirlia who photographed the encounter from his drive way in Wimberley, Texas, using a 7-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 20D digital camera.

Now Comet 8P/Tuttle is heading toward Earth. On Jan. 1st and 2nd it makes its closest approach to our planet--only 24 million miles away. The emerald-colored comet will brighten to a predicted magnitude of 5.8, visible to the unaided eye from dark-sky sites and a fine target for backyard telescopes: sky map.

Space.com : The Enduring Mysteries of the Outer Solar System

2008-01-01T11:51:00.000+05:30

By Charles Q. Choi
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 31 December 2007
7:00 a.m. ET

The farthest reaches of our solar system remain the most mysterious areas around the sun. Solving the mysteries of the outer solar system could shed light on how the whole thing emerged — as well as how life on Earth was born.

Why the rainbow of colors in the Kuiper belt?

For instance, the Kuiper belt past Neptune is currently the suspected home of comets that only take a few decades or at most centuries to complete their solar orbits — so-called "short-period comets." Surprisingly, Kuiper belt objects "show a wide range of colors — neutral or even slightly blue all the way to very red," said University of Hawaii astrophysicist David Jewitt.

The color of an object helps reveal details about its surface composition. It remains a mystery why Kuiper belt objects show a much wider range of color — and thus surface composition — than other planetoids, such as the asteroids.

Some researchers had suggested volcanic activity could have led to all these colors — "absurd in the context of 100-kilometer-sized (60-mile) bodies," Jewitt said, as volcanism needs something bigger.

Jewitt and his colleagues had suggested that cosmic rays could have made Kuiper belt objects redder, while impacts with rocks could have dug up more pristine matter that made them less red. Nowadays Jewitt thinks there must be another explanation for this rainbow, but it remains unknown.

What is ultra-red matter?

There appears to be a material dubbed "ultra-red matter" that exists only on about half of all Kuiper belt objects and their immediate progeny, known as centaurs — icy planetoids orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune that very recently escaped from the Kuiper belt.

This ultra-red matter does not exist in the inner solar system, "not even on the comets which come from the Kuiper belt. This suggests that the ultra-red matter is somehow unstable at the higher temperatures close to the sun," Jewitt explained.

The red colors suggest this substance might contain organic molecules. Comets and other planetoids are often thought to have helped bring organic molecules to Earth.

"In the Kuiper belt objects, organics might have been 'cooked' by cosmic ray radiation, giving them dark red surfaces, but there is no proof," Jewitt said. Ideally spacecraft could go out there and find out, he added.

Has the Kuiper belt shrunk?

Theoretical calculations suggest the Kuiper belt was once hundreds or maybe even thousands of times more populated than it is now. "How was 99 percent or 99.9 percent of the mass lost, and when?" Jewitt asked.

One conjecture suggests when Saturn and Jupiter shifted their orbits roughly 4 billion years ago, their gravitational pulls slung Kuiper belt objects out of the solar system. Another says the Kuiper belt objects pulverized themselves to dust, which then was swept away by the sun's radiation. Yet another possibility "is that we are missing something crucial and the conclusion that the belt is heavily depleted is wrong," Jewitt said. "All these possibilities are comparably hard to swallow, but would each be amazing, if true."

Secrets in the Oort cloud?

A distant reservoir of trillions of comets known as the Oort cloud theoretically lies up to 100,000 astronomical units from the sun — an astronomical unit or AU being about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). This means the Oort cloud is a fifth of the way to the nearest star, so far away that objects within it have never been seen directly, only inferred — but it must exist, given all the comets seen over the years.

The Oort cloud is the conjectured source of comets that require centuries or millennia to complete their long journeys around the sun. Since these "long-period comets" come from all directions, the Oort cloud is often thought to be spherical. However, while comets such as Halley's do not come from the Kuiper belt, their orbits also do not jibe with a spherical Oort cloud, Jewitt explained. This suggests there may be an "inner Oort cloud" shaped kind of like a doughnut.

Astrophysicists think the Oort cloud is a remnant of the protoplanetary disk that formed around the sun roughly 4.6 billion years ago. Learning more about the Oort cloud could shed light on how our solar system — and Earth — were born, Jewitt said.

Are there more dwarf planets?

So far, three dwarf planets are recognized — Ceres, Pluto and Eris. The Kuiper belt, which lies about 50 AU from the sun, could hold some 200 more. Beyond that there could be scores of dwarf-planet-sized bodies beyond roughly 100 AU from the sun "that nobody had seen before due to their faintness and slow motion," said astronomer Chad Trujillo at Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. "Even a body as big as Mars could be missed in our current surveys if it were moved beyond a couple hundred AU."�

Trujillo noted projects such as Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System) and the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) "should fill this gap in our knowledge in the coming decade."

Where do the dwarf planets come from?

There are theories that the dwarf planets of the outer solar system may have dwelt in the inner solar system billions of years ago, based on their current orbital trajectories. If so, "why are there so many ices on their surfaces?" Trujillo asked. Bodies in the inner solar system are generally expected to lose their ice due to sunlight.

Trujillo and his colleagues suspect the ice now seen on these dwarf planets is relatively new, with such replacement ice coming perhaps from within these worlds, erupting out during "cryovolcanism." Of course, further research is needed to see if such ice renewal would be enough to cover the dwarf planet after they voyaged from the inner to the outer solar system, he added.

Do cosmic rays come from a bubble around the solar system?

When the supersonic wind of charged particles that flows from our sun collides with the thin gas found between the stars, the solar wind essentially blows a bubble in this interstellar medium — a ball known as the heliosphere.

Scientists have thought unusually weak cosmic rays — energetic particles that zip from space at Earth — come from the heliosphere. Specifically, these rays are thought to come from the "termination shock" — a shock wave of compressed, hot particles that results when the solar wind abruptly brakes against interstellar gas. (The termination shock appears to be about 75 to 85 AU from the sun.)

However, Voyager 1 saw no sign these anomalous cosmic rays were produced at the termination shock. "Perhaps it crossed the shock at the wrong time or place," said MIT astrophysicist John Richardson, or perhaps the standard view on how these anomalous cosmic rays are generated is wrong. Voyager 2 crossed the termination shock in 2007 about 10 billion miles away from where Voyager 1 crossed it in 2004, and its data, which is still being analyzed, "may help us understand where these particle are produced," he explained.

"Cosmic rays have been reported to affect Earth's weather so understanding their source is important," Richardson added. Moreover, high-energy particles from shock waves triggered by huge eruptions from the sun known as coronal mass ejections can damage spacecraft and astronauts, and better understanding the termination shock could help understand these other, potentially dangerous particles.

NASA : SERVIR: NASA lends a hand in Central America

2007-12-30T12:37:00.000+05:30

Dec. 28, 2007: Earlier this year, NASA researcher Dan Irwin stepped off a plane in Guatemala and found, to his surprise, that he was running for mayor. It seems the people of San Andres had put his name on the ballot.

Irwin respectfully declined, but he was touched. If you ask him why the residents of rural San Andres are crazy about him, Irwin, a humble soul, shrugs his shoulders and says, "Everyone has a hobby. Mine is building things – helping develop their community. I enjoy it."

Irwin is a pioneer of SERVIR (Spanish for "to serve"), a high-tech satellite visualization system that monitors the environment of Central America. It helps track and combat wildfire, improves land use and agricultural practices, and helps local officials respond faster to natural disasters.

Right: During a recent visit to Central America, Dan Irwin explains the inner workings of SERVIR to NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale. [more]

Developing SERVIR was a full-time job for Alabama-resident Irwin, including many months on assignment in Central America. What do you do in your spare time so far from home? With the help of community residents, Irwin built a playground and a library in San Andres. "I worked on the projects before and after work and on weekends," says Irwin, "just as other people spend time on their hobbies at those times."

But it is Irwin's "real" work with SERVIR that makes contributions reaching far beyond the community level to the whole of Central America.

"SERVIR has brought together a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds to create the kind of team needed to help solve very complex issues and provide potentially life-saving solutions to local decision makers and stakeholders," says John Horack of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) where SERVIR technology is developed and tested.

SERVIR's supercomputer at the Water Center for the Humid Tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean (CATHALAC) in Panama City integrates data from a variety of sources and displays a real-time map of crisis points. At a glance, decisions-makers can see where rain will fall, where flooding will occur, the location of forest fires, hurricanes, tornadoes – pretty much anything nature can dish out. CATHALAC then warns residents.

Above: SERVIR brings high-tech satellite imagery and visualization tools to bear on Central America. Current maps of fire, floods and severe weather may be found on the bilingual SERVIR web site: http://servir.net.

SERVIR also takes a global approach to environmental challenges by supporting the ten-year plan for implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS, which was adopted by the European Commission and over 70 governments worldwide.

GEOSS's main purpose is to foster cooperation and integration among countries by pooling Earth observation tools and data for the benefit of all. Because of SERVIR's positive impact in Central America, GEOSS recently adopted SERVIR as their template--a sort of "poster child" for how to meet GEOSS goals. At the organization's recent Ministerial Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, which was attended by over 70 nations and over 50 international organizations, SERVIR was recognized as a "GEOSS Early Achievement."

What's the secret to SERVIR's success? It's not "what" but "who" – namely, Irwin and what he calls the "dream team."

Above: The SERVIR "dream team." [Larger image]

These behind-the-scene "wizards" include administrators, scientists, and technicians like, at CATHALAC, Director Emilio Sempris, Emil Cherrington, and Francisco Delgado; and, at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Burgess Howell, Robert Griffin, and Jason Arnold.

The CATHALAC team members are in charge of day-to-day on-site operations: gathering and processing the satellite data, combining it with ground observations, and getting the results quickly into the hands of national environmental management and disaster response leaders. Team members at the MSFC test-bed facility view SERVIR data at the same time as their Central American counterparts view it and play key roles in supporting and coordinating SERVIR projects.

"I'm involved at several different levels within SERVIR," says team member Griffin. "I help coordinate among institutions in a country as well as with SERVIR and its partners in the U.S. and abroad. As with everyone involved with these projects, I help create products to solve problems in the event of a natural disaster."

All of the SERVIR team members will help achieve the next important step -- geographic expansion. NASA is extending SERVIR's life-saving benefits to Africa and the Caribbean. SERVIR’s flexibility and adaptability make it perfect for meeting the new challenges of these geographic areas, helping NASA and its partners bring global technology to the grass roots level.

Right: A SERVIR "test bed node" at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, AL. [Larger image]

"This is an extremely exciting time to be a part of this project," says Griffin. "Right now, I'm working to deploy SERVIR in the Dominican Republic. Most recently we brought together radar imagery and other information to help the Dominican Republic's government respond to extensive flooding in the wake of Tropical Storm Noel."

Says Irwin of Griffin and other members of the team, "all of these people are indispensable to all that we've done and will continue to do. Without them, it would be impossible."

It's no wonder that Irwin reveres the SERVIR team, and that many Central Americans revere Dan Irwin.

