History > 2008 > USA > Space (I)

The Keepers of the Moon

July 8, 2008
The New York Times
By GUY GUGLIOTTA

HOUSTON — In the lab, the Moon rocks look nondescript — dark gray basalt, a whitish mineral called anorthosite and mixtures of the two with crystals thrown in. Yet nearly 40 years after the Apollo astronauts brought the first rocks back to Earth, these pieces of the Moon are still providing scientists with new secrets from another world.

“We call this one the ‘genesis’ rock, because it was formed close to the time the Moon solidified about 4.5 billion years ago,” said Carlton C. Allen, pointing to a light-colored stone about the size and shape of a large artist’s eraser, resting inside a glove box filled with inert nitrogen gas.

“We know the Big Bang happened about 14.5 billion years ago,” Mr. Allen said, “and this rock is a third that old. You will never see a solid piece of stuff in our solar system that is any older.”

Mr. Allen is the astromaterials curator at the Johnson Space Center, home of the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility, a secure repository opened in 1979 to house 842 pounds of Moon rocks and soil collected by astronauts in six visits.

The rocks on the lunar surface, lying virtually unchanged in a weatherless vacuum since their formation, offer opportunities to investigate the origin and evolution of the solar system available nowhere else, and the study deepens with each new generation of scientists and scientific instruments.

Each year an independent peer review panel evaluates new research proposals, and curators mail out about 400 lunar samples to 40 to 50 scientists worldwide. Almost all are less than one gram in size. “We don’t hand them out, we only loan them,” Mr. Allen said. “We’re not planning to run out any time soon.”

Over the years, the samples have provided uncounted insights into the nature of our closest celestial neighbor. Because of the samples, we have learned when the Moon was formed, probably (although it is still controversial) the result of a planetoid smashing into the young Earth, throwing a cloud of debris into space that subsequently came together in a sphere.

The samples have confirmed that asteroid and meteor impacts, not volcanism, created the vast majority of craters that define the Moon’s topography, while a constant barrage of meteorites, micrometeorites and radiation melted and pureed the bedrock to create the blanket of fine-grained soil and dust — known as regolith — that now cloaks the lunar surface.

And knowing the ages of Moon rocks, which can be computed to within 20 million years, has enabled scientists to establish a baseline that allows them to date geologic features throughout the solar system. The surface of the Earth, one of the solar system’s youngest topographies, is constantly changing, as it is faulted, folded, shaped and reshaped by eruptions, earthquakes and erosion. By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets.

“It’s hard to wrap your mind around a place where nothing ever happens,” Mr. Allen said. “But the Moon is that place.”

In recent years the rocks have also helped researchers to answer practical questions that have emerged since President Bush’s 2004 proposal to return to the Moon by 2020 and set up a permanent outpost. Planners are using the rocks to study the pernicious effects of regolith on machinery and astronaut health. They are learning how to extract oxygen and other vital elements from lunar rocks and soil. And they need to understand how to shield living spaces from the deadly radiation that eternally pounds the lunar surface.

The samples — 2,200 of them — are kept in nitrogen-filled boxes in a stainless steel vault on the second floor of the 14,000-square-foot repository, and are transferred to other parts of the lab in airlocks. Technicians prepare shipments in glove boxes containing sterile tools and containers.

The samples are numbered and sorted by expedition. All of the Apollo landings, beginning with Apollo 11’s historic mission in 1969 and ending with Apollo 17 in December 1972, were at equatorial sites, but terrain differed each time and the samples reflect the differences. The genesis rock was collected by Apollo 15 astronauts near Hadley Rille at the border between a lowland “sea,” or mare, and the lunar highlands.

The arrival of the first Moon rocks in 1969 was eagerly anticipated by scientists. “We had no idea what the Moon was made of,” Mr. Allen recalled, and the first two decades of research focused on basic questions — the age and composition of the Moon rocks and the origin and evolution of the Moon’s geology and salient topographical features.

The early Moon developed as a mostly liquid ball of magma covered with a thin crust of lighter minerals. The crust became the white anorthosite, which floated atop the magma to form the lunar highlands. The basalt erupted later and subsequently solidified in the lowland maria.

The anorthosite and similar rock types in the highlands and basalt lavas in the maria are the Moon’s basic building blocks. Other rocks are breccias — crushed and broken rock fragments, fused by the heat from impact collisions and ejected from the resulting crater.

Researchers saw that the highlands had more craters than the maria. This meant they had been hit with more impacts so the highland rocks were relatively older. But once they had the rocks in hand, they could determine their absolute age in years.

This enabled them to make a template that could work anywhere in the solar system. The Moon showed that a site with rocks of a certain age would have a predictable number of craters of different sizes. And since the rate of impacts was presumably similar throughout the solar system, the lunar dates could be used as a benchmark to estimate the age of surfaces elsewhere.

“This was a key thing, that impact was a significant and fundamental phenomenon that affected not only the Moon and planets, but life itself,” said the planetary geologist Paul D. Spudis, of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “We had known that impacts occurred, but until the rocks, we had viewed them as a geological oddity.”

No longer. In the early 1980s, scientists were able to show that terrestrial mineral and crystal deposits 65 million years old were similar to those found routinely in lunar ejecta. This led to the now widely accepted theory that the consequences of an asteroid impact had wiped out the dinosaurs.

Lunar scientists now suspect this insight may have further implications. Analysis of the lunar samples and impact craters has shown that the Moon’s surface was solid 4.3 billion years ago, yet the oldest impact rocks among the samples are 3.9 billion years old.

Some researchers have suggested that impacts on the moon began to taper off 4.3 billion years ago, only to resume with a vengeance in a “cataclysm” 400 million years later. And if the cataclysm affected the Moon, it also affected the Earth — at a time when life was just beginning.

“This is very controversial,” said Charles Shearer, a lunar scientist at the University of New Mexico and the chairman of the lunar lab’s peer review committee. “It’s probably important to sample other terrains.”

This is part of the lure of Mr. Bush’s lunar initiative, which calls for a base near the South Pole and exploration of the Moon’s entire surface, including the far side. These possibilities, Mr. Allen said, “have the scientific community really jazzed.”

But not everyone. “It is very difficult to justify the Moon as a primary goal for human spaceflight — there’s not enough new to find out,” said Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and a critic of renewed lunar exploration. “If we want a challenge, Mars is it. Are you really going to inspire the youth of today by repeating the technological feats of their grandparents?”

One of these “grandparents” is a University of Tennessee lunar geologist, Lawrence A. Taylor, 70, an expert on regolith. He has developed ways to extract oxygen from the lunar dust, and, based on the knowledge that regolith contains metallic iron, he patented a method of microwaving the soil to transform it into a glass that can be used as a hard surface for spacecraft landings and takeoffs or for roads.

Mr. Taylor has also developed a way to “vacuum” iron particles from lunar dust using a tube filled with electromagnets. And he is on NASA committees advising medical doctors on astronaut health and engineers on lunar habitat.

“People have started calling on me right and left,” Mr. Taylor said. “For years people contacted me mainly out of curiosity, but now I’m in the limelight.”

The Keepers of the Moon, NYT, 8.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/science/space/08moon.html

NASA craft finds evidence of ice

on Mars surface

Fri Jun 20, 2008
11:04am EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists working on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission are reporting what they call compelling evidence that the robot craft has found ice while digging on the Martian surface.

NASA is expected to give details on the discovery during a news conference on Friday.

The small science probe landed safely last month on a frozen desert at the Martian north pole to search for water and assess conditions for sustaining life.

Small chunks of bright material described as the size of dice have disappeared from inside a trench where they were photographed by the craft earlier this week, NASA said in a statement late on Thursday.

This has convinced scientists the chunks were ice -- frozen water -- that vaporized after digging exposed it, NASA said.

"It must be ice," said mission principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days. That is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

The presence of water on Mars is a hot topic for scientists. They have presented strong evidence in recent years of huge deposits of frozen water at the Martian poles and point to geological features that indicate that large bodies of water have flowed on the planet's surface in the distant past.

Water is a key to the question of whether life, even in the form of mere microbes, has ever existed on Mars. On Earth, water is a necessary ingredient for life.

The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench dubbed "Dodo-Goldilocks" when Phoenix's robotic arm enlarged that trench on June 15. Several chunks were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench again on Thursday, NASA said.

The U.S. space agency also said that the lander, digging in a different trench, used its robotic arm to connect with a hard surface that has scientists believing they have found an icy layer on the Martian surface.

The $420 million lander spent 10 months journeying from Earth to Mars.

(Reporting by Will Dunham, editing by Chris Baltimore)

    NASA craft finds evidence of ice on Mars surface, R, 20.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2045326920080620

Shuttle Returns Safely

After a 14-Day Mission

June 15, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The shuttle Discovery rolled to a stop here on Saturday morning, bringing a 14-day mission to the International Space Station to a close.

When the shuttle passed over the space center, it produced its distinctive double sonic boom, as if sounding a brief fanfare for landing. The shuttle could be glimpsed, tiny and white through brilliant skies with scattered clouds. It banked around and glided steeply toward the runway, touching down on the 15,000-foot landing strip at 11:15 a.m.

The mission was devoted to further construction of the $100 billion space station, including the delivery of the $1 billion main module of a Japanese laboratory known as Kibo, or Hope.