Space.com : The Winter Sky: Planets, Stars and Cool Shapes

2007-12-30T12:33:00.000+05:30

By Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
posted: 28 December 2007
01:17 pm ET

December is the month of the winter solstice, which a large part of mankind associates with such festivals as the Nativity. Among the many varied customs linked with this special season for thousands of years, the exchanging of gifts is almost universal.

The moment of the solstice occurred on Dec. 22 at 1:08 a.m. EST. The sun, appearing to travel along the ecliptic, reached that point in the sky where it is farthest south of the celestial equator.

Mother Nature herself offers the sky observer in north temperate latitudes the two gifts of longest nights and a sky more transparent than usual.

One reason for the clarity of a winter's night is that cold air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air can. Hence, on many nights in the summer, the warm moisture-laden atmosphere causes the sky to appear hazier. By day it is a milky, washed-out blue, which in winter becomes a richer, deeper and darker shade of blue. For us in northern climes, this only adds more luster to that part of the sky containing the beautiful wintertime constellations. Indeed, it is seemingly nature's holiday decoration to commemorate the winter solstice and enlighten the long cold nights of winter.

First rule: Bundle up!

If you plan to be outside for a long period of time on these frosty, cold nights, remember that enjoying the starry winter sky requires protection against the prevailing low temperatures. One of the best garments is a hooded ski parka, which is lightweight yet excellent insulation, and ski pants which are better than ordinary trousers. And it is also important to remember your feet. While two pairs of warm socks in loose-fitting shoes are often adequate, for protracted observing on bitter-cold nights wear insulated boots.

From dusk to dawn

Soon after sunset, we can enjoy the sight of the brightest evening planet, Mars, shining brilliantly in the east-northeast sky. It fades ever-so-slightly since its Christmas Eve opposition brilliance to magnitude -1.5.

Still, this is a trifle brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, which itself will be coming up over the east-southeast horizon soon after 7 p.m.

Saturn rises soon after 9 p.m. from the east-northeast, a bright yellowish-white interloper among the stars of Leo, the Lion. If you received a telescope as a holiday gift, you'll be able to glimpse Saturn's famous ring system with a magnification as low as 30-power. Currently, the rings are tipped only about 7 degrees to our line of sight, but as the winter progresses they'll be opening up a bit more. On Dec. 20, Saturn began its retrograde motion – reversing its course against the background stars and appearing to move back to the west toward Leo's brightest star, Regulus (which it will almost reach by next spring).

And if you're still up in the predawn morning hours, you'll see Venus, the brightest of all the planets, emerging from the east-southeast horizon like a brilliant silvery "star" soon after 4 a.m.

High toward the south, also at around 10:30 p.m., we see what astronomy author Hans A. Rey (1898-1977) called a "Great Hexagon" of bright winter stars. To the south and a little east lies Sirius; up to the west, Rigel. Still higher, reddish Aldebaran; then at the north end of the circle, Capella. South and slightly east, we come to Castor and Pollux, the heads of the Gemini twins. Finally, south again to Procyon: in all, seven bright stars in six constellations.

In the center of the hexagon, more or less, you have the ruddy star Betelegeuse, while soaring high above Orion, between the horns of Taurus is pumpkin-hued Mars; an interloper this winter season. This is the rich region that gives the winter sky its splendor.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

Space.com : Stepping Forward: The Year in Spaceflight

2007-12-30T12:22:00.000+05:30

By Tariq Malik
Staff Writer
posted: 27 December 2007
7:00 a.m. ET

It's been a busy year for spaceflight in the U.S. and around the world, with an even more ambitious slate ahead for 2008.

On the home front, NASA launched three shuttle missions to the International Space Station (ISS), where astronauts laid the framework for new European and Japanese laboratories set to fly next year even as they uncovered new glitches with the outpost's solar arrays.

"I think that we have accomplished a lot post-Columbia, and that this last year has been our proving ground," said the space station's current commander Peggy Whitson, the first female ISS skipper, this month.

Malaysia's first astronaut and a record space tourist flight also launched toward the ISS in 2007, which saw a myriad of science probes rocket spaceward while the Space Age turned 50. China and Japan also made great strides this year, launching their first moon probes as both countries prepare to send crewed spacecraft into orbit next year.

Orbital construction leaps forward

While a freak hail storm in February delayed the start of NASA's shuttle flight plan for months, the U.S. agency bounced back to complete three missions that added new solar arrays, truss segments and the Harmony connecting room to the ISS.

Astronauts moved old, massive trusses, stitched up torn solar wings and overcame crippling computer glitches while outfitting the ISS with new segments. Engineers are currently grappling with the station's balky starboard solar wing joints, with repairs slated for sometime next year.

"Obviously, it hasn't gone along flawlessly, but that's part of the process too," said Whitson, adding that only by tackling such challenges will humanity learn how to better explore space.

The construction work culminated in a November marathon of spacewalks and robotics by Whitson and her crewmates to ready their station for a fourth shuttle flight—since delayed—bearing Europe's Columbus laboratory. Columbus will dock at the station's Harmony node, the first new room to arrive at the ISS since 2001.

"The activity we just did on [the] station is probably the most complicated assembly we have ever done," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations. "And all that has worked precisely as we needed it to work."

NASA plans up to 12 more shuttle flights to complete ISS construction, plus one more to the Hubble Space Telescope, before its three-orbiter fleet retires in 2010. Six shuttle flights are currently on NASA's docket for 2008.

"I think we've got easily the capability to go fly the four flights a year that we need to do to complete our manifest," Gerstenmaier said.

Asian Space Race

China began this year with a bang, literally, when it destroyed a defunct communications platform during a January anti-satellite test that spurred widespread criticism from countries around the world.

"They really do seem to have been caught off guard," said China space specialist Dean Cheng, a senior Asia analyst with CAN Corp. in Arlington, Va., of the country's surprise from the protests. "And the damage control efforts that they've undertaken have, frankly, been poor."

But the test kicked off a busy launch period for China and Japan capped by the near launches of separate lunar orbiters—Chang'e 1 and Kaguya, respectively—to explore the surface of the moon. The year also saw Malaysia's first astronaut launch to the ISS aboard a Russian spacecraft and return during a harrowing ballistic descent with two professional cosmonauts.

"This was, in a sense, the first wave of Asia's jump into space," Cheng said of 2007. "This is not a high-impact, pedal-to-the-metal kind of race."

Unlike the Space Race between the U.S. and former Soviet Union, the international competition for space prowess in Asia reaches past national prestige, he added.

"The Chinese are still, for better or worse, head and shoulders above the rest simply because they're putting up their own astronauts up on their own vehicle," Cheng said.

China is the third country, after Russia and the U.S., to build and launch spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts into orbit.

South Korea's first astronaut is slated to launch to the space station atop a Russian rocket in 2008 after, if all goes well, Japanese astronauts visit the ISS to help install segments of their country's massive Kibo laboratory. When fully assembled, Kibo will be the largest single lab attached to the ISS.

Meanwhile, China is gearing up to launch its third manned spaceflight, with three astronauts and a planned spacewalk, in fall 2008.

"These countries are competing with each other to say, 'We are a first world, first rate, aerospace and scientifically advanced country,'" Cheng said. "Take us seriously, invest in us, hire our people, all of those factors. And I think in the next several years you're going to see an even higher growth rate."

The road ahead

While national space agencies made steady progress, commercial firms met with mixed results highlighted by Bigelow Aerospace's successful second launch of a prototype space station and the tragic explosion that killed three and wounded three others.

NASA is banking on advances in commercial spaceflight to help bridge the anticipated years-long gap between the space shuttle fleet's retirement and the first flights of its replacement—the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle.

The U.S. space agency completed awarding contracts for the spacecraft's Ares I rocket among other milestones, with the first abort test flights planned for 2008.

"[I]t's been an important year for us," Whitson said. "And I'd like to think that it's been very successful."

Univers eToday : Quadrantid Meteor Shower Will Sparkle on January 3rd

2007-12-30T12:19:00.000+05:30

Written by Tammy Plotner

Beginning each New Year and lasting for nearly a week, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower sparkles across the night sky for nearly all viewers around the world. Its radiant belongs to an extinct constellation once known as Quadran Muralis, but any meteors will seem to come from the general direction of bright Arcturus and Boötes. This is a very narrow stream, which may have once belonged to a portion of the Aquarids, but recent scientific data points to a what may have been a cosmic collision.

According the most recent data, the Quandrantid meteors may have been formed about five centuries ago when a near-Earth asteroid named 2003 EH1 and a comet smashed into one another. Historic records from ancient China put comet C/1490 Y1 in the path of probability. As Jupiter's gravity continues to perturb the stream, another 400 years may mean this shower will become as extinct as the constellation for which it was once known… But NASA scientists and astronomers are taking to the skies to study the event.

A Gulfstream V aircraft will fly scientists and their instruments for 10 continuous hours over the Arctic to observe and record meteor activity. From above the Earth, the stream can be studied without light pollution and clouds to determine when the activity peaks and how the stream is dispersed. “We will fly to the North Pole and back to compensate for Earth's rotation and to keep the stream in view throughout the flight,” said Peter Jenniskens, a principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center.

According to NASA, scientists believe this could be the most brilliant meteor shower in 2008 with over 100 visible meteors per hour at its peak. Best viewing times with the highest meteor rates are expected to be in either the late evening of Jan. 3 over Europe and western Asia or the early morning of Jan. 4 over the eastern United States. For the USA: 6pm – 2am (Pacific Time) on Jan. 3 and 4, 2008. For Northern Europe: 2am – 10am (London) on Jan. 4, 2008. For Northern Asia: 11am – 7pm (Tokyo) on Jan. 4, 2008. For almost of us, this means bundling up against the cold and battling the remnants of the waning Moon… But the sight of even one "shooting star" can make the trip worthwhile!

Will the Quadrantid Meteor Shower live up to its expectations? No one knows for sure… But we'll be watching!

Universe Today : Podcast: Globular Clusters

2007-12-30T12:00:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

This week we're going to study some of the most ancient objects in the entire Universe; globular clusters. These relics of the early Universe contain hundreds of thousands of stars, held together by their mutual gravity. Since they formed together, they give astronomers a unique way to test various theories of stellar evolution.

Click here to download the episode

Globular Clusters - Show notes and transcript

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

Universe Today : Book Review: Rocketeers

2007-12-30T11:51:00.000+05:30

Written by Mark Mortimer

People as a group don't get credit for making great advances. Individuals are the ones who rise above the background noise of humanity, and their suggestions or offerings provide a new thrust for our civilization. Edison brought ready energy to peoples' houses; the Wright brothers brought ready transport across vast distances. Michael Belfiore in his book Rocketeers – How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space gives identity to some of today's individuals who are trying to rise above. His is the story of these individuals who want to enable the ready travel of people beyond Earth's atmosphere.

Just recently, SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize by privately funding a craft that could rise to more than 328,000 feet. Belfiore sees this as a starting point to a grand adventure for humankind. He claims, and writes, how individuals are able to accomplish tasks once solely in the realm of government. These few people, with great drive and smarts, set their special skills to attaining a specific goal. And some, almost miraculously, achieve it. The author also describes how most of these people, if not all, have great expectations on seeing their results become a cornerstone to another, new vibrant industry.

In this book, Belfiore is, if nothing else, amazingly vibrant and cheerful. Think, a cheerleader on steroids after drinking an overly caffeinated drink. He glamourizes imagery and enlightens background situations. In doing, he leaves no doubt as to the challenge of building rockets, the risk with flying them and the utmost joy upon a mission's success. He relays the fear of having a plane door flap open during flight, the amazement of using a rocket to power a bicycle, and the dejection of months of effort evaporating with the failure of one small, relatively inexpensive, component. Within this book, everything is happening immediately, in front of the reader. Great distances and many people dash by, as the book follows the author while he visits airfield operators, financial underwriters and rocket developers. He conveys the feeling of no time to waste, as in any start-up industry.

This traveling about by the author is the greatest appeal to this book. Belfiore includes passages that show he hasn't just read clippings and then written a book. Rather, he's gone out, met the people and got first hand information. He writes of meetings with Bigelow, Feeney, Ansari and many others. He describes many of the manufacturing facilities, test sites and mock-ups which he visited. Included within the book are photographs and fun anecdotal events to back up these travels. With these, the book really comes alive for the reader. The reader becomes part of the working group gathered around the restaurant table, all drawing schematics on paper napkins.

But, this optimism and vibrancy throughout the text makes for a very one-sided appreciation of the undertaking. Entrepreneurs and experimenters with near-limitless funding or with connections to wealthy benefactors are all nearly eulogized as being the best. The government comes across as lost, misdirected or obstructionist. Further, there's only reference to efforts in the United States. Therefore, as wonderful as this will read for any rich citizen in the United States, others may have some difficulty in sharing in the excitement and hope. Given references to one hundred thousand dollar tickets to fly to orbit and back, most people on this planet will never experience this pleasure. Hence, though Belfiore is careful to write that the goal is to benefit all humankind, the book's details impart a different story.

Hence, if a reader is very much into space and rocket travel, this book is great fun. Rocket plane races, weddings in space and orbiting hotels make for exciting visions of the future. Those readers who perhaps dwell deeper in the practicalities will find this book a bit overly optimistic and thin. But, anyone who enjoys fast paced, lively writing on technical subjects will enjoy this book probably as much as Belfiore says he had in gathering the information.

Working for the future allows us to put substance into our dreams. Waiting for a finished product to service our longings may mean never doing it. In Rocketeers – How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space, Michael Belfiore writes of those doing the deed rather than waiting for a provider. For them, a ticket to ride can never come soon enough and their dreams may just enable ours.

universe Today : SoHO Celebrates its 12th Birthday

2007-12-30T11:47:00.001+05:30

Written by Ian O'Neill

On December 2^nd, 1995 a large joint ESA and NASA mission was launched to gain an insight to the dynamics of the Sun and its relationship with the space between the planets. 12 years on, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO) continues to witness some of the largest explosions ever seen in the solar system, observes beautiful magnetic coronal arcs reach out into space and tracks comets as they fall to a fiery death. In the line of duty, SoHO even suffered a near-fatal shutdown (in 1998). As far as astronomy goes, this is a tough assignment.

By the end of 1996, SoHO had arrived at the First Lagrange Point between the Earth and the Sun (a gravitationally stable position balanced by the masses of the Sun and Earth, about 1.5 million km away) and orbits this silent outpost to this day. It began to transmit data at "solar minimum", a period of time at the beginning of the Solar Cycle, where sunspots are few and solar activity is low, and continues toward the upcoming solar minimum after the exciting firworks of the last "solar maximum". This gives physicists another chance to observe the majority of a Solar Cycle with a single observatory (the previous long-lasting mission was the Japanese Yohkoh satellite from 1991-2001).

On board this ambitious observatory, 11 instruments constantly gaze at the Sun, observing everything from solar oscillations (“Sun Quakes”), coronal loops, flares, CMEs and the solar wind; just about everything the Sun does. SoHO has become an indispensable mission for helping us to understand how the Sun influences the environment around our planet and how this generates the potentially dangerous “Space Weather”.

The SoHO mission site confidently states that SoHO will remain in operation far into the next Solar Cycle. I hope this is the case as the new Hinode and STEREO probes will be good company for this historic mission.

Source: NASA News Release

Universe Today : 1-in-75 Chance Of Tunguska-Size Impact On Mars

2007-12-30T11:38:00.000+05:30

Written by Ian O'Neill

A 164-foot (50 meter) wide asteroid will be crossing the orbit of Mars at the end of January 2008. Currently, there is a 1-in-75 chance of the "Mars Crosser" hitting the Red Planet, and if it does, the 30,000 mile per hour speeding mass would generate a three megaton explosion (approximately the size of the terrestrial Tunguska impact over Siberia in 1908) and create a crater half-a-mile wide somewhere north of Meridiani Planum. So, the Mars Rover Opportunity will get a ringside seat should this once-in-a-thousand-year event occur…

NASA's Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California reported this month that a known Near Earth Asteroid (NEO) will be crossing the path of Mars on January 30, 2008. This puts asteroid "2007 WD5" in a special group of asteroids: "Mars Crossers". NASA's Near Earth Object Observation Program (or "Spaceguard" program) is intended to track asteroids that come close to the orbit of Earth, but also provides data for any asteroids tracked near our planetary neighbors.

Scientists are both excited and concerned by the possibility of an impact on Mars. Whilst this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to observe an impact of this size on Mars (remember the excitement at Shoemaker-Levy hitting Jupiter in 1994?), this event would eject millions of tons of dust into the Mars atmosphere, interfering with the Mars Expedition Rovers, and hindering orbital imaging of the planet. The Phoenix mission (currently en-route) will undoubtedly be affected. Looking far into the future, this event could have serious consequences for manned exploration.

"Right now asteroid 2007 WD5 is about half-way between the Earth and Mars and closing the distance at a speed of about 27,900 miles per hour […] Over the next five weeks, we hope to gather more information from observatories so we can further refine the asteroid's trajectory," - Don Yeomans, manager of the NEO Office at JPL.

Although the odds are low, and the asteroid is expected to miss Mars by 30,000 km, asteroid hunters will be keeping a close eye on the progress of 2007 WD5 as it barrels closer and closer to the Red Planet and our robotic explorers.

Source: Near Earth Object Program

Universe Today : Happy Birthday Johannes Kepler

2007-12-30T11:21:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

December 27 is a day to celebrate the life of astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was born on this date in 1571, and is best known for his three laws of planetary motion. But also, coming up in 2009, The International Year of Astronomy (IYA) will celebrate the work of Kepler as well. Not only did Galileo begin his observations with a telescope almost 400 years ago in 1609, but also in that year Kepler published his book New Astronomy or Astronomia Nova. This was the first published work that documented the scientific method.

Kepler’s primary reason for writing Astronomia Nova was to attempt to calculate the orbit of Mars. Previous astronomers used geometric models to explain the positions of the planets, but Kepler sought for and discovered physical causes for planetary motion. Kepler was the first astronomer to prove that the planets orbited the sun in elliptical paths and he did so with rigorous scientific arguments.

An offshoot of Astronomia Nova was the formulation of concepts that eventually became the first two of Kepler's Laws:

First Law: The orbit of a planet about the Sun is an ellipse with the Sun's center of mass at one focus.

Second Law: A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time.

And Kepler's third Law: The squares of the periods of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their semi-major axes.

Kepler was also instrumental in the development of early telescopes. He invented the convex eyepiece, which allowed an expanded field of vision, and discovered a means of determining the magnifying power of lenses. He was the first to explain that the tides are caused by the Moon and the first to suggest that the Sun rotates about its axis. He also was the first to use stellar parallax caused by the Earth's orbit to try to measure the distance to the stars.

While Kepler remains one of the greatest figures in astronomy, his endeavors were not just limited to this field. He was the first person to develop eyeglasses designed for nearsightedness and farsightedness, the first to investigate the formation of pictures with a pin hole camera, and the first to use planetary cyles to calculate the birth year of Christ. He also formed the basis of integral calculus.

Kepler's many books provided strong support for Galileo's discoveries, and Galileo wrote to him, “I thank you because you were the first one, and practically the only one, to have complete faith in my assertions.”

Original News Source: The Writer's Almanac

Universe Today : Studying Planets With Sunglasses

2007-12-30T11:16:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

While finding a planet orbiting another star is incredibly exciting, it’s almost becoming commonplace. The current exoplanet count is up to 270. So now that astronomers know where these exoplanets are located, they are currently devising new techniques in order to study the planets in detail. Using a new method similar to how Polaroid sunglasses filter away reflected sunlight to reduce glare, an international team of scientists were able to infer the size of an exoplanet’s atmosphere, plus directly trace the planet’s orbit.

Orbiting a dwarf star in the constellation Vulpecula and lying approximately 63 light years from earth, this exoplanet was discovered two years ago. Using this new polarization technique, the astronomers were able to see details about the planet called HD189733b that aren’t possible to observe using other indirect methods. The scientists extracted polarized light to enhance the faint reflected starlight ‘glare’ from the planet, and for the first time, were able to detect the orientation of the planet’s orbit and trace its motion in the sky.

This new technique also indicates that the atmosphere of the planet is quite large, about 30% larger than the opaque body of the planet seen during transits, and probably consists of small particles, perhaps even tiny dust grains or water vapor.

Earlier studies of HD189733b using the Hubble Space Telescope indicated that this world doesn’t have any Earth-sized moons or a discernible ring system. Also, the temperature of its atmosphere is a blazing seven hundred degrees Celsius.

The planet is so close to its parent star that its atmosphere expands from the heat. Until now, astronomers have never seen light reflected from an exoplanet, although they have deduced from other observations that HD189733b probably resembles a ‘hot Jupiter’ – a planet orbiting extremely closely to its parent star. Unlike Jupiter, however, HD189733b orbits its star in a couple of days rather than the 12 years it takes Jupiter to make one orbit of the sun.

“The polarimetric detection of the reflected light from exoplanets opens new and vast opportunities for exploring physical conditions in their atmospheres”, said Professor Svetlana Berdyugina, leader of the group from Zurich’s Institute of Astronomy and Finland’s Tuorla Observatory. “In addition, more can be learned about radii and true masses, and thus the densities of non-transiting planets.”

They discovered that polarization peaks near the moments when half of the planet is illuminated by the star as seen from the earth. Such events occur twice during the orbit, similar to half-moon phases.

Original News Source: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Press Release

Universe Today : Fast Food Delivery: Progress Docks With ISS

2007-12-30T11:13:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

A new Progress cargo carrier docked to the International Space Station’s Pirs docking compartment early Wednesday, bringing almost 2.5 tons of fuel, air, water and other supplies to the station and its three-member crew. One of the first items unpacked were fresh tomatoes and lettuce, to be used for an anticipated culinary treat of “space hamburgers” for the crew.