The module, a silver can roughly the size of a tour bus, is the second component of the three-part laboratory to arrive at the station. During the mission, three spacewalks and extensive use of robotic arms on the station and the shuttle got the module out of the shuttle’s payload bay and attached to the station.

A smaller Kibo module that arrived in March was moved from its temporary storage position to the top of the main Kibo module.

The seven-member crew also delivered replacement parts for the station’s single toilet, which had been malfunctioning for a week before the shuttle arrived. Although the problem was potentially serious, the crew treated it with good humor. After the shuttle docked with the station, Cmdr. Mark E. Kelly of the Navy, the mission commander, joked, “You looking for a plumber?”

Much of the mission was also spent examining the rotary joints that keep the station’s enormous solar panels facing the sun. Mission managers noticed last year that the joint on the right side of the station was producing unusual vibrations, and spacewalkers found damage and metal shavings in its works. The joint has been largely parked since then.

Mission managers say they still do not know what caused the damage, but a spacewalk demonstration of cleaning techniques during this mission gave them confidence that they can replace bearings, clean up the shavings and lubricate the joint. The work could begin with a flight scheduled for November.

Cmdr. Kenneth T. Ham of the Navy was the pilot for the mission, the 123rd in the history of the shuttle program. The other crew members were Col. Michael E. Fossum of the Air Force Reserve, Karen L. Nyberg, Col. Ronald J. Garan Jr. of the Air Force and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Discovery brought Garrett E. Reisman home from the station, where he had lived since March, and left his replacement, Gregory E. Chamitoff.

Mr. Reisman, surprisingly, participated in the traditional walk-around inspection of the shuttle and a news conference, despite having just returned from three months without gravity. In a news briefing late in the afternoon, Mr. Reisman, who is 5 feet 4 inches tall, said short astronauts tended to recover more quickly than taller ones. “I’m happy that that’s finally come in handy for something other than limbo contests,” he said.

At an earlier news briefing, William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said, “I can’t think of a mission that’s really been much better than this one.”

Colonel Fossum, at the crew’s news conference, said there was “a great feeling of accomplishment for all of us” to pull away from the station and see it 70 percent complete.

“For this last two weeks, it was our time to play our part in the big play,” Colonel Fossum said. “And you know, we knocked it out of the park and had a great mission.”

Ten missions are scheduled before the shuttle program is wound down in 2010. The next one, in October, will be a flight to perform work on the Hubble Space Telescope.

    Shuttle Returns Safely After a 14-Day Mission, NYT, 15.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/science/space/15shuttle.html

Discovery Heads Back to Earth

June 12, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

The space shuttle Discovery pulled away from the International Space Station early Wednesday as the 123rd mission of the shuttle fleet headed toward a close.

Cmdr. Mark E. Kelly of the Navy, the shuttle commander, radioed to the ground that he and the crew hoped they had left behind “a better, more capable space station than when we arrived.”

Members of the shuttle crew conducted a final inspection of the spacecraft’s heat shield before it takes on the punishing heat of re-entry. Mission managers said informally that they had seen nothing of concern during the mission, but that the analysis would not be complete until Thursday evening.

The shuttle is scheduled to land as early as Saturday at 11:15 a.m. Eastern time, though problems like rain, low clouds over the landing strip or high winds can cause mission managers to delay landing or put it off to a second day.

The mission has been devoted to further construction of the $100 billion space station. Discovery delivered the $1 billion main module of the Japanese laboratory known as Kibo, or Hope. The lab — a cylinder about the size of a tour bus — is the second component of the three-part lab to arrive at the station; a smaller storage module containing equipment for the lab came up on the previous shuttle mission in March. Another section that will expose experiments to space will be delivered on a future mission.

The construction work was overshadowed by a more urgent problem aboard the station: the need to repair the single toilet, which had been malfunctioning for a week before the shuttle arrived. The replacement parts carried by the shuttle did the trick, however, and the construction work took center stage.

Three spacewalks and extensive use of the station and shuttle’s robotic arms got the new Kibo module out of the shuttle’s payload bay and attached to the station. The first part of the module was also moved from its temporary storage position to the top of the main Kibo module.

The mission also introduced a new mystery to the space station team: a buildup of grease and what looked like dust on one of the two large rotary joints that keep the station’s solar arrays facing the sun.

Col. Michael E. Fossum of the Air Force Reserve made the discovery on the left-side joint during a spacewalk. In a news conference from the station on Tuesday, Colonel Fossum said that the grease was not entirely unexpected, and that the particles did not appear to be a problem — “just a little bit of dust, maybe kind of like the dust you have on your brakes,” he said.

The joint on the right side of the station has been stilled for the most part since last year, when damage and metal shavings were detected in its works. Mission managers said on Wednesday that they still did not know what caused the damage, but hoped to replace the large bearings that allow the joint to roll, clean up the shavings and lubricate the joint in a flight scheduled to begin in November.

During the mission, Colonel Fossum tested methods for cleaning and lubricating the damaged right-side rotary joint. His tests showed that cleaning the 10-foot-diameter ring was feasible, but “that’s going to be a big job,” he said.

    Discovery Heads Back to Earth, NYT, 12.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/science/space/12shuttle.html

50 Years of NASA’s Home Movies

June 6, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

ABOUT midway through “When We Left Earth,” a sweeping new video history of the American space program, the former NASA flight director Eugene F. Kranz looks into the camera with an intensity that is almost frightening.

“The power of space was to raise our aspirations to those things that are possible,” he says, “if we will commit.”

He punches each of those last four words, so it comes out “If. We. Will. Commit!”

Those four words lay out the underlying argument of the six hours of a NASA documentary that goes far beyond recounting history, and which begins on Sunday at 9 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times, on the Discovery Channel.

Mr. Kranz is not just making a statement. He’s asking a question — will we commit? — and issuing a challenge: Well?

Mr. Kranz, who was the famous flight director on the nearly tragic Apollo 13 mission — Ed Harris played him in the 1995 movie “Apollo 13” — has still got the flattop. He’s still wearing a flashy vest, just like the ones he wore for missions stretching from the initial Mercury program to today’s space shuttle. But he’s decades older than that kid in the pictures from the early days.

So is the space program.

The future is 50 years old.

Last October marked a half-century since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the be-beeping, silvery ball that transformed science fiction to science fact. The next year the United States government pooled aerospace research resources under a new agency: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

So NASA has reached the half-century mark, and the Discovery Channel has set out to tell the tale. This, however, is not just another recap of the parts everybody knows: the hell-for-leather attempt to catch up with the Soviets’ first satellite and then chasing their countryman into space in 1961; President John F. Kennedy’s stunning pledge, just a few weeks after Alan Shepard’s flight, that “before this decade is out” America would put a man on the Moon; Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for a man,” and the famous flags and footprints and lunar buggies and rocks.

Mr. Shepard and Mr. Armstrong get their due, of course, but so does the long-ignored Gemini program — the essential middle step between the original Mercury flights and the Apollo missions that laid so much of the groundwork for reaching the Moon. And there is Skylab, the first American space station and the subject of an audacious rescue effort after damage during ascent threatened to render it useless.

And the series devotes hours to the current space program. Two episodes focus on the space shuttle, NASA’s attempt to make space travel routine, which for many people made it dull.

Kathryn Sullivan, a former astronaut who flew three shuttle missions, including the one that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, and who appears in the film, applauded the broader focus of the series in a telephone interview this week. She suggested that the breadth might be a function of the big, round anniversary itself. Maybe, she said, “given that your target and your assignment is 50, you found yourself discovering that the program didn’t end in ’73; you found meaning and purpose and significance to events that occurred in ‘spaceflight as Southwest Airlines.’ ”

Like many gadget-happy Americans, NASA took lots and lots of home movies. For this series it threw open the doors of its film and video archives, which have been transferred to stunning high-definition format.

The resulting episodes have the vividness of a dream: here are images many of us have seen all of our lives, but instead of showing up in grainy black and white or in still photographs in magazines, there is vivid color and motion showing moments like the first American space walk by the astronaut Ed White.

“This is utterly not just seeing it again,” Ms. Sullivan said.

The NASA videographers didn’t just focus on the hero shots. There are the Ban-Lon shirts and the ashtrays in mission control, and the tense, pensive faces of people waiting to find out if it’s a bad day. As mission controllers wait to hear if the crew of Apollo 13 has survived the fiery entry through the Earth’s atmosphere, the camera focuses on a pair of hands, with the fingers working a telephone cord as if it were a rosary.

The quality of the video and the very human touches “took our breath away” said Dan Parry, the head of research on the project, in an interview last week. “They’re not always wearing silver suits. Sometimes they’re hanging out on the beach,” he said. “It turns out that astronauts are people after all.”

Bill Howard, the executive producer on the series, said in an interview that the hundreds of hours of archival footage turned out to be “what amounts to dailies from an action movie shoot.” The series shapes a narrative around then-and-now intercutting of old footage of astronauts and mission managers, with voice-over narration by the actor Gary Sinise, who played the astronaut Ken Mattingly in “Apollo 13,” that stitches things together.

Mr. Armstrong, in a rare interview for the series, describes his descent to the lunar surface as his fuel supply dwindled. And there is an ebullient Alan Bean, who went to the moon on the second flight, and who says, “When you’re an astronaut, you buy into a lot of risk,” and “If you can’t buy into it, don’t be an astronaut.”