This is the ISS’s 27th unpiloted Progress spacecraft to bring supplies to the station. The Progress launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Dec. 23 at 2:21 am EST, and docked with the ISS on Dec. 26 at 3:14 am EST. About three hours later, the crew began unloading the supplies, which includes more than 1,900 pounds of propellant, over 100 pounds of oxygen and 2,921 pounds of dry cargo. Part of the dry cargo are Christmas presents for Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Dan Tani, as well as birthday gifts for Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, who turned 46 on Saturday.

In an earlier press conference Whitson mentioned she was especially looking forward to receiving the “fixings” for hamburgers, especially since the crew wouldn’t be able to enjoy the Christmas meal that space shuttle Atlantis was supposed to bring on its flight, originally scheduled for early December. The shuttle will now launch no earlier than January 10 due to problems with engine cutoff sensors in the shuttle’s external fuel tank. Whitson said she had created space hamburgers during her previous stay on the station, Expedition 5, and wanted to reproduce the meal for her current crew.

The previous Progress ship was undocked from the station last Friday, after it was filled with trash and unneeded equipment from the station. It will be deorbited for destruction on re-entry in mid-January after conducting Earth observation experiments.

Original News Source: NASA Press Release

Universe Today : It’s a Bird! It’s Tinker Bell! It’sThree Galaxies!

2007-12-30T10:52:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

There once was a galaxy known as ESO 593-IG 008. It was thought to be a relatively mild-mannered galaxy, even though scientists believed it was a collision of two different galaxies; one a barred spiral and the other an irregular galaxy. But now, an international team of astronomers has discovered that it actually is a stunning rare case of three interacting galaxies, with the third galaxy forming stars at a frantic rate.

Using adaptive optics on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers were able to see through the all-pervasive dust clouds of the object that has been dubbed as “The Bird“ because of its resemblance to a winged creature. With the adaptive optics of what’s called the NACO instrument, very fine details were able to be resolved.

"Examples of mergers of three galaxies of roughly similar sizes are rare," says Petri Väisänen, lead author of the paper which will appear in the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. "Only the near-infrared VLT observations made it possible to identify the triple merger nature of the system in this case."

NACO is the combination of NAOS - Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System that is equipped with both visible and infrared sensors, and CONICA, a Near-Infrared Imager and Spectrograph.

Looking like a bird or a cosmic Tinker Bell, the NACO images show two unmistakable galaxies that form the body and wings of “The Bird.” Astronomers were surprised with the new images that identify a third, clearly separate component that forms the head. This irregular, yet fairly massive galaxy is forming stars violently, at a rate of nearly 200 solar masses per year. It appears to be the major source of infrared luminosity in the system, even though it is the smallest of the three galaxies. The other two galaxies appear to be at a quieter stage of their interaction-induced star formation history. The object is 650 million light years distant but it is quite large with the ‘wings’ alone extending more than 100,000 light-years, or the size of our own Milky Way.

Subsequent optical spectroscopy with the new Southern African Large Telescope, and archive mid-infrared data from the NASA Spitzer space observatory, confirmed the separate nature of the 'head', but also added further surprises. The 'head' and major parts of the 'Bird' are moving apart at more than 400 km/s (1.4 million km/h!). Observing such high velocities is very rare in merging galaxies.

"The Bird" belongs to the prestigious family of luminous infrared galaxies, with an infrared luminosity nearly one thousand billion times that of the Sun. This family of galaxies has long been thought to signpost important events in galaxy evolution, such as mergers of galaxies, which in turn trigger bursts of star formation, and may eventually lead to the formation of a single elliptical galaxy.

The galaxy is also designated as IRAS 19115-2124. The ESO is more formally known as the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere.

Original News Source: ESO Press Release:

Bad Astronomy : Top 10 Astronomy Pictures of 2007: Runners Up

2007-12-27T15:23:00.000+05:30

I’m not exactly a wishy-washy kind of guy, but choosing this year’s Top Ten Astronomy pictures was really tough. First, there are literally hundreds of images to go through. Maybe thousands. I can usually narrow that choice down to a few dozen. But then I’ll have three pictures of the same sort of thing: colliding galaxies, or Jupiter’s moons, or whatever. Then I have to figure which of those three is the best. Framing, color, science, simple devastating impact… whatever criteria I can use. Then I have to make sure I can use the one I pick. Some images are from amateur astronomers, and I need to know if they are copyrighted, and what credit to give.

For whatever reason, some images just didn’t make the cut. I never heard back from the owner, the image wasn’t high enough resolution, whatever. In some cases they were too similar to last year’s picks (I may ease up on that next time). For others, I just screwed up; I thought they were from 2006, or I simply never saw the image in the first place.

The following pictures are one that fall in this category. They are all gorgeous, of course, and very cool scientifically, but they just didn’t make my Top Ten. Still, I think you’ll like them! Clicking on them will take you to a high-resolution version from the original image site. Some are extremely high-res and totally amazing.

Crescent Saturn

After I had compiled my final Top Ten list and written everything up, I realized with utter horror (no exaggeration) that not one Cassini image was on the list! And this, with a) the Saturn image being my #1 pick last year, and b) Carolyn Porco — the Cassini imaging team leader — being a friend of mine! The reason I left Saturn off were manyfold, and I tried, oh I tried. Here are the pictures I considered.

This spectacular Cassini image of the crescent Saturn is impossible to see from Earth; the orbiter was high over the plane of the rings, capturing this mesmerizing view. I love this picture, and was one of my first choices for the Top Ten. But then I realized it was a little too much like last year’s winner, so I cut it. That hurt to do.

Iapetus

Saturn’s moons are weird, but none weirder than Iapetus. First, it has two totally different hemispheres; the leading gone (the one that faces into its direction of travel as it orbits the ringed planet) is very dark, and the trailing hemisphere is very bright. This is because of the junk it slams into as it moves around Saturn. Also, the moon has a giant raised ridge around its equator, kilometers high. Theories abound about it (including some silly pseudoscience ones, of course), but its exact origin is still something of a mystery. This picture is a mosaic of several smaller images made by Cassini. I didn’t include it on my list because I’m an idiot, and thought it was from 2006 (even though it was on my blog recently)! It was Fraser from Universe Today who told me (too late) that it was recent. Figures. Obviously, this would have made the cut had I been thinking.

Kaboom!

In February, a rocket booster exploded high in the sky over Australia. Robert McNaught, famed comet hunter, caught it on camera and created a short animation as the debris cloud moved across the sky as it orbited the Earth. You just don’t see stuff like this every day, and it’s totally cool. You can even see small streaks from the solid debris! This image is from Space Weather, which is a great daily stop for amazing images and info.

Comet McNaught from STEREO

Speaking of McNaught…

Comet McNaught graced our skies in January 2007, and was magnificent. It was near the Sun, and so bright it was easily visible in broad daylight! I took many terrible pictures of it, but my favorite is this one from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft. Thing is, I already had a STEREO animation on my Top Ten list, and another comet as well, so I dropped this one. There are dozens, hundreds of incredible images of McNaught on the web; my second favorite is this one from McNaught, the man himself. APOD has many more, too.

The Moon Eats Saturn

I love this multiple image of Saturn passing behind the Moon. It comes from Peter Lawrence via LPOD, the Lunar Picture of the Day. It’s rare, but sometimes the Moon appears to pass directly in front of a planet. Peter took a series of images and made this composite. It’s very cool, and gives you a sense of depth to the solar system. Saturn is huge, but it’s a long way away.

Chaos in Cluster Abell S0470

How many Hubble images can you have in a Top Ten list? Maybe next year I’ll expand the list to 15. That way I won’t have to leave out pictures like this one, of the galaxy cluster Abell S0740. Pictures like this floor me; the sheer variety, complexity, and beauty of galaxies in a cluster always brings me to a standstill. Just examining the image can tell you so much about galaxies behave in such an environment! Careful analysis also reveals a lot of information about the way the Universe itself behaves, and that’s why we do this, isn’t it? That, and to simply gape at the pageantry of the cosmos.

Carina

The Milky Way Galaxy is lousy with dense clouds of gas and dust, stellar nurseries where stars are born. This phenomenal Hubble mosaic has so much going on in it that it’s hard to know where to start, and it’s harder to know where to stop! That link will take you to a lengthy description I wrote, and had a huge amount of fun putting together. Scroll to the bottom for one of my favorite astronomical images of all time.

Barred for Life

I don’t need to give too many reasons for loving this image of barred spiral NGC 1672, taken by Hubble. I just love spirals, and barred spirals too. Love love love. Sigh.

I Zwicky 18

… or this picture of I Zwicky 18. This galaxy is cool for more than just its odd beauty: it was thought to be a young galaxy, but it turns out to have some very old stars in it. It is also 59 million light years away; the observations making this image showed it to be 10 million light years farther away than previously thought.

HAWK-1 and the Stellar Cocoon

This image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile is very cool, showing dust and gas in a star-forming region. I discussed it in depth in an earlier blog entry. It’s nice, but not quite what I was looking for for my Top Ten. Still… cool.

I love whimsical pictures, too, and this one kills me. The effort that went into it must have been phenomenal; the Moon is actually very small in a camera, and I would think that if the tripod had even been bumped slightly it would have totally screwed this image up. Not to mention the timing! Wow.

Spitzer maps a distant planet

In 1995, the first planet was discovered orbiting a sun-like star. We’ve come a long way: well over 200 have now been found; one has been directly imaged, and some have even had their atmosphere detected! This image is the very first temperature map ever made of an exoplanet, in this case HD 189733b, which orbits its star so closely that it is extremely hot. Spitzer can detect that heat, and as the planet orbits its star we see different aspects of it. By mapping the amount of heat detected very carefully over time, astronomers were able to create this temperature map of the planet. The hot spot is the part of the planet that permanently faces the star (where it’s always high noon), and fierce winds distribute that heat around the rest of the planet.

Mapping Dark Matter

It is no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most important maps ever made: a three-dimensional layout of dark matter in the Universe. Dark matter is invisible, but for decades has been known to exist. An extraordinary series of observations led to astronomers being able to map out its location in the Universe. Distance increases to the right, and, since we see more distant objects as they were in the past, we are actually getting a timeline of the cosmos. Note how the dark matter is smoother back when the Universe was young; over billions of years it has fragmented and aided the development of the galaxies and clusters we see today. This was an incredible confirmation of dark matter science and theory!

Spitzer Helix

The Helix Nebula is a favorite: it’s a planetary nebula, a cloud of gas created when a dying star sheds its outer layers, which expand outward in dramatic fashion. Spitzer Space Telescope captured this incredible view of it. It’s possible the Sun will look like this in a few billion years, when it runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core and starts its final paroxysms… though some current reading I have done indicates the Sun won’t be bright enough to light up the gas. It will still blow off its envelope, but the gas won’t be lit up in this way. Too bad, I suppose; aliens viewing our eventual demise won’t get such a pretty show.