John Young, the astronaut whose career spanned the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, is chilling in a scene that leads up to the loss of the shuttle Columbia. The ship and its crew were doomed by a chunk of lightweight insulating foam that punched a hole in a wing during ascent, which allowed superheated gases into that wing during re-entry. “They told me you could hit the wing leading edge with a baseball bat, and you wouldn’t hurt it,” he said. “They weren’t exactly telling me the truth,” he deadpans, and then allows a chuckle and an infinitesimal quantum of smile.

Will the series find an audience? Mr. Howard said a generation gap was the biggest challenge. “One of the things we knew from the beginning of this: anyone under 40 doesn’t know” much about the Moon landings. “Anyone over 40 knows it like the back of their hand because they lived through it.”

Along with the drama of the Discovery programs and the overwrought musical score and the sometimes-portentous narration by Mr. Sinise is, always, the message of the series: Human space exploration is worthwhile, even necessary. While critics of the manned space program argue that robots outstrip the abilities of humans for less cost and risk, the film puts forward Edward Weiler, the former chief scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope program.

The telescope was famously flawed upon its initial deployment and had to be repaired in orbit through a bold shuttle mission that involved five spacewalks of unprecedented complexity. “I can say unequivocally that if it wasn’t for the human space program, Hubble would be a piece of orbiting space junk,” he says.

NASA is now in the process of winding down the shuttle program; no flights are scheduled after 2010. What comes next, a new generation of spacecraft known as Constellation, will not be flying until 2015 at best. In the middle is a gap that will be filled by buying seats to the space station aboard the Russian Soyuz capsules. That period to come will test the nation’s commitment to spending the billions of dollars it takes to send humans into space and keep them safe from start to finish. It will test the notion that we need to send people into space at all.

These are topics worthy of a spirited national debate. And the Discovery Channel has put the argument on the table.

To paraphrase Mr. Kranz: Well?

    50 Years of NASA’s Home Movies, NYT, 6.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/arts/television/06eart.html

Mars Lander

Transmits Photos of Arctic Terrain

May 27, 2008
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

PASADENA, Calif. — The first pictures sent back by NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander from the northern arctic plains of Mars show a flat terrain marked by a polygonal pattern of shallow troughs and a few pebbles scattered about.

“I know it looks a little like a parking lot,” said Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, the mission’s principal investigator, at a news conference four hours after Phoenix’s landing on Sunday, “but it’s a safe place to land.”

But the monotonous landscape is not why Phoenix went to Mars. “I guarantee it. There’s ice under this surface,” Dr. Smith said. “It doesn’t look like it. You don’t see ice, but it’s down there.”

“Follow the water” has been NASA’s mantra for its Mars exploration for more than a decade. Phoenix will be the first space probe to directly touch Martian water when its robotic arm digs down to the ice layer, expected a few inches beneath the surface, and scoops up some for examination.

Phoenix reached its destination after a 422-million-mile journey that lasted almost 10 months.

During the final, tense minutes of the descent, long stretches of quiet in the mission control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were punctuated by cheers and clapping as confirmation of crucial events like the deployment of the parachute were confirmed.

Then, at 7:53 p.m. Eastern time, Richard Kornfeld, the lead communications officer for entry, descent and landing, announced: “Touchdown signal detected.”

The mission controllers, wearing identical blue polo shirts made for the occasion, erupted in cheers and began hugging one another in congratulations.

“It was better than we could have possibly wished for,” said Barry Goldstein, the project manager for the mission. “We rehearsed over and over again. We rehearsed all of the problems, and none of them occurred. It was perfect, just the way we designed it.”

At 9:53 p.m., there were more cheers as confirmation came that one more critical event, the unfolding of the solar arrays, had occurred without problem. And then the first pictures arrived: black-and-white images of the solar panels, of one of the lander’s footpads and of surrounding terrain, showing the polygonal fractures caused by repeated expansion and contraction of the underground ice.

The next few days will be spent checking the condition of the spacecraft. Then it will begin the first up-close investigation of Mars’s northern polar region. Instruments on the spacecraft include a small oven that will heat the scooped-up dirt and ice to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Analyzing the vapors will provide information on the minerals, and that will, in turn, provide clues about whether the ice ever melted and whether this region was habitable. The mission is to last three months, with the possibility of a two-month extension.

“We see Phoenix as a stepping stone to future investigations of Mars,” Dr. Smith said.

But Phoenix had to get to the surface first. Mission managers sent their last instructions to Phoenix around noon Eastern time on Sunday. From there, the spacecraft operated on autopilot all the way to the surface.

During the day Sunday, the pull of Mars’s gravity accelerated the spacecraft from 6,300 miles per hour to 12,700 m.p.h. when it entered the Martian atmosphere. The friction of the atmosphere slowed the craft down by 90 percent, then a parachute provided further drag. For the last kilometer down to the surface, 12 thrusters slowed Phoenix to a velocity of 5.4 m.p.h. before it bumped onto the surface.

Phoenix set down in a very flat spot, sitting at a tilt of about three-tenths of a degree.

The landing held an extra dose of anxiety, because Phoenix has the same basic design as NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, which crashed while landing near the south pole in 1999. The Phoenix spacecraft was originally going to go to Mars’s equatorial region as Mars Surveyor 2001, but after investigations of the Polar Lander failure turned up major flaws in the design, that mission was canceled and the almost complete Surveyor spacecraft was put into storage.

Dr. Smith proposed resurrecting the Surveyor spacecraft as Phoenix for a new mission. Testing identified more than a dozen flaws in the lander design, and mission managers believed they had fixed the problems.

NASA’s budget for Phoenix is $420 million, which includes testing and retrofitting the spacecraft, outfitting it with new instruments, launching and operating the mission. The Canadian Space Agency contributed $37 million for one of the instruments, a weather station. In addition, the development and construction of the original Surveyor 2001 spacecraft cost $100 million.

    Mars Lander Transmits Photos of Arctic Terrain, NYT, 27.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/science/space/27mars.html?hp

Shuttle Retirement

May Bring Loss of 8,600 Jobs,

NASA Says

April 2, 2008
The New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY

WASHINGTON, April 1 — Retiring the space shuttle in 2010 could result in the loss of 8,000 jobs among NASA contractors and 600 Civil Service workers at the agency, NASA said Tuesday.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, under orders from Congress, released its first estimates of job losses as it continued the transition from the shuttle program to the Constellation program. That program is developing a new generation of spacecraft and rockets to service the International Space Station and carry people to the Moon and, later, Mars.

NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, William H. Gerstenmaier, cautioned that the job losses might appear worse than they would end up. As the agency gears up for the Constellation program, Mr. Gerstenmaier said in a telephone news conference, a potentially large number of employees could transfer to new openings developing, building and operating Constellation spacecraft and rockets.

The Orion capsule, which could take astronauts to the space station and the Moon, is not scheduled to begin flights until 2015.

In addition, he said, some workers might go to private companies planning to support NASA’s space efforts commercially and others might choose to retire. About 25 percent of the contractor workforce is eligible for retirement, agency officials said.

Mr. Gerstenmaier cautioned that the estimates were preliminary and that people should not “overreact to these numbers.” It could take more than a year for the agency to develop more concrete job forecasts, he said.

Hardest hit would be the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., from which the shuttle fleet operates. It could lose 6,400 of its 8,000 contract workers by 2011. The Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, which makes the external fuel tanks for the shuttle, could lose 1,300 of 1,900 positions.

Representative Dave Weldon, a Florida Republican who was a co-sponsor of the bill calling for the report, said in a statement the “draconian” losses showed that the Bush administration’s space plan was inadequate and underfinanced, and needed to be revised.

    Shuttle Retirement May Bring Loss of 8,600 Jobs, NASA Says, NYT, 2.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/washington/02nasa.html

Space Shuttle

Completes 16-Day Mission, and Lands

March 26, 2008
The New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The space shuttle Endeavour returned safely to earth on Wednesday evening, completing a record-breaking 16-day mission to the International Space Station.

The shuttle landed at 8:39 p.m., roughly an hour after the shuttle’s commander, Capt. Dominic L. Gorie, fired twin braking rockets that brought the spacecraft out of orbit.

Mission managers canceled the day’s first landing opportunity, which would have brought the Endeavour to the runway at 7:05 p.m.; clouds threatened to obscure the site. After consulting with weather officers and Captain Gorie, however, the managers determined that conditions were improving by the time the second opportunity of the day came around and ordered Captain Gorie to bring the shuttle out of orbit and bring it and its crew of seven astronauts down to the 15,000-foot landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center.

“Good news,” Lt. Col. James P. Dutton of the Air Force, an astronaut in Mission Control, told the Endeavour’s crew shortly after 7 p.m. “You are ‘go’ for the de-orbit burn,” he said, referring to the rocket firing that brakes the shuttle out of orbit.

Captain Gorie had said the end of the long mission was bittersweet, but the crew and the shuttle were ready to return home. “The orbiter’s really been performing really marvelously this whole flight,” he said late Tuesday. “We don’t have any concerns at all about it.”

The crew includes Col. Gregory H. Johnson of the Air Force, the mission pilot; Richard M. Linnehan, a veterinarian; Capt. Michael J. Foreman of the Navy; Maj. Robert L. Behnken of the Air Force; and Takao Doi, a Japanese Space Agency astronaut.

The Endeavour also took up the astronaut Garrett E. Reisman, who stayed aboard the station for long-term duty, and returned with Gen. Léopold Eyharts of the French Air Force, a European Space agency astronaut who has lived aboard the station since last month to activate a new European science laboratory.

The shuttle’s mission was the longest flight to the station since construction of the multinational outpost began, and NASA officials said it accomplished all of its objectives.

“In my view, it’s been extraordinary in every way that I can think of,” said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the Endeavour’s mission management team. “It’s just been a textbook mission up and down the line.”

The shuttle delivered the first section of Japan’s large Kibo laboratory, an 18,500-pound storage compartment. The main laboratory, a unit the size of bus, is scheduled to arrive in May aboard the shuttle Discovery.

The Endeavour also ferried up a 12-foot, 3,400-pound Canadian Space Agency robot called Dextre, which is to perform maintenance outside the station and help spacewalking astronauts.

During 12 days at the station, the shuttle astronauts performed five spacewalks, a number previously seen only during Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. Three of the excursions were needed to assemble Dextre and the others to deploy experiments, examine a malfunctioning rotary joint on a truss holding solar power panels, and stow a long shuttle-inspection boom that the Discovery will retrieve and use on the next shuttle mission.

John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.

    Space Shuttle Completes 16-Day Mission, and Lands, NYT, 26.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/science/space/26cnd-shuttle.html?st=cse&sq=shuttle&scp=7

A Burst of Light From Halfway

to the Beginning of the Universe

March 21, 2008
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

How far can you see with your own eyes on a clear night? Would you believe seven billion light years?

Early Wednesday morning, a spot of light just barely visible to the human eye (about fifth magnitude in astronomical parlance) appeared in the constellation Bootës. Astronomers say it was the toasted remains of one of the most titanic examples yet of the explosions known as gamma-ray bursts. News about the burst, in a galaxy seven billion light years away, began circulating by e-mail in the astronomical community when it was detected by NASA’s Swift satellite on March 19.

Gamma ray bursts are some of the most violent and enigmatic events in nature. Astronomers surmise that they might mark the implosion of a massive star into a black hole, or the collision of a pair of dense neutron stars.

The visible glow from this burst, said Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was 10 million times as bright as a supernova at that same distance. The universe is some 14 billion years old, which means that the news of this cataclysm has been on its way to us for half the age of the universe. Whatever stars went to their grave then have been dead since before the Sun and Earth were born.

The burst, which has now been dubbed the “naked-eye burst” by astronomers, was one of four that day to be detected by Swift, which has been patrolling the heavens since 2004 for the invisible gamma rays streaming from these blasts and relaying information and precise coordinates to a worldwide network of observers and telescopes. Dr. Gehrels said it was the most intense burst that Swift had yet seen.

Alerted by Swift, a myriad of telescopes on the ground swung into action, some of them operating completely robotically, which as Dr. Gehrels noted, is convenient at an early morning hour. Among those recording and inspecting the burst was one of the giant eight-meter-diameter telescopes of the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal, in Chile. Spectral measurements of the glow’s redshift (the spectral shift due to motion away from us in the expanding universe) allowed the astronomers to estimate its surprisingly large distance.

That seven billion light years, astronomers say, would have been far and away the record for long-distance sight by the naked eye, at least in the present sky — had anybody seen it. So far, according to Dr. Gehrels, there is no report that anybody did. Within an hour, the glow had faded below the range of human visibility.

“It was an amazing burst, and we are having a lot of fun with it,” said Dr. Gehrels, who said that he and a large group of collaborators are preparing a quick report to submit to Nature.

    A Burst of Light From Halfway to the Beginning of the Universe, NYT, 21.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/science/space/21bangw.html

Stuff of Life (but Not Life Itself)

Is Detected on a Distant Planet

March 20, 2008
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Astronomers reported Wednesday that they had made the first detection of an organic molecule, methane, in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system and had confirmed the presence of water there, clearing the way for a bright future of inspecting the galaxy for livable planets, for the chemical stuff of life, or even for life itself.

Under the right conditions, water can combine with organic chemicals like methane to make amino acids, the building blocks of life as we know it. While the presence of these chemicals was not a big surprise and while the planet in question — in the constellation Vulpecula — is too hot and massive for living creatures, the result left astronomers elated at their improving powers of celestial discernment.

“The big news is that we were able to do this at all,” said Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the lead author of the study, being reported Thursday in the journal Nature. Other members of the team, which used the Hubble Space Telescope, were Gautam Vasisht of the propulsion lab and Giovanna Tinetti of University College London.

The work, they said, represents a shift from barely detecting the existence of so-called exoplanets to probing them chemically.

“We are able to start studying the conditions and chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres,” Dr. Swain said at a news conference on Wednesday. “That’s a very exciting development.”

David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not part of the team, called the detection “both persuasive and important.”

Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at M.I.T., called it “another great day for exoplanets,” and a “tipping point” for the study of their detailed properties, though she cautioned that the findings still needed to be duplicated.

“Hubble was never been designed to make measurements like this,” she said. “This is pushing the telescope to its limits.”

She said she was looking forward to the day when the experiment would be repeated on Earth-like planets with the much more powerful James Webb Space Telescope, set to be launched in 2013. In that case, she said, the existence of methane and water would be indicative that the planet was habitable.

The planet in question, known as HD 189733b, is definitely not a candidate abode for life. It is a suffocatingly hot ball about the mass of Jupiter orbiting only about 3 million miles from a star slightly smaller than the Sun. The temperature is a toasty 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Vulpecula planet was in the news a year ago after astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope tried and failed to find signs of water there and on another planet — a surprise since all the theoretical models predicted it should be there in abundance. But that was a year ago, a long time in the world of exoplanets, where an avalanche of data in the last decade has produced a series of milestones and some 270 new planets.

This planet, like every exoplanet discovered to date, is too dim and close to its parent star to be seen directly, but conveniently for astronomers it is one of a few dozen which passes directly in front of and behind its parent star in the course of an orbit, a geometrical quirk that Dr. Swain and his colleagues were able to exploit.

They watched with Hubble and an instrument known as Nicmos (for Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer) as the star slipped behind the planet and thus backlit its atmosphere. Gases in the planet’s atmosphere absorbed the starlight in a band of wavelengths characteristic of methane, causing dips in the combined spectrum of star and planet.

A similar dip also occurred at another band, characteristic of water vapor, resolving a controversy that had been simmering for the last year. Asked why the previous measurements had failed, Dr. Swain and others explained that the Spitzer measurements had been made during the opposite part of the cycle, when the planet goes behind its star and was thus being seen face on. From this angle, structural features in the atmosphere, like an inversion layer, could mask the presence of water.

Adam Burrows, a theorist from Princeton University, said, “A temperature inversion can change the spectrum of the atmosphere without changing its composition.” But all these planets, he continued, have to have water.

“If you don’t see it you have to have a really good reason you don’t,” he said.

Indeed, later last year, Dr. Tinetti used the Spitzer telescope to make crude spectral measurements of light coming through the planet’s atmosphere while it was eclipsing its sun and found evidence of water absorption. Dr. Swain said those measurements fitted perfectly with the abundance of water on the Vulpecula planet derived from his observations.

One lingering puzzle, he said, is why they did not detect carbon monoxide in the planet’s atmosphere. The models, he said, suggest that at high temperatures that molecule is more likely to form than methane, which predominates in colder regions.

Dr. Burrows, theorized, however, that if the planet was tidally locked — with one side always facing its sun and being roasted while the other faces away and freezes — “the hot side would have more carbon monoxide, the cold one more methane.”

During the transits observed by Hubble, he pointed out, the starlight passes through the dividing line, or terminator, between the hot side and the cold side, where fierce winds might be blowing redistributing heat and chemical species around the planet.

But nobody really knows how chemistry, climate and cosmic history are manifested on these planets. Dr. Swain said he hoped to perform similar measurements on a half dozen other so-called transiting planets that are within reach.

Dr. Burrows said, “A lot of other shoes are about to drop in this subject.”

But time is of the essence. Hubble will have four more years if its scheduled refurbishment by astronauts goes well this August, but the other warhorse of the effort, the Spitzer, has only a year to go before it runs out of the cryogenics that keep its infrared detectors cold and sensitive.

“People are frantic to get as much data as they can in short term,” Dr. Burrows said.

    Stuff of Life (but Not Life Itself) Is Detected on a Distant Planet, NYT, 20.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/science/space/20planetw.html

What a Star’s Orbiting Disk Is Made Of

March 13, 2008
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

The winking star has sand in its eye.

Back in 2002, astronomers from Wesleyan University concluded that a star brightening and waning in an unusual 48-day rhythm was dipping in and out of stuff swirling around the star in a so-called protoplanetary disk. At the time one astronomer called the system “a Rosetta stone,” for understanding how planets form.

Now, after six more years of observation with an international group of astronomers, led by William Herbst of Wesleyan, researchers say they know what the stuff in this disk is. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Nature, they report that it is made of sand-size grains, roughly a millimeter in diameter, which must have grown from infinitesimal dust particles over the three million years that the star, known as KH 15D, has been in existence.

“This is the first step in going from smoke particles to macroscopic things like planets and asteroids,” Dr. Herbst said in an interview, noting that these grains were about the same size as those found in many meteorites. Observing starlight reflected from these grains, he said, represented a rare opportunity to study the structure and chemical properties of material in the inner parts of another planetary system.