Earthrise, Earthset

The US and Russia are no longer the only countries to have sent probes to the Moon, Japan now belongs to this exclusive club (as do India and China as well). The Japanese orbiter Kaguya captured this incredible series of images as the Earth appeared to set over the limb of the Moon. It doesn’t look real! But don’t tell Bart Sibrel.

Home

Does this count as astronomy? Maybe. But after traveling millions of light years across the Universe, sometimes the best sight of all is the approach of home.

And there you go. Next year, well, we’ll see. Making the Top Ten cut is so hard I may very well expand the list. If you are an amateur astronomer — or a pro — better get cracking! Obviously, the competition is fierce. But I’m already looking forward to seeing what will rise over the horizon in 2008.

Space.com : Most Amazing Space Discoveries of 2007

2007-12-27T15:20:00.000+05:30

From revealing to just plain odd, vote for your favorite.
Read More

Space.com : The Enduring Mysteries of Comets

2007-12-25T11:31:00.000+05:30

By Charles Q. Choi
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 24 December 2007
06:45 am ET

For millennia, comets were believed to be omens of doom. Instead, solving the mysteries regarding these "dirty snowballs" could help reveal the part they played in the birth of life on Earth, as well as secrets concerning the rest of the galaxy.

Did comets help create Earth's seas?

For years scientists thought comets slamming against the newborn Earth helped deliver water to a once dry planet. But roughly a decade ago this view was shaken by the discovery that the water in comets and Earth's oceans did not match up in terms of hydrogen isotopes.

Calculations then showed it was highly improbable that enough icy rocks from the suspected homes of comets — the Kuiper belt past Neptune and the Oort cloud past that — could have collided with Earth to supply its oceans.

In the last two years, however, researchers have discovered comets in the outer part of the asteroid belt. These "main-belt comets" may have the right levels of hydrogen isotopes, and are perhaps close enough to Earth to have realistically brought us the seas that life emerged from.

"No one knows for certain yet where Earth's oceans came from," said University of Hawaii astrophysicist David Jewitt. "Earth's oceans are likely a mixture of water from all sorts of places, but the main-belt comets are very likely one of them."

Where do comets come from?

The suspected homes of comets include the Oort cloud, the Kuiper belt and now the asteroid belt. But are there more reservoirs of comets yet to be found?

The Oort cloud is a theoretical cloud of icy rocks roughly 4.6 trillion miles (7.5 trillion kilometers) from the sun thought to be the source of long-period comets — that is, ones that take more than a few centuries to complete their orbits. It was once thought the original home of short-period comets as well, until calculations suggested that was impossible.

About 20 years ago, the Kuiper belt roughly 4.6 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) from the sun was then proposed to be the home of short-period comets. "But measurements taken in the last few years raise some doubts about that," Jewitt explained. "Maybe there are other reservoirs of comets yet to be discovered."

Secrets regarding the birth of the solar system?

Comets were long thought to be primordial relics, pristine leftovers from the protoplanetary disk that once surrounded the newborn sun. As such, it was supposed they might hold secrets untouched for billions of years regarding the birth of our solar system.

Increasingly, however, it looks as if the comets we see are anything but unspoiled. Instead, "there is good evidence that many of them are nearly burned-out hulks, with neither the size, mass, shape nor spin they might have had before entering the solar system," Jewitt said.

Still, "since comets are icy, they're not entirely cooked, and we may learn a lot regarding the formation of the solar system from chemicals trapped in their ice," he added.

Comets so close to the sun?

The main-belt comets are themselves a mystery. Until their discovery, researchers had largely supposed no comets could have lasted that close to the sun without getting baked away after a few centuries or millennia.

Dirt coatings on main-belt comets could have protected them from sunlight for billions of years. Every now and again boulders a yard or larger tumbling around the asteroid belt might hit these comets, uncovering their ice and triggering the plumes of gas and dust that got them discovered in the first place.

"We expect to soon find many hundreds or thousands of main-belt comets," Jewitt said.

Interstellar comets?

As our solar system formed, calculations predict the gravitational pull of the planets would have scattered 90 to 99 percent of all comets that once orbited the sun away toward the stars, never to be seen again. "If every star does that, you would expect some of their comets to come toward us, but no such object has ever been seen," Jewitt said.

Still, as astronomical telescopes and techniques improve, Jewitt remains optimistic that such interstellar comets will be detected fairly soon. These comets would prove quite distinctive, zipping at great speeds and following trajectories completely unlike the orbits our comets follow.

"We could see interstellar comets for the first time in the next few years," Jewitt predicted. "It would be great if we saw one, especially so if we had the wherewithal to launch a mission to one, to get samples and study the diversity of comets in an interstellar and galactic context. But we have to find one first."

Space.com : Galaxy Blasts Neighbor with Deadly Jet

2007-12-20T12:08:00.000+05:30

By Dave Mosher
Staff Writer
posted: 17 December 2007
01:26 pm ET

This story was updated at 1:42 p.m. ET.

For the first time astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy.

The "death star galaxy," as NASA astronomers called it, could obliterate the atmospheres of planets but also trigger the birth of stars in the wake of its destructive beam. Fortunately, the cosmic violence is a safe distance from our own neck of the cosmos.

"We've seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we've seen one punch into another galaxy like we're seeing here," said Dan Evans, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling."

Evans and his colleagues detail their findings in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Cosmic death

The deadly galaxy — the largest of two in a system known as 3C321 — is aiming the high-energy jet from its center at a smaller galaxy 20,000 light-years away from it, or roughly the distance from Earth to the Milky Way's core. Both galaxies are situated about 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth.

A bright spot in a NASA composite image reveals that the beam is striking the edge of the smaller galaxy, deflecting the spindle of energy into intergalactic space. While not a direct hit, astronomers said the consequences are frightening.

"This is a fascinating result, and we can be glad that we're seeing it from a safe distance," said Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who did not contribute to the study. "Knowing how lethal the radiation from the jet could be, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near its line of fire."

Jets from supermassive black holes produce tremendous radiation in the form of X-rays, gamma rays and electrons traveling close to the speed of light. Evans said, however, that the X-ray and gamma-ray photons would ultimately do the most damage to planets.

"The photons can have a really dramatic, profound effect on a planetary atmosphere," he said. "It's likely the ozone layer on an Earth-like planet would be destroyed within months."

Without an ozone layer to protect a planet from deadly space radiation, Tyson said creatures on a planet's surface would perish quickly.

"You would basically render extinct all surface forms of life," Tyson said. "But it may be that subterranean life is ... immune to this kind of violence in the universe."

Recent attack

The offending galaxy probably began assaulting its companion about 1 million years ago, which is relatively recent on a cosmic time scale. Evans said the unusual event makes 3C321 an important object for learning more about the universe.

"We've seen jets do pretty weird things to their environments, but a head-on collision is really rare and generates a [large] amount of information about physics that we can understand and use," Evans said. "For that galaxy to be looking right down ... the barrel of the gun of that jet is incredibly rare, so this makes it a really exciting discovery."

Turns out that the "death ray" may not be all bad news for the victimized galaxy, at least theoretically, as such a massive influx of energy and radiation could help form new stars and solar systems by compressing gases.

"In the end [3C321] may be the source of new life in that distant galaxy," said Martin Hardcastle, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom. Hardcastle explained that the jet will continue to pour out of its parent supermassive black hole for about 10 to 100 million longer — plenty of time to squeeze otherwise inert gas together into new star systems.

"Jets can be highly disruptive ... but [create] stellar nurseries," Tyson said. "It's a fascinating sort of duality about how these high-energy phenomena influence the environments in which they're embedded."

To fully view the galactic violence and rebirth, astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory, Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, and the Very Large Array and MERLIN radio telescopes on Earth.

Space.com : Water vs. Land: NASA Weighs Landing Options for Orion Spacecraft

2007-12-20T11:43:00.000+05:30

By Brian Berger
Space News Staff Writer
posted: 19 December 2007
7:00 a.m. ET

NASA expects to decide sometime in 2008 whether the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the agency's space shuttle replacement, will typically splash down off the California coast or touch down on dry land when it returns from space.

Time is of the essence because the choice will determine a number of other design decisions that need to be made between now and a scheduled review in September, NASA officials say.

It is a decision NASA officials have likened to choosing the shape of the space shuttle's wings or the International Space Station's orbit. As might be expected in cases where the long-term consequences of a decision are not always obvious, NASA is not of one mind on the Orion landing question.

"The simple answer is we have not picked a landing mode for Orion yet. Both options are still on the table as we head into the coming year," Rick Gilbrech, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems told reporters Dec. 10.

For the better part of the past two years, NASA had been leaning heavily toward dry landings for Orion. That approach was endorsed in the landmark Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) that NASA Administrator Mike Griffin commissioned upon his arrival in 2005 to kick the agency's return-to-the-Moon planning into high gear.

The ESAS embraced dry landings in the Western United States "for ease and minimal cost of recovery, post-landing safety and reusability of the spacecraft." While the ESAS planners wanted Orion to be capable of making water landings if necessary, they reasoned that "a vehicle designed for a primary land-landing mode can more easily be made into a primary water lander than the reverse situation."

Subsequent studies by Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which NASA picked in mid-2006 as the Orion prime contractor, also favored having the crewed capsule touch down on land for similar reasons. In submitting its winning proposal to build Orion, Lockheed Martin left the landing option open and won praise from NASA for an innovative airbags-and-retro-rockets solution that kept land-landings on the table without imposing a significant weight penalty on the spacecraft design.

But by the time NASA gave permission this fall to begin Orion's detailed preliminary design phase, the assumption was that Orion would routinely land in water with only a contingency capability to touch down on land.

Jeff Hanley, program manager of NASA's Constellation Program, which includes Orion and other hardware needed to return astronauts to the moon, said the team has made a strong case that landing in water offers safety and performance advantages over land landings.

"There are a couple of aspects that pop out to us," he told reporters during the Dec. 10 media roundtable. "Looking at the landing event itself -- the event of actually touching down -- water comes out to be preferable. And that kind of makes sense.

"Now when you add in the risk of what happens after landing, if you've nominally landed on land in a place you intended to land, then obviously getting out of the capsule is a lot easier and a lot safer," Hanley continued. But from a broader safety perspective, water landing still came out the winner because the landing event itself, he said, is "the riskiest part of doing crew return."

When the Constellation Program looked at how the various landing options affected Orion's performance for lunar missions, water landing again came out the winner.

"Every pound you send toward the moon is a precious thing ... from an efficiency point of view -- a performance point of view -- carrying 1,500 pounds (680 kilograms) of landing bags to the moon and back when I have a perfectly viable mode of landing in the water near a U.S. coastal site didn't seem like a good trade in terms of its performance," Hanley said.