The discovery is part of what has become a flood of information lately as astronomers have turned increasingly powerful eyes, like the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and ground-based giants, on the putative planet nurseries surrounding other stars.

There are water and organic molecules in the inner regions of the disk around another young star known as AA Tauri — more good news for eventual life — according to spectroscopic measurements made with the Spitzer telescope by John S. Carr from the Naval Research Laboratory and Joan R. Najita from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., and reported in Friday’s issue of Science magazine.

The star KH 15D is about 2,400 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. Since its initial discovery, astronomers have deduced that it is actually two stars in orbit about each other, with one of them occasionally popping over the edge of the disk, which is inclined to the plane of the stars’ orbits and is slowly wobbling, into direct view. An animation of the system can be seen here.

Such disks are probably common, Dr. Herbst said, but the geometry of KH 15D is perfectly aligned from our point of view to use the star to probe the disk from different viewpoints. Astonishingly, he said, there seems to be no dust at all in KH 15D’s disk now. “It all condensed into sand and somewhat larger parts,” he explained, “but not so much that they started grinding each other up.”

    What a Star’s Orbiting Disk Is Made Of, NYT, 13.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/science/space/13winkw.html

Shuttle Is Carrying Laboratory

and Robot to Space Station

March 12, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

HOUSTON — The space shuttle Endeavour made its way toward the International Space Station on Tuesday after brightening the early morning skies in a launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Endeavour lifted off at 2:28 a.m. Eastern time. From the perspective of American time zones, the crew is working the night shift, waking in the afternoon and working until the next morning.

James Hartsfield, a spokesman for the Johnson Space Center, said that the work schedule for any mission is determined largely by the time of the launching, which is in turn determined by a complex set of factors that includes orbital mechanics.

Much of the crew’s second day — after being awakened at 4:29 p.m. by the jazzy piano of Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” — is devoted to checking the spacesuits that will be used in spacewalks during the mission, and to the meticulous examination of the delicate tiles and panels that make up the shuttle’s heat shield. The inspection is performed with the shuttle’s robotic arm and a special sensor boom that extends its reach.

The inspection is especially important on this mission because the night launching reduced the ability of the cameras to detect debris. Mission mangers informed the crew that one piece of debris was observed soaring by the shuttle’s right wing 83 seconds into the launching and apparently did not hit it. In addition, there was a possible impact with something, although at this point it is unclear what, 10 seconds after the liftoff.

Teams on the ground have been studying problems that cropped up during the climb to orbit: the failure of an equipment cooling system that is primarily used when the payload bay doors are closed during ascent and landing and a loss of some capability of the ground team to monitor the activity of the shuttle’s thrusters.

In a news conference on Tuesday morning, the leader of the mission management team, LeRoy Cain, said that neither issue was a serious problem.

The cooling system, the flash evaporator system, has a backup unit and either can do the job, Mr. Cain said. The problem has come up before, and the primary unit is likely to come back online before the end of the mission.

As for the thruster system, the problem affects only the use of a single small thruster, one of six used for fine-tuning propulsion. Specialists on the ground “have a work-around that they are verifying,” Mr. Hartsfield said.

The main goals of the mission are delivering part of a new Japanese science laboratory to the station and a two-armed robotic assistant named Dextre that will be able to take on some of the outside tasks that currently require a spacewalking human to perform. The mission includes five spacewalks to connect the module to the station and to assemble the robot, which was made in Canada.

The spacewalks will also be used to test a new tile repair technique and to inspect a damaged rotary joint that is designed to keep the solar panels that power the station facing the sun.

The commander for this mission is Dominic L. Gorie, a retired Navy captain, and the pilot is Col. Gregory H. Johnson of the Air Force. Other members of the crew are Richard M. Linnehan; Capt. Michael J. Foreman of the Navy; Maj. Robert L. Behnken of the Air Force; Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut; and Garrett E. Reisman, an astronaut who will be staying aboard the station for long-term duty. He will take the place of Gen. Léopold Eyharts, a French astronaut who has lived aboard the station since last month.
 

Endeavour is scheduled to dock with the space station on Wednesday.

    Shuttle Is Carrying Laboratory and Robot to Space Station, NYT, 12.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/science/space/12shuttle.html

Shuttle Launches on 16-Day Mission

March 11, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The shuttle Endeavour blazed a roaring trail into orbit as a spectacular night launch kicked off 16-day mission to the International Space Station.

The shuttle was launched at the conclusion of a countdown that seemed touched by good fortune: nearly perfect weather and none of the technical problems that can cause last-minute delays.

During the eight-and-a-half minute ascent, problems were announced over the communications loop with the shuttle’s reaction control system, which provides thrust for maneuvers, and the flash evaporator system, which helps cool equipment until the payload bay doors are opened on orbit. Neither problem, however, interfered with Endeavour’s climb to orbit.

In a press briefing an hour after the launching, LeRoy Cain, the head of the mission management team at Kennedy Space Center, called the two problems “very minor issues” that could be worked around without any impact on completion of the mission. Once Endeavour was on orbit, atronaut James P. Dutton called the crew from the ground to say that a first look at launching video showed a piece of debris came off the tank 83 seconds after liftoff, but appeared to “move past the right wing” without striking the craft. “There was no impact seen,” he said. In coming days, further inspection will determine whether any debris strikes occurred.

The shuttle will catch up with the station and dock just before midnight on Wednesday. The mission, the longest visit by a shuttle to the International Space Station, is packed with tasks for seven astronauts who are bringing the first part of a new Japanese laboratory, Kibo, to the station, as well as a gangly two-armed robot named Dextre.

With the arrival and installation of the first piece of Kibo, components from all of the major partners in the space station — the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan — will finally be joined in the orbital outpost. The Kibo module will be put in a temporary spot on the station until the main structure is carried to space and installed in the next shuttle mission in April.

Dextre, which was made in Canada and has the eerily anthropomorphic look of a robot from science fiction, was designed to do some of the external servicing jobs that humans perform today. It will work with the station’s robotic arm or ride on a mobile platform that runs along rails on the station’s trusses.

The mission includes five spacewalks that will be mostly devoted to the work on Kibo and Dextre. One of the spacewalks will be devoted to testing a zero-gravity goo gun that could be used to repair small areas of damage to the shuttle’s delicate heat-shedding tiles. The device was developed after the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003: the shuttle and crew were lost because insulating foam fell off of the fuel tank during ascent and damaged the craft.

NASA has expended tremendous effort since then to reduce the amount of foam shed by the tank, and minute inspection of the heat shield is now part of each mission. But the independent board that investigated the disaster recommended developing tile repair techniqes as well, and the “tile repair ablator dispenser” is one of the products that came out of that work. Mission managers wanted to perform that test before astronauts returned to the Hubble Space Telescope for a servicing mission later this year, since the shuttle would not be able to change course and reach the space station if if the tiles were damaged on ascent.

During this mission, crew members will also inspect a damaged rotary joint that is supposed to turn the station’s solar panels toward the sun through each orbit. Mission managers took the 10-foot-in-diameter joint out of commission last year after inspections showed the works were peppered with metal shavings — a sign of metal-on-metal grinding. The astronauts will examine the joint closely and will replace a bearing that was taken off for inspection on a previous flight.

NASA is still trying to determine how best to address that problem and get the joint rolling again so that the station can receive all the power that the system was designed to produce.

The commander for this mission is Dominic L. Gorie, a retired Navy captain, and the pilot is Col. Gregory H. Johnson of the Air Force. Other member of the crew include Richard M. Linnehan; Capt. Michael J. Foreman of the Navy; Maj. Robert L. Behnken of the Air Force; Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut; and Garrett E. Reisman, an astronaut who will be staying aboard the station for long-term duty. He will take the place of Gen. Léopold Eyharts, a French astronaut who has lived aboard the station since last month.

Shortly before launching, the shuttle launch director, Michael D. Leinbach, opened a channel to Captain Gorie and informed him that the team backed the decision to launch. “Good luck, godspeed and we’ll see you back here in 16 days,” he said.

“Well, Mike, you just made people smile around the world,” Captain Gorie responded, referring to the international participants in the station program, “and you’ve got seven smiling faces on board here.” He thanked the launch team and the crew’s families, spoke a few words of thanks in Japanese, and finished by saying, “God truly has blessed us with a beautiful night to launch, so let’s light em up and give ‘em a show.”

Lifting of on schedule at 2:28 a.m., the shuttle lit the night with a yellowish-orange glow, and quickly punched through a low cloud bank and flew out of sight.

    Shuttle Launches on 16-Day Mission, NYT, 11.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/science/space/11cnd-shuttle.html

Research Explains Formation

of Unique Martian Fans

February 21, 2008
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

To figure out an odd landscape feature on Mars, play in a big sandbox.

Enlist some high school students, too.

That’s what some scientists at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands did, and they believe they now know how sediment deposits spilling out of the mouth of some water channels on Mars were shaped in a series of terraces that look like terraced rice paddies.

But no similar natural formations have been seen in river deltas on Earth. Usually river sediments spill out in a smooth, sloping fan like the Mississippi delta.

Planetary geologists have been speculating about the terraced fans since they were first spotted by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor eight years ago. About 10 stepped fans have been identified, most at the base of a steep slope emptying into a basin like an impact crater. (Most of the 200 sediment fans seen on Mars do not have the stepped structure. Another mystery is why many of the river channels seem to have no sediment deposit at all.)

Some scientists suggested the terraced fans were the result of repeated shore erosion as a lake in the basin dried up. Others thought repeated landslides might have formed the steps.

The sandbox experiment, reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, supports a third notion. The terraces form by the interaction of the sediment flow with the water’s edge, which is rising as the basin fills.

“Where that’s happening, you’re getting a little lip,” said Erin R. Kraal, the lead author of the Nature paper. Pulses of flow and sediment produced multiple terraces. “They’re just stacking one atop the other,” she said.

While a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht, Dr. Kraal became intrigued by the terraced fans and mentioned them to her colleagues there. Utrecht has a set-up known as Eurotank, essentially a 16- by 40-foot sandbox for studying sedimentary dynamics.

High school students visiting the laboratory as part of an educational project saw the Mars pictures on the laboratory walls and were interested in helping on an experiment, which eventually turned into a short educational movie about the Martian fans.

The students dug a crater in the sandbox and shaped a water channel. Then they sent water down the channel — and the result was a terraced fan, just as on Mars.

“We didn’t expect it to be so successful the first time,” said Dr. Kraal, now a research scientist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. “We were really surprised they formed so quickly and so easily.”

Dr. Kraal and her colleagues, Maurits van Dijk, George Postma and Maarten G. Kleinhans later repeated the experiments more rigorously so they could correlate their sandbox results with the Martian terrain.

They estimate that the water necessary to form one of the Martian fans, which measure up to a dozen miles wide, would equal 10 years of Mississippi River flow. The whole structure appears to have formed in one event lasting perhaps tens of years, they said.

“It does look like she’s experimentally shown here that this type of deposit can form in a single event type of discharge,” said Rossman P. Irwin III, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institute’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies who has also studied the terraced fans. “It offers some good experimental support for a type of feature that is basically unique to Mars and really was not well understood.”

    Research Explains Formation of Unique Martian Fans, NYT, 21.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/science/space/21mars.html

Atlantis returns safely to Earth

20 February 2008
USA Today
By Traci Watson

Space shuttle Atlantis landed safely in Florida this morning, scrambling to leave orbit before the military tries to blast a failing spy satellite from the heavens.

The shuttle fired its tail thrusters at 7:59 a.m. ET to cut short its glide around the Earth and begin its dive through the atmosphere. It touched down at 9:07 a.m. ET after streaking over Central America, the Gulf of Mexico and Fort Myers, Fla.

Conditions at the shuttle's Florida runway were perfect. The rare combination of soft breezes, clear skies and sunshine ensured the shuttle would land in plenty of time for the Navy's attempt to use an anti-ballistic missile to shoot down the satellite, perhaps as early as this evening. The Pentagon said it would not target the satellite until the shuttle had returned.

"The weather's looking really nice still," astronaut Jim Dutton told the Atlantis crew from Mission Control just past 7:30 a.m. ET. "Atlantis, you're go for the deorbit burn."

"Great news," Atlantis pilot Alan Poindexter replied.

Atlantis delivers a crew of seven back to Earth. Six have spent the past 13 days in orbit, but one, astronaut Daniel Tani, has been gone four months aboard the International Space Station. Tani rode home lying in a special reclining seat in the shuttle's lower cabin, to ease his transition to Earth's gravity.

Tani said Tuesday that he was looking forward to spitting out his toothpaste rather than swallowing it and to eating a meal that didn't float away. He said he's also looking forward to seeing his wife and daughters, who are three and nearly two.

NASA is trumpeting Atlantis' mission as one of the smoothest and most successful in years. The crew installed the first European segment of the space station, which until then was entirely Russian- and U.S.-owned. The new room, a laboratory called Columbus, roughly doubles the lab space aboard the station.

Unlike many of the shuttle crews in the last few years, Atlantis' astronauts escaped having to cope with major problems. Their ship's heat shield has no nicks or holes, and the station suffered no major meltdowns during their visit.

The only blemish was the illness of astronaut Hans Schlegel, who had to sit out a spacewalk because of a medical problem NASA would not reveal. Schlegel recovered in time to conduct a spacewalk Feb. 13 as planned.

    Atlantis returns safely to Earth, UT, 20.2.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2008-02-20-atlantis_N.htm

Shuttle Atlantis crew

prepares to leave station

Sun Feb 17, 2008
9:18am EST
Reuters
By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The shuttle Atlantis astronauts moved spacesuits onto the International Space Station and packed up old equipment to bring home on Sunday, while scientists prepared for the first experiments in Europe's new Columbus laboratory.

The shuttle, which arrived at the station eight days ago to deliver Europe's first permanent space laboratory, was scheduled to depart on Monday. Hatches between the two ships were due to be sealed Sunday afternoon.

French astronaut Leopold Eyharts, who traveled aboard Atlantis, will remain on the station to oversee Columbus' operations. He previously spent three weeks on the Russian Mir space station.

Eyharts replaces NASA astronaut Dan Tani, whose planned two-month stay on the station doubled when Atlantis' launch was delayed by fuel sensor problems.

"I can't wait to get back and see everybody," Tani radioed to Mission Control in Houston on Sunday.

Eyharts will return home with the next shuttle crew, scheduled to launch March 11.

Endeavour will deliver the first part of a huge laboratory complex built by Japan, called Kibo. NASA plans to move the shuttle to the launch pad on Monday.

Atlantis' stay at the station was extended by two days, first by an astronaut's illness and later to have more time for setting up Columbus. Now, NASA is under pressure to get the crew home.

The military plans to shoot down a failed spy satellite that it says poses a threat to public safety because of its load of toxic rocket fuel. By destroying the satellite before its tumbles on its own into the atmosphere, the military hopes to time its breakup so that debris falls into the ocean with no threat to populated areas.

To avoid debris impacts to Atlantis as it re-enters the atmosphere, the military will postpone the operation until the shuttle lands. NASA is preparing both its prime landing site in Florida and backup runways in California on Wednesday to clear the skies for the satellite shot.

NASA and the military say the space station, which orbits more than 200 miles above Earth, is not in any danger from satellite debris.

    Shuttle Atlantis crew prepares to leave station, R, 17.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1662165020080217

Astronauts prepare

for Wednesday's shuttle return

Sat Feb 16, 2008
12:21pm EST
Reuters
By Ed Stoddard

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Astronauts worked to outfit Europe's new permanent space laboratory on Saturday as a busy visit by NASA's shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station neared its end.

NASA is readying landing sites at both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Edwards Air Force Base in California to ensure a landing on Wednesday, as the U.S. military wants the shuttle landed by then so it can try to shoot down a disabled spy satellite with a missile.

In a news conference on Saturday with reporters on the ground in Europe and the United States, Atlantis commander Steve Frick said he had no worries about the U.S. military's high-tech shooting event.

"We don't have any concerns ... we're going to be safely on the ground before they take any action," Frisk said.

The Pentagon on Thursday said the Navy would try to shoot down the disabled satellite before it enters the atmosphere, using a modified tactical missile from a ship in the Pacific, to avert a potentially deadly leak of toxic gas from its fuel tank.

The Columbus module, the European Space Agency's $1.9 billion space lab, was launched aboard Atlantis last week and connected to the space station on Monday.

The external work on the lab during this mission was capped on Friday when spacewalking astronauts installed a solar observatory and an experimental facility on it.

Atlantis is scheduled to undock from the space station at 4:26 a.m. EST on Monday and is due to touch down on Wednesday at 9:06 a.m.

This mission, which has involved three space walks and been mostly trouble-free, has been heavily focused on Columbus, which gives Europe its first permanent presence in space.

The solar observatory installed on it contains instruments that will, among other things, measure aspects of the sun's energy and help scientists decipher the impact of solar activity on Earth's climate.

The other facility attached to Columbus' hull will be used to conduct a range of space-related experiments. These include exposing lichen and fungi to space conditions for about 1-1/2 years to test the limits of their survival.

The agency has nine construction missions remaining to complete the $100 billion outpost and two resupply flights planned before the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.

NASA astronaut Dan Tani, who will be coming home aboard Atlantis after four months in orbit, at the news conference said he was looking forward to simple earthly delights.

"I'm looking forward to putting food on a plate and eating several things at once which you can't do up here," he said.

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

    Astronauts prepare for Wednesday's shuttle return, R, 16.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1662165020080216

Atlantis astronauts wrap up spacewalk

Sat Feb 16, 2008
11:19am EST
Reuters
By Ed Stoddard and Irene Klotz

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Two shuttle Atlantis astronauts wrapped up a spacewalk on Friday to install a solar observatory and a science experiment on Europe's space lab.

The Columbus module, the European Space Agency's $1.9 billion permanent space laboratory, was launched aboard NASA's Atlantis last week and connected to the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday.

As preparations began for the shuttle's return on Wednesday, NASA said it was readying its landing sites at both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The U.S. military is eager to land the shuttle by Wednesday so it can proceed with a planned attempt to shoot down a disabled spy satellite with a missile.

NASA prefers to land the shuttle at Kennedy, its home port and launch site, because of the high cost of transporting the spacecraft from California. The agency often does not open Edwards until the second day of landing opportunities if weather prevents a Florida landing on the first day.