For an Orion team under the gun to shed weight from its spacecraft design, the 680 kilograms of airbags the vehicle would have to carry to enable routine land landings proved a fat target.

"That's a pretty big amount in terms of the mass challenge that the Orion team was facing last summer," Hanley said. "That 1,500 pounds represents quite a bit of the amount that they were trying to burn down."

No panacea

Land-landing advocates inside NASA argue that the added weight is worth it if it means the difference between using each Orion capsule up to 10 times instead of throwing it away after every mission. By treating Orion as expendable, they argue, NASA could find itself spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually keeping production lines open. That money, they say, would be better spent establishing a robust presence on the moon.

"It's the difference between going to the moon to stay and making one two-week trip a year," one such advocate said.

Gilbrech said the Constellation Program is being asked to assess the long-term cost implications of a water- versus a land-landing scheme. A key factor in the analysis is the cost of maintaining a permanent Orion production capability versus building enough vehicles and spares to last 30 years and then shutting down the assembly lines.

"That's one of the knobs we've asked them to go back and turn is keeping the production line open longer depending on how reusable you make the spacecraft," Gilbrech said. "That's one of the things we want to hone in on in some of these trades."

Hanley said the analysis will test the assumption that touching down on dry land offers the greatest reusability and the lowest cost. "Landing on land is not a panacea in any sense of the imagination," he said. "There have been a lot of assumptions made assuming that landing on land is going to be better. There are a lot of people in the technical community who don't buy into that."

For example, NASA still does not fully understand the loads Orion would experience in a land landing versus a water landing, Hanley said. And while a lengthy stay in salt water certainly is not good for anything as sensitive as a spacecraft, advances in navigation and positioning since the Apollo program bode well for rapid recovery efforts.

"In a nominal water landing, how long does the capsule stay in the water? If we have a fairly rapid recovery, where the recovery ship would be pulling the spacecraft out of the water very, very quickly -- assuming with our targeted landing capability we are going to land very close to the recovery ship -- then maybe most of the spacecraft is reusable in a water landing case," Hanley said. "We don't know."

NASA has learned a thing or two about recovery at sea since Apollo, Hanley said.

"The philosophy the Orion team has adopted is to have a targeted landing zone off the coast of California with one or two recovery vessels," Hanley said. "We've got a couple of recovery vessels for the [space shuttle solid-rocket boosters] today off the coast of Florida, so that is not an infrastructure cost we don't understand at this point, since we have been in that mode for 30 years with the space shuttle."

While a quick recovery would bode well for reusing a capsule that splashed down in the ocean, Hanley said he still has questions about just how much reusability is desirable from a cost perspective.

"The life-cycle cost trade between the two is not at all clear," he said. "We have a lot of battle scars, if you will, from re-using space shuttle. We need to go really interrogate that."

With Orion's preliminary design review slated for September, Hanley said it is necessary to lock down something as basic as the landing mode so that the vehicle's various design teams can do their job.

James Reuther, project manager for advanced development of Orion's heat shield at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., agreed. He said the water versus land question does not make much difference for Orion's ablative main heat shield since it is a single-use system either way. But he said it does make a difference for Orion's back shell, whose current design relies on space shuttle-heritage ceramic tiles for thermal protection.

"There are those in the community who say if you stick a tile in water, forget about it. You are never going to reuse it," he said. Others, he said, simply do not think the tiles are worth saving under any circumstances and favor treating them as expendables by mounting them on easy-to-change detachable panels instead of directly onto the capsule's rigid hull.

Reuther said thermal protection system designers also are expecting a decision from the program in the coming weeks on whether Orion will jettison its main heat shield before landing or keep it in place through touchdown.

For a dry landing, the assumption has been that Orion would jettison its heat shield in order to deploy the airbags and retro-rockets necessary for a soft touchdown. But if land landing is only going to be used in the event of a launch-abort situation, Reuther said, big airbags and retro rockets might not be necessary.

Small airbags probably still would require Orion to jettison its heat shield. But if Orion engineers decide that parachutes and retro-rockets alone can guarantee a safe touchdown in the event of an abort situation that shoots the capsule back over land, Reuther said it is possible to design a heat shield where the retro rockets would be able to blow through the shielding and bring the crew down to a safe, if somewhat rough, landing.

What is important at this stage of the game, Reuther said, is that the program freeze some design assumptions so that subsystem teams can continue to move forward.

Hanley said that while Constellation is assuming a water landing for now, it has not closed the door on land landing.

"By the time we get done looking at what that minimal capability would be to land on land safely and have the crew walk away, we will see what the design looks like then," Hanley said. "And if the design is in fact robust enough that we could in fact return to having nominal land landing then we will make that choice at that time. We are allowing that to now fight its way back in."

As for the cost estimates the Constellation Program has come up with for reuse versus expendable, and land versus water, Hanley declined to comment.

"As far as the specific cost numbers, I'm not going to share them because I don't believe them," he said.

ESA : Efficiency of satellite telecommunications for civil protection agencies

2007-12-19T22:53:00.000+05:30

17 December 2007
Enhancing interoperability during European civil protection operations is the objective of an ESA project named Decision. In the context of this project, field trials were held in Chartres, France, focusing on satellite solutions to improve cooperation between civil protection agencies in crisis theatres - whether they occur in Europe or outside.

The 'Decision' (DEvelopment of CIvil protection Satellite communication services: enhancing Interoperability during deployments Outside Europe - also referred to as 'Multinational Telecoms Adaptor') Project aims to increase the efficiency of co-operation between different national civil protection units working within the same foreign crisis theatre, and between members of national teams.

The demonstration covered two intervention scenarios. The first focused on a national situation where an industrial disaster has occurred and, as a consequence, the terrestrial communications infrastructure has been destroyed. In this instance, telecommunications satellite links are used to support coordination between the command post in the field and the regional crisis operations centre.

The second scenario dealt with an intervention outside Europe (such as an earthquake or a tsunami) involving a number of different civil protection agencies. For international disasters, rescue activity coordination needs to be performed between units in the field, as well as between national centres in Europe. In such a situation, telecommunications satellites are needed so as to ensure, on the one hand, communications between field units and, on the other hand, between those units and their national centres.

The Chartres trial allowed the validation of the satellite multi-adaptor use concepts that are applicable both in a national and an international context. It also helped to assess the added value of the multi-adaptor in a joint operation by different civil protection agencies working within the same foreign crisis theatre.

The involvement of civil protection agencies as end users is of primary importance since, by its nature, the project has a user-need oriented approach rather than a technology-push one.

The field trial was conducted with a cooperative spirit and a complementary contribution, through which fruitful results and end-user feedback were collected. This will lead to the definition of new perspectives and extensions of the current work.

The results truly demonstrated the need for adapted tools such as the Multi-Service Adaptor Communication Facilities, and some tracking facilities. These technical assets can ease the work of agencies in case of emergencies and also show the importance of developing interoperability solutions adapted to in-the-field needs and constraints.

The field trial benefited of the attendance and involvement of the French authorities and the French Civil Protection Agency (Direction de la Défense et de la Sécurité Civiles - DDSC), the German Technical Relief Agency (Technisches Hilfswerk - THW), the Belgian Civil Protection Agency, and the Austrian Civil Protection Support Unit.

Funded by ESA, the Decision consortium is composed of Infoterra France, the project lead, TRADIA Spain, Astrium Satellites France, EADS Secure Networks France and Skysoft of Portugal.

In the civil protection field, ESA's activities are now focused on drawing together the views and expertise of all European civil protection agencies, to define their requirements and assist them in federating and articulating their demand for satellite services. To this end, the European Commission and ESA have set up a tailored work plan for promoting satellite-based services of direct benefit to European civil protection agencies. The demonstration held in Chartres was a key milestone in this strategic, user-driven effort.

ESA : ESA and EC take major step forward in GMES

2007-12-19T22:48:00.000+05:30

19 December 2007

ESA and the European Commission have signed a €48 million grant that will allow the space agency to ensure the coordinated and timely supply of satellite-based Earth Observation data for the preoperational phase of GMES from 2008 to 2010. The signing of the grant marks the first real cooperation between the two in the GMES framework.

The GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme is a European Union-led initiative in partnership with ESA to combine ground- and space-based observations to develop an integrated environmental monitoring capability.

ESA’s role within GMES is to coordinate and implement the dedicated GMES Space Component, which involves developing the five Sentinel satellites, and Ground Segment and to coordinate data access to the Sentinels and to other missions mainly from ESA Member States which contribute to fulfilling of the GMES requirements.

Following the signing of the GMES Space Component Data Access (GSC-DA) grant, European Commission (EC) Vice-President Günter Verheugen, who is responsible for enterprise and industry policy, said: "Globally, changes in environmental conditions lead to increased risks for economical, social and political stability, which further affect European security."

“Coordinated, comprehensive and sustained global monitoring of the Earth system is one of the key factors to respond to this challenge. GMES is the European solution for the needs of citizens in Europe to access reliable information on the status of their environment."

Dr Volker Liebig, Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programme, signed the agreement on behalf of ESA. "The data access grant is the first step of a wider GMES cooperation with the EC, using ESA's 30 years of experience in collecting and distributing necessary Earth Observation data to users," Liebig said.

The data access grant will support the GMES services, which today include three fast-track services focusing on land, marine and emergency, two pilot service projects focusing on security and atmospheric composition, as well as downstream and other public GMES-related services.

The data access grant considers the EO data needs from the GMES services and covers the analysis of the services requirements, the negotiation of data access agreements with contributing missions, as well as the development and pre-operations of coordinating functions linking EO data providers with service providers.

Under the grant, ESA will coordinate the data provision activities from the EO contributing missions and will act as Data Provider for its own missions as well as its Third Party Missions.

ESA : ESOC 40th anniversary event marks history, emotion, future

2007-12-19T22:41:00.000+05:30


ESOC retirees gather for the on-stage finale

19 December 2007
ESOC's 40th anniversary event on 18 December included history, emotion and expansion for the future as past and present personnel joined guests from across Europe's space community to celebrate.

The event showcased 40 years of successful spacecraft operations at ESOC, and was attended by over 1200 current and retired ESA staff and contractors and guests from Darmstadt, the Hessen region, Germany and numerous ESA Member States.

The highlight of the evening was a rousing on-stage performance including some 50 retirees representing, collectively, many centuries of operations experience and expertise.


	41-year-vetran Siegmar Pallaschke recounting ESOC's early days

Senior guests support ESOC

The event was hosted by Gaele Winters, ESA's Director of Operations and Infrastructure and Head of the ESOC establishment, who, together with Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA's Director General, welcomed Dr Joachim Würmeling, Administrative Secretary of State in the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and Roland Koch, the Prime Minister of the State of Hessen.

Prof. Dr Johann-Dietrich Wörner, Chairman of the Executive Board of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Walter Hoffmann, Lord Mayor of the City of Darmstadt rounded out the senior invitees, all of whom gave addresses strongly endorsing ESOC as Europe's and Germany's 'Gateway to space'.