During Friday's third and final outside excursion of Atlantis' nine-day visit to the space station, lead spacewalker Rex Walheim and partner Stanley Love picked up a broken gyroscope and did some inspection work on a hand rail outside the airlock.

They did not have time during the nearly 7 1/2-hour spacewalk to examine a contaminated solar wing joint that has mired station operations since October. It has been inspected on previous outings.

NASA needs to fix the joint so the station can reach full power before the arrival of a large Japanese laboratory, known as Kibo, later this year. Replacing the faulty equipment will require four to five spacewalks on later missions.

The solar observatory installed on this mission contains instruments that will, among other things, measure aspects of the sun's energy and help scientists decipher the impact of solar activity on Earth's climate.

The other facility attached to Columbus' hull will be used to conduct a range of space-related experiments. These include exposing lichen and fungi to space conditions for about 1 1/2 years to test the limits of their survival.

Another will evaluate the effects of space on different materials that may be used on spacecraft in low Earth orbit.

"The aim is to improve components and materials for spacecraft design," Alan Thirkettle, the ISS program manager for the European Space Agency, told Reuters.

He later told a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston that they would start getting data from the solar observatory before the end of February.

The agency has nine construction missions remaining to complete the $100 billion outpost and two resupply flights planned before the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.
 

(Editing by Stacey Joyce)

    Atlantis astronauts wrap up spacewalk, R, 16.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSHER98173220080216

Smaller Version of the Solar System

Is Discovered

February 15, 2008
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light-years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets.

“It looks like a scale model of our solar system,” said Scott Gaudi, an assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. Dr. Gaudi led an international team of 69 professional and amateur astronomers who announced the discovery in a news conference with reporters.

Their results are being published Friday in the journal Science. The discovery, they said, means that our solar system may be more typical of planetary systems across the universe than had been thought.

In the newly discovered system, a planet about two-thirds of the mass of Jupiter and another about 90 percent of the mass of Saturn are orbiting a reddish star at about half the distances that Jupiter and Saturn circle our own Sun. The star is about half the mass of the Sun.

Neither of the two giant planets is a likely abode for life as we know it. But, Dr. Gaudi said, warm rocky planets — suitable for life — could exist undetected in the inner parts of the system.

“This could be a true solar system analogue,” he said.

Sara Seager, a theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not part of the team, said that “right now in exoplanets we are on an inexorable path to finding other Earths.” Dr. Seager praised the discovery as “a big step in finding out if our planetary system is alone.”

Since 1995, around 250 planets outside the solar system, or exoplanets, have been discovered. But few of them are in systems that even faintly resemble our own. In many cases, giant Jupiter-like planets are whizzing around in orbits smaller than that of Mercury. But are these typical of the universe?

Almost all of those planets were discovered by the so-called wobble method, in which astronomers measure the gravitational tug of planets on their parent star as they whir around it. This technique is most sensitive to massive planets close to their stars.

The new discovery was made by a different technique that favors planets more distant from their star. It is based on a trick of Einsteinian gravity called microlensing. If, in the ceaseless shifting of the stars, two of them should become almost perfectly aligned with Earth, the gravity of the nearer star can bend and magnify the light from the more distant one, causing it to get much brighter for a few days.

If the alignment is perfect, any big planets attending the nearer star will get into the act, adding their own little boosts to the more distant starlight.

That is exactly what started happening on March 28, 2006, when a star 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius began to pass in front of one 21,000 light-years more distant, causing it to flash. That was picked up by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or Ogle, a worldwide collaboration of observers who keep watch for such events.

Ogle in turn immediately issued a worldwide call for continuous observations of what is now officially known as OGLE-2006-BLG-109. The next 10 days, as Andrew P. Gould, a professor of mathematical and physical sciences at Ohio State said, were “extremely frenetic.”

Among those who provided crucial data and appeared as lead authors of the paper in Science were a pair of amateur astronomers from Auckland, New Zealand, Jennie McCormick and Grant Christie, both members of a group called the Microlensing Follow-Up Network, or MicroFUN.

Somewhat to the experimenters’ surprise, by clever manipulation they were able to dig out of the data not just the masses of the interloper star and its two planets, but also rough approximations of their orbits, confirming the similarity to our own system. David P. Bennett, an assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame, said, “This event has taught us that we were able to learn more about these planets than we thought possible.”

As a result, microlensing is poised to become a major new tool in the planet hunter’s arsenal, “a new flavor of the month,” Dr. Seager said.

Only six planets, including the new ones, have been discovered by microlensing so far, and the Scorpius event being reported Friday is the first in which the alignment of the stars was close enough for astronomers to detect more than one planet at once. Their success at doing just that on their first try bodes well for the future, astronomers say.

Alan Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said, “The fact that these are hard to detect by microlensing means there must be a good number of them — solar system analogues are not rare.”

    Smaller Version of the Solar System Is Discovered, NYT, 15.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/science/space/15planets.html

Astronauts open hatch

to Europe's new space lab

Tue Feb 12, 2008
1:18pm EST
Reuters
By Irene Klotz

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Two European astronauts slipped inside Europe's newly installed Columbus laboratory module on Tuesday while crewmates prepared for a second spacewalk to outfit the International Space Station for new additions.

The 23-foot(7-metre)-long laboratory, equipped for medical, pharmaceutical and physics experiments, is Europe's first permanent space base and the prime contribution of a $5 billion investment in the space station program.

"This is a great moment," French astronaut Leopold Eyharts radioed to ground control teams in Houston and Munich before entering the module for the first time since it reached orbit on Thursday aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.

"We are very proud," added crewmate Hans Schlegel, of Germany. "It starts a new era. The European scientific module Columbus and the ISS are connected for many, many years of research in space in cooperation, internationally."

The visiting Atlantis crew installed the laboratory on Monday following an extended eight-hour spacewalk. Rookie astronaut Stan Love paired with lead spacewalker Rex Walheim for the outing after Schlegel developed an undisclosed medical ailment.

Schlegel remained scheduled to join Walheim for a second spacewalk on Wednesday to replace a spent nitrogen tank used to pressurize the station's coolant system.

One job the shuttle crew will not have to worry about is fixing a loose insulation blanket on one of Atlantis' steering engines. The insulation likely tore during Atlantis' climb to orbit on Thursday. The shuttle crew made an extra inspection of the area on Sunday.

"Good news," astronaut Kevin Ford from Mission Control told Atlantis commander Stephen Frick on Tuesday. "The analysis clearly shows there's no safety of flight issue. So the area has officially been cleared for entry."

"It's a relief to know we don't have to go back there and mess with it," said Frick.

NASA is about 60 percent finished building the $100 billion outpost. During the next shuttle flight scheduled for launch March 11, astronauts plan to begin installing what will be the station's largest laboratory, the Japanese-built Kibo complex.

"We're very, very much looking forward to having (Japan) join us next month," said Alan Thirkettle, the Europe Space Agency's space station program manager.

Europe waited more than five years for its Columbus module to reach orbit due to problems in both the United States and Russia, the prime space station partners.

Russian financial issues delayed launch of the station's crew module for two years and the 2003 Columbia accident put construction of the outpost on hold for 3 1/2 years.

Now NASA has just two years to compete the 11 remaining station construction and resupply flights.

Europe has high hopes for its orbital outpost, including research to benefit a wide variety of industries.

"The mechanical guys have done their bit," Thirkettle said. "(Tuesday) we get the electricians and the plumbers in to hook it up."

(Editing by Jane Sutton and David Wiessler)

    Astronauts open hatch to Europe's new space lab, 12.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSHER98173220080212

Spacewalk to anchor European lab

to space station

Mon Feb 11, 2008
2:27pm EST
Reuters
By Irene Klotz

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Two U.S. space shuttle astronauts, garbed in bulky spacesuits, left the International Space Station on Monday to attach Europe's first permanent space laboratory to the orbital outpost.

Lead spacewalker Rex Walheim and rookie Stanley Love, who substituted for German astronaut Hans Schlegel, floated out of the airlock at around 9:25 a.m. EST to begin a planned seven-hour outing to anchor the $1.9 billion, 10-ton Columbus module.

Schlegel was pulled from the spacewalk due to an undisclosed medical condition, though he is expected to participate in a second spacewalk on Wednesday, officials with the European Space Agency said.

NASA delayed the first spacewalk a day to allow more time for Love to prepare. The spacewalkers were all trained to complete each others' tasks.

Walheim, who has made two spacewalks on a previous mission to the station, and Love planned to spend most of their time preparing Columbus to be relocated from the shuttle Atlantis' cargo bay to its permanent home on the station's Harmony connecting node.

The work includes attaching a grapple fixture for the shuttle's robot arm to grasp.

"The grapple fixture is basically a big pin that the robot arm can grab onto and then pull the Columbus module out of the payload bay," Walheim told reporters before the shuttle flight.

"It could be launched with it on there. The only problem is it's a little bit too big to fit into the payload bay with the grapple fixture on."

Robot arm operators Leland Melvin and Dan Tani will lift the lab from the shuttle's cargo bay and inch it over toward its new home on the station.

"At that point I think there'll be lots of celebrations in Europe," Melvin said before the mission.

Columbus is the heart of a $5 billion investment in the space station program by 10 European countries.

"This will be the first time Europe will have a permanent base in space," said Leopold Eyharts, a French astronaut who launched aboard Atlantis but transferred to the station crew to remain in orbit and set up the new lab.