The evening included ESA's Space Show, a fantastic virtual voyage through our solar system highlighting space 'made in Europe' and featuring images, multimedia and science results from numerous ESA missions - most of which were controlled from ESOC.

With an eye to the future, the evening also included the signing of the formal agreement to expand the ESOC establishment through a grant of land provided by the government of Germany.

Universe Today : Galactic Black Hole Fires a Jet at a Nearby Neighbour

2007-12-19T16:50:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

Ouch, that's going to leave a mark. A new photograph captured by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows a powerful jet blasting out of one galaxy, and colliding with another. As the jet tears through the galaxy, it could have serious implications for planetary formation, and trigger a wave of new star formation.

The image contains two galaxies, collectively known as 3C321, in orbit around one another. X-ray images from Chandra show that they both have supermassive black holes at their centres.

The black hole in the larger galaxy is actively feeding, and has an enormous jet of radiation and material blasting out into space. Unfortunately, the smaller galaxy has gotten caught right in the crossfire of this jet.

"We've seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we've seen one punch into another galaxy like we're seeing here," said Dan Evans, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leader of the study. "This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling."

So what kinds of problems? For starters, the jet has a tremendous amount of radiation, especially high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays. An ongoing blast of this radiation could strip away planetary atmospheres and blow away newly forming stellar nurseries. In other cases, the jet could cause a cloud of gas and dust to collapse in the first place, setting the stage for new star formation.

Since the two galaxies are only 20,000 light years apart - the same distance of the Solar System to the middle of the Milky Way - the effect of the jet will be extreme. One bright part of the image shows where the jet is colliding with the galaxy, and then getting disrupted and deflected away.

This event is probably very short-lived. Astronomers estimate that the jet only began impacting the galaxy about a million years ago; a blink of the eye in cosmological terms.

Original Source: Chandra News Release

ESA : Final preparations for first human-rated spacecraft to be lauched from Europe's Spaceport

2007-12-19T16:30:00.000+05:30


Two halves of the ATV are mated ready for launch

18 December 2007
For the first time in 40 years of space activities, a silent revolution is taking place at the European launch site in Kourou. Jules Verne, the first human-rated spacecraft to be launched from Europe's Spaceport, is being prepared for launch.

The 48 m³ pressurised module of the largest, most complex automated spacecraft ever developed in Europe has been inspected and closed, fulfilling the most stringent rules of human spaceflight.

Three days later, the two halves of the 20-tonne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) – the avionics/propulsion module and the pressurised cargo carrier – were mated ready for its launch, scheduled for February 2008, to re-supply the International Space Station (ISS).

“In order to eliminate any risk of disease or contamination for the astronauts on board the ISS, we have disinfected all the surfaces inside the pressurised module with pure hydrogen peroxide. Even if it is launched unmanned, ‘Jules Verne’ respects all the human spacecraft safety requirements. This also applies to the 7 tonnes of cargo carried into orbit”, said Patrice Amadieu, ESA’s ATV Deputy Project Manager.


	Loading dry cargo into Jules Verne ATV

Over five days, the interior of the cabin has been first disinfected, filled with approximately 1300 kg of ‘dry cargo’ such as food (500 kg), clothing (80 kg) and spare parts, and then disinfected a second time. Afterwards, experts from ESA, NASA and the world-famous Institut Pasteur’s laboratory, through its branch in French Guiana, have taken surface samples inside the ATV cabin for bacteriological analysis.

“Before closing the aft rear door of the pressurised module [through which the cargo has been loaded], we inspected one last time the entire cabin to be sure that everything was secured for the launch and safely placed where the ISS crew will expect the different items to be. After working for seven years on the programme, it was a special feeling to be the last person inside Jules Verne before it is launched into orbit”, said Charlotte Beskow, ESA engineer in charge of on-orbit crew operations.


Antoine Stevens (left) and Pierre Rebeyre (right) have taken water samples

Tanking of ‘Russian’ water

Last week, with the technical support of Thales Alenia Space in Turin and flown in from Italy, the ATV’s tanks were filled with about 268 litres of drinking water for the ISS astronauts. This is the municipal water of Turin (Italy) that has been treated according to Russian standards. Once in orbit, the water will be transferred via hoses to small portable containers or to the main tank on the Russian Service Module, where ‘Jules Verne’ will be docked for up to four months.

“It took about five hours to tank the water on board. The fact that for the first time drinking water will be carried into orbit by a European cargo spaceship for the ISS crew brings a great sense of satisfaction”, said Pierre Rebeyre, ESA expert for water quality control and Life Support System Development.


	Two halves of the ATV are mated ready for launch

The ATV can deliver to the ISS water either in compliance with the standards of NASA or with those of the Russian State Space Agency Roscosmos, but the ISS partners have decided Jules Verne will only bring the Russian water type.

Roscosmos standards call for water with certain amounts of minerals, such as calcium, magnesium and fluoride, and disinfection with silver obtained via electrolysis. By contrast, the NASA potable standard requires water with a low dry residue, such as the one produced through reverse electrolysis process by fuel cells on board the NASA Space Shuttle, and disinfection with iodine.


Closing the ATV's pressurised module

Synthetic air inside the cabin

Once the ATV's pressurised module is closed and sealed, its air can be purged and replaced by pure synthesised air. The main purpose of this operation is to ensure that the astronauts breathe clean air, free from particles, bacteria or microbes and unaffected by off-gassing from the several tonnes of cargo.

Off-gassing poses a serious concern in space because cargo objects emit odours and odourless gases that can endanger the cabin environment. Because no windows can be opened in space, the climate of the ISS and space vehicles are delicately checked and balanced. The air inside the pressurised module will be regularly analysed until launch by ESA, NASA and Institut Pasteur experts to be sure that cargo off-gassing will not alter the quality of the air brought into orbit and then mixed with the Space Station atmosphere.

Final steps

Implementing a work schedule of two eight-hour shifts and sometimes three shifts for six days a week, the ATV campaign, which started in early August, solved all technical issues. The two major pieces of the ATV, a pressurised payload unit and an avionics/propulsion unit, were carefully ‘mated’ for the last time in one piece on 15 December in the Spaceport's giant integration hall. In this final launch configuration, the ATV is the size of a double-decker London bus.

As the year 2008 approaches, Jules Verne ATV will be transferred to the filling area in the restricted propellant zone of building S5-B. In the first days of February, the cargo vessel will be transferred to a different site for integration atop a special Ariane 5 launcher. The launch and maiden voyage to the International Space Station is scheduled on the first Ariane 5 flight of the new year in February 2008.

ESA : Christmas greetings from Venus – with a new educational film

2007-12-19T16:08:00.000+05:30

‘A breath of Venus’ - an educational film

18 December 2007
What is the link between Earth and Venus? Find out with this new educational film, where scientists walk you to enchanting places on Earth to unveil the secrets of Venus.


	A breath of Venus

The film consists of four chapters. In the first and main chapter, ‘A breath of Venus’, two scientists climb atop one of the most famous active volcanoes on Earth. From the island of Vulcano, Italy, the scientists talk about Venus’ impressive green-house effect, give glimpses of how volcanism may work at Venus as compared to Earth, and illustrate the principles used for such investigations on other planets.

The three additional chapters of the film bring our attention to other fascinating aspects of Venus exploration – all addressed relentlessly by ESA’s Venus Express.


A story of Deuterium and Hydrogen

From a sandy beach in the Netherlands, ‘A story of Deuterium and Hydrogen’ takes us through the story of the fate of water on Venus. Did Venus host oceans in the past? If yes, where has this water gone now?


	A question of temperature

In ‘A question of temperature’, a scientist climbs an apple tree and tells us how to calculate the global temperature of a planet. He talks about why planetary temperatures are important for the overall climate balance, related to the green-house effect - the phenomenon at work on both Earth and Venus.


A look at operations

‘A look at operations’ unveils the secrets behind spacecraft operations, and tells us about the complex job engineers perform as they translate scientific objectives into commands for the Venus Express spacecraft.

Click on any of the images in this article to go to the download page.

ESA and Venus Express take this chance to wish you a merry Christmas. Enjoy watching!

Universe Today : Enceladus: Cold Moon With a Hot Spot

2007-12-19T16:02:00.000+05:30

Written by Nancy Atkinson

Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus is a cold and icy place. But somehow, there’s enough heat being generated on Enceladus’ south pole to eject plumes of ice and vapor high above the moon. These plumes are extremely intriguing to the Cassini mission scientists and they want to know more about this hot spot on a very cold moon. In fact, Enceladus has become a major priority for study by the Cassini team and they are anticipating learning more about the moon in an upcoming fly-by.

The temperature at Enceladus' south pole is about -220 degrees Celsius, but the hot spot is at least 100 degrees warmer. The leading model for the cause of the plumes on Enceladus is that the moon’s tides cause its crust to ratchet, or rub back and forth, in a set of faults near the south pole. The forces between Enceladus, the big planet Saturn and another moon, Dione cause what’s called dynamical resonance, and Enceladus is continually squeezed under this gravity field. This process creates a small hot spot, in relative terms, for an icy satellite.

Cassini has actually flown through the plumes, giving scientists a glimpse of the plume’s make up.

“The plume particles are like smoke, ice smoke, “said William B. McKinnon, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “If you were standing on Enceladus’ surface you wouldn’t even be able to see the plumes. The particles are just larger than the wavelength of light, about one-thousandths of a millimeter. Most icy bodies of this size are geologically inert, but this is a clear indication of geological activity. Cassini has found active venting of water vapor. This leads to scientifically intriguing speculations and questions.”

The scientists are pondering if Enceladus has active ice volcanism, and if so, is it due to ice sublimating, like a comet, or due to a different mechanism, like boiling water as in Old Faithful at Yellowstone. Even though there may be water on the moon, McKinnon doesn’t believe there is the possibility of life on Enceladus. This is because measurements made from Earth don’t indicate there is enough sodium present in the plumes to warrant the “life” question. “The emerging view is that there’s not obvious evidence for a subterranean ocean in contact with rock, no boiling or venting,” said McKinnon.

The Cassini science team has made Enceladus a major priority and there will be seven additional close fly-bys of the moon by the spacecraft through mid-2010 (provided the mission is extended to that period.) The next fly-by will be on March 8, 2008 and Cassini will approach Enceladus at an incredibly close 25 km in altitude at the low latitudes and fly over the south pole at 580 km altitude. The spacecraft will actually fly through the plumes and should be able to take high-phase images of the plumes, map the temperatures of that region, search for any activity at other latitudes as well as image other interesting features on Enceladus, such as “tiger-stripe” –like fissures found near the south pole.

“We still can’t say how truly ‘hot’ the hot spots are,” said McKinnon. “We’ll probably learn this in March.”