"We hope that this first participation will help in reinforcing our technical expertise and our experience of operations to be able to go further and participate with the future of space exploration," Eyharts said recently.

Japan is still waiting for NASA to launch its space station contribution -- a three-part laboratory named Kibo. NASA plans to begin installing the Japanese lab during its next shuttle mission in March.

The U.S. space agency has 11 more construction and resupply flights remaining before the $100 billion station is complete and the space shuttles are retired in 2010.

(Editing by Michael Christie and Eric Beech)

    Spacewalk to anchor European lab to space station, R, 11.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSHER98173220080211

FACTBOX:

Atlantis flies on NASA's

121st shuttle mission

Thu Feb 7, 2008
3:17pm EST
Reuters

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle Atlantis lifted off on Thursday to deliver Europe's $1.9 billion Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station. Here's a look at the mission:

*NASA's 121st shuttle flight is an 11-day mission, with an extra day likely.

*Three spacewalks are scheduled to install Columbus, Europe's first permanent space laboratory, as well as to attach external experiments and tackle some space station maintenance tasks.

*It is the 29th flight of Atlantis. Its final mission is currently scheduled for August to the Hubble Space Telescope.

*After the current flight, there are 12 missions remaining for the shuttle program. The spacecraft are due to be retired in 2010.

*Europe paid NASA for Columbus' launch by providing two connecting nodes for the $100 billion space station.
 

(Reporting by Irene Klotz, editing by Jim Loney)

    FACTBOX: Atlantis flies on NASA's 121st shuttle mission, R, 7.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0723960520080207

Shuttle Atlantis launches

with European space lab

Thu Feb 7, 2008
3:04pm EST
Reuters
By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from its Florida home port on Thursday on a mission to deliver Europe's first permanent space laboratory to the International Space Station.

Clouds and rain near the Kennedy Space Center that had threatened to delay the launch held off long enough for the shuttle to roar off its seaside launch pad at 2:45 p.m. (1945 GMT). The spacecraft settled into Earth's orbit eight minutes later.

The launch finally put Europe's $1.9 billion Columbus laboratory into orbit after postponements dating back to 2002 -- first because of Russian delays in launching the space station's service module and then by the destruction of shuttle Columbia in 2003, which grounded the U.S. shuttle fleet.

Atlantis' mission was twice delayed in December by technical problems with an emergency engine cutoff system.

Twenty-three feet long and nearly 15 feet (4.5 meters) in diameter, the cylindrical Columbus lab has room for three crew members to work on experiments. It was launched with a biolab for cell and tissue studies and an experiment to study the effects of weightlessness on the human body.

The European Space Agency is counting on Columbus' successful deployment and the March 8 launch of a cargo ship to proceed with future space programs, including participation in NASA's plan to return humans to the surface of the moon.

Atlantis also carried two European astronauts -- French Air Force Gen. Leopold Eyharts, 50, who will oversee the setup and activation of Columbus, and Hans Schlegel, 56, a physicist with the European Space Agency from Aachen, Germany.
 

(Reporting by Irene Klotz, editing by Jim Loney and Michael Christie)

    Shuttle Atlantis launches with European space lab, R, 7.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0459481320080207

Pictures Reveal

Mercury’s Tumultuous Past

January 31, 2008
The New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY

WASHINGTON — The Messenger spacecraft that zipped past Mercury two weeks ago found more evidence of the innermost planet’s turbulent past, including ridges that run hundreds of miles and a unique feature made up of more than 100 troughs radiating in all directions, scientists said Wednesday.

A preliminary look at data from the flyby, including 1,213 images, shows a small, cratered planet that superficially looks like Earth’s moon but is very different in reality, they said.

The robot spacecraft, the first to visit the planet in more than three decades, passed 124 miles above Mercury’s surface on Jan. 14 before continuing on a path that is to bring it back three more times in the next three years before settling into orbit.

During the encounter, the Messenger’s seven scientific instruments scanned the planet, its magnetic field and its wispy atmosphere in great detail.

“Our little craft has returned a gold mine of exciting data,” said Dr. Sean C. Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the mission’s lead investigator.

“We were continually surprised,” Dr. Solomon said at a NASA news conference. “It was not the planet we expected. It was not the moon.”

Mercury remains a very dynamic planet and is a key to understanding the evolution of the inner solar system and its four rocky planets, including Earth, he said.

NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft, which made three flybys of Mercury in 1974 and 1975, mapped about 45 percent of the planet’s surface. The Messenger craft took pictures of another 30 percent during its first visit and should complete the portrait when it returns on its next flyby in October, scientists said.

After that visit and another in September 2009 to slow the craft, the Messenger is to settle into orbit around Mercury on March 18, 2011, for at least a year of studies.

Among the features spotted by the Messenger — short for the $446 million mission’s formal name, Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging — is one informally called “the spider.” It appears to be an impact crater 25 miles in diameter from which more than 100 flat-bottomed troughs shoot out in all directions, said Louise Prockter, an imaging instrument scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., which built and operates the spacecraft.

“It’s a real mystery, a very unexpected find,” Ms. Prockter said, unlike anything ever observed in the solar system. It is unclear if the impact crater caused the shattered-looking feature or came later, after the troughs formed for another reason, she said.

    Pictures Reveal Mercury’s Tumultuous Past, NYT, 31.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/science/31mercury.html

Astronauts Start Risky Spacewalk

January 30, 2008
Filed at 7:44 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- The space station's two American astronauts went out on a riskier-than-usual spacewalk Wednesday to fix one of two equipment failures that have crippled their power system and threatened to stall construction.

Commander Peggy Whitson and Daniel Tani floated outside well before dawn, hauling a new motor that NASA hoped would enable a solar wing to tilt toward the sun again and draw more power for the orbiting complex.

It was a hazardous job because the astronauts risked being shocked. For safety, they waited until the international space station was on the dark side of Earth, then carefully undid fasteners and disconnected cables, and pulled out the old electric motor. Tani noted that one of the connectors was manufactured on his birthday, Feb. 1. ''I'm reading the manufacture date,'' he said.

A few minutes later, the spacewalkers popped in the new 200-pound-plus motor, a spare that had been stored on board. ''We're all breathing down here. Thanks a lot,'' Mission Control said.

The tilting mechanism stopped working in early December, exasperating a power problem that arose three months earlier when a solar wing rotating joint jammed up and had to be shut down.

To avoid being shocked, Whitson and Tani had to do the replacement job in the darkness of night, pausing during the daytime swings around Earth when 160 volts of electricity would course through the cables. As an added precaution, the spacewalkers were advised not to point any nonessential lights at the solar wing in question to prevent power generation.

Because the motor serves as the structural backbone for the solar wing, the spacewalkers had to make sure the wing didn't come off and fly away.

Earlier in the morning, the spacewalk almost ended up being aborted when a radio-relay problem prevented Whitson and Tani from hearing Mission Control. Flight controllers restored communication through a backup channel within 20 minutes.

NASA is still uncertain what to do about the clogged joint, which is supposed to continuously rotate 360 degrees to keep the solar wings pointing toward the sun. As many as four spacewalks will be required later this year to remove metal shavings from the joint and get it working again.

Even with both failures, NASA could still launch Atlantis to the space station next week with the European science lab, Columbus. But unless the tilting mechanism is fixed, any further shuttle missions would be in jeopardy. The joint problem alone, if left unresolved, could delay shuttle flights starting in the fall.

It was the first spacewalk for Tani since his 90-year-old mother was killed in a car accident outside Chicago just before Christmas. Flight director Holly Ridings said Tani has been coping extremely well, and that his work has not been affected.

Tani was supposed to return to Earth in December aboard Atlantis, but his trip home was delayed because of problems with the fuel gauges in the shuttle's external tank. NASA is now aiming for a Feb. 7 liftoff after replacing a bad connector at the bottom of the tank.

Wednesday's spacewalk fell on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the launch of NASA's first satellite, Explorer 1. The very next day, Friday, will mark the fifth anniversary of the Columbia disaster.

------

On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov 

    Astronauts Start Risky Spacewalk, NYT, 30.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Space-Station.html

Astronomers Describe Violent Universe

January 11, 2008
Filed at 11:53 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The deeper astronomers gaze into the cosmos, the more they find it's a bizarre and violent universe.

The research findings from this week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers range from blue orphaned baby stars to menacing ''rogue'' black holes that roam our galaxy, devouring any planets unlucky enough to be within their limited reach.

''It's an odd universe we live in,'' said Vanderbilt University astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann. She presented her theory on rogue black holes at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, earlier this week.

It should be noted that she's not worried and you shouldn't be either. The odds of one of these black holes swallowing up Earth or the sun or wreaking other havoc is somewhere around 1 in 10 quadrillion in any given year.

''This is the glory of the universe,'' added J. Craig Wheeler, president of the astronomy association. ''What is odd and what is normal is changing.''

Just five years ago, astronomers were gazing at a few thousand galaxies where stars formed in a bizarre and violent manner. Now the number is in the millions, thanks to more powerful telescopes and supercomputers to crunch the crucial numbers streaming in from space, said Wheeler, a University of Texas astronomer.

Scientists are finding that not only are they improving their understanding of the basic questions of the universe -- such as how did it all start and where is it all going -- they also keep stumbling upon unexpected, hard