Original News Source: Washington University Press Release

Universe Today : Mars at its Closest Approach

2007-12-19T16:00:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

Okay, now you can tell your friends and family that Mars is making its closest approach, and not August like that annual hoax email that goes around. This image of Mars, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, was captured when the planet was only 88 million km (55 million miles) away from Earth. Their closest point occurs on December 18th at 1145 UTC (6:45 p.m. EST).

This close encounter between the Earth and Mars happens every 26 months. That's because Earth makes more than two orbits for every one Martian trip around the Sun. As the Earth catches up with Mars in orbit, the planet brightens in our skies until it becomes one of the brightest objects we can see.

Since both Earth and Mars have elliptical orbits, the point of their closest approach changes from year to year. Back in 2003, when that closest approach between Earth and Mars actually happened, the two planets were 32 million km closer (20 million miles) than today. (Of course, Mars never looked as large as the Moon in the sky, it was always just a bright red star.)

The image attached to this story was made up of a series of photographs captured by Hubble over the last 36 hours. They were then stitched together on computer to make up this composite photograph.

The large triangular dark shape on Mars is Syrtis Major, and the region on the left is called Sinus Meridani. That's roughly where NASA's Opportunity rover is currently rolling across the Martian landscape.

When Hubble took this photograph, the planet was largely free of the dust storms that plagued the Mars rovers earlier this year. Although, you can see clouds near the northern and southern poles.

Original Source: Hubble News Release

Universe Today : Mysterious Explosion Comes Out of Nowhere

2007-12-19T15:57:00.000+05:30

Written by Fraser Cain

When astronomers find a gamma ray burst, they can usually locate the culprit's home galaxy. But in the case of an explosion that went off earlier this year, there's no galaxy to be found - even with the most powerful telescopes on Earth.

The gamma ray burst GRB 070125 was first detected on January 26th, 2007 by NASA's Swift telescope in the constellation Gemini. One of the brightest bursts of the year, astronomers scrambled to observe the explosion and then the slowly fading afterglow.

Gamma ray bursts occur when a massive star runs out of fuel. Without the light pressure, the star collapses inward on itself, turning into a black hole. This newly formed black hole spins at an enormous rate, generating enormous magnetic fields. These fields catch infalling material and spew it out again into powerful jets. And it's those jets where the burst comes from.

One of the normal activities in observing GRBs is the identify the host galaxy so that astronomers can measure its distance. It's also important to know what kind of galaxy the burst exploded within to better understand the kinds of environments can lead to these massive stars.

In the case of GRB 070125, though, no originating galaxy was obvious. Astronomers from Caltech/Penn State used the 60-inch Palomar Observatory to watch the afterglow, and then called in the even larger Gemini North and Keck 1 telescopes, located on Hawaii's Mauna Kea.

Even with the power of Keck, they couldn't find a galaxy.

So how could you get a gamma ray burst without a galaxy? Astronomers know that colliding galaxies can throw off enormous tidal tails that stretch away for hundreds of thousands of light-years. The original star could have been within one of these tidal tails, many light-years away from its parent galaxy.

If their theory is correct, a long duration exposure from the Hubble Space Telescope should reveal the dim tidal tail.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Space.com : Spacewalkers Inspect Space Station's Solar Wing Joints

2007-12-19T15:42:00.000+05:30

By Tariq Malik
Staff Writer
posted: 18 December 2007
12:51 p.m. ET

This story was updated at 3:00 p.m. EST.

Two spacewalking astronauts took a close look at a pair of balky solar array joints outside the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday to help engineers on Earth draw up repair plans.

Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Dan Tani found widespread contamination inside a massive gear that rotates both of the station's starboard solar arrays, but no sign of damage to a joint at the base of one of those solar wings, during nearly seven hours of orbital work.

"Hopefully we got a good amount of data for the folks on the ground," said Tani, who led the spacewalk, after the reentering station's Quest airlock.

Whitson and Tani began Tuesday's spacewalk at 4:50 a.m. EST (0950 GMT), marking the fourth for their Expedition 16 mission. The excursion was initially scheduled as an extra spacewalk during NASA's STS-122 mission aboard the shuttle Atlantis, but the flight's planned December launch was thwarted twice by faulty fuel tank sensors.

As the Expedition 16 crew worked in orbit high above Earth, engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida fueled Atlantis' external tank to test the erratic sensors. Shuttle workers hoped to recreate, and then isolate, persistent glitches with the fuel gauge-like sensors in order to proceed with Atlantis' rescheduled Jan. 10 launch.

Fact-finding inspection

Whitson and Tani focused most of their spacewalk on a massive gear designed to rotate the station's starboard solar arrays like a paddlewheel to keep its power-generating wings continuously facing the sun.

Engineers will use the astronauts' findings as a reference for any plans to repair the joint's bearings, motors and metal race ring. Solving the station's solar array joint woes is vital to allow the outpost to support the addition of a large Japanese-built laboratory and other modules, mission managers have said.

"We didn't find anything that stood out," said NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffredini after the spacewalk. "It would be really nice if something stood out and said, 'Hey, I'm the cause of your problem,' and we didn't get that. But we do know more about the condition of the ring."

Tani first discovered metal grit inside the joint, known as a Solar Alpha Rotary Joint (SARJ), during a late October spacewalk after flight controllers noticed odd vibrations and power spikes in the mechanism's telemetry. A second inspection by spacewalkers last month confirmed the contamination, which Tani and Whitson found to be widely distributed around the 10-foot (3-meter) wide joint during today's excursion.

"You can see the motion of the gear because the debris is kind of walking across the housing," said Tani, adding that magnetized metal shavings appeared to walk end-over-end on one of the SARJ motors. "It's hilarious...it's animated, like they're alive. They're like ants."

The spacewalkers retrieved a suspect set of bearings, one of 12 on the joint, which may be responsible for the contamination. They also used orange Kapton tape to take samples of the metal grit and clean the SARJ gear's damaged metal race ring.

"I am getting almost all of the debris off," Whitson said. "It seems less splotchy."

Using a mirror, Tani and Whitson looked inside the SARJ gear to find that two sides of its three-sided race ring were untouched by damage, boosting hopes that engineers can find a way to continue using the joint in short spurts while continuing to study the glitch.

"If we can figure out to live with this, maybe roll on it for awhile when we have to...it gives us more time to figure out root cause and figure out what the real issue is," Suffredini said. By taking that extra time, engineers could determine whether a major switch to a backup race ring, which could potentially take up to four spacewalks and be performed during a fall 2008 space station mission, will be required, he added.

Tuesday's spacewalk marked the 100th outside the ISS and the 23rd this year alone, tying the all-time record for excursions in a single year. The spacewalk was the fifth career outing for both Tani and Whitson, who set a new world record during the outing for the most spacewalking time for a female astronaut.

"Congratulations, there is no pressure now because you are the queen of EVA," Mission Control told Whitson, using NASA's abbreviation for extravehicular activities.

"It's just being in the right place at the right time," replied Whitson, who is the space station's first female commander and beat NASA astronaut Sunita Williams' benchmark of 29 hours and 17 minutes to nab the title.

Hunting for damage

In addition to their SARJ joint inspection, the spacewalkers also surveyed cables and other hardware for a beta gimbal joint that swivels one of the station's starboard solar wings on a different axis from the SARJ. The joint suffered triple electrical failures on Dec. 8, prompting concerns on Earth of a possible micrometeorite strike.

"Everything I can see is nominal," Tani said. "There is no damage, no frays that I can see."

Despite her bulky NASA spacesuit, Whitson squeezed herself inside the station's backbone-like truss to reach the gimbal joint's power cables. Mission controllers warned her that it would be a tight fit, prompting a laugh from the spacewalker.

"Does this [spacesuit] make me look fat," she joked.

Space station managers said they are now confident that the gimbal joint's glitch lies in its motor box. A spare for the unit is aboard the ISS and Tani is trained to replace the motor.

Whitson ended Tuesday's spacewalk with 32 hours and 36 minutes of spacewalking time under her belt across five career excursions. Tani, meanwhile, ended with 32 hours and one minute as he concluded his fifth career spacewalk.

Space.com : Missing Matter Caught in Tangled Cosmic Webs

2007-12-11T23:20:00.001+05:30

By SPACE.com Staff

posted: 10 December 2007
06:33 am ET

Cosmologists are always complaining about their inability to find the dark matter in the universe, invisible stuff that's supposedly more prevalent than regular matter. They don't even know what it is, so of course they can't see it.

Meantime, a whole bunch of normal matter is missing, too.

A new computer model at least suggests where some of that missing normal matter might be.

Regular vs. dark

Regular matter—the "visible" atoms and molecules of dirt, people, stars, gas and dust—makes up only about 5 percent of the universe. Scientists call it baryonic matter, or baryons.

Dark matter is the term used to describe the invisible stuff that's holding galaxies together. Some 25 percent of the universe is dark matter, and it's all missing in action. The rest is even more mysterious, a sort of anti-gravity force called dark energy.

While scientists have no clue when they'll actually find dark matter, they'd really like to square the cosmic ledger a bit by tallying up all the regular matter that theory holds should exist. Only about 40 percent of it is in the books yet.

The rest, according to the new simulation, is gas that's caught in a tangled web of cosmic filaments that are hundreds of millions of light-years long. The filaments connect clusters of galaxies, and the gas within the filaments is hidden by huge gas clouds.

This conclusion is based on a new computer model that took nearly 10 years to make. It models a region of space equal to 2.5 percent of the visible universe and showed how matter collapsed due to gravity and became dense enough to form the cosmic filaments, galaxy structures and the clouds that hide the filaments.

"We see this as a real breakthrough in terms of technology and in scientific advancement," said Jack Burns of the University of Colorado at Boulder. "We believe this effort brings us a significant step closer to understanding the fundamental constituents of the universe."

The research will be detailed in the Dec. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Let's look

Burns predicts that future telescopes will be able to spot the filaments.

The 10-meter South Pole Telescope in Antarctica and the 25-meter Cornell-Caltech Atacama Telescope, or CCAT, being built in Chile's Atacama Desert, will aim to do so, Burns said.

The CCAT telescope will observe radiation in sub-millimeter wavelengths, which are longer than infrared waves but shorter than radio waves. It will probe galaxies in their infancy shortly after the universe was born.

"We think that as we begin to see these filaments and understand their nature, we will learn more about the missing baryons in the universe," Burns said.

HubbleSite : Hubble Finds that Extrasolar Planet Has a Hazy Sunset

2007-12-11T23:17:00.001+05:30

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A team of astronomers, led by Frederic Pont from the Geneva University Observatory in Switzerland, has detected for the first time strong evidence of hazes in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star. The new Hubble Space Telescope observations were made as the extrasolar planet, dubbed HD 189733b, passed in front of its parent star in an eclipse. As the light from the star briefly passes through the exoplanet's atmosphere, the gases in the atmosphere stamp their unique spectral fingerprints on the starlight. Where the scientists had expected to see the fingerprints of sodium and potassium, there were none; implying that high-level hazes (with an altitude of nearly 2,000 miles) are responsible for blocking the light from these elements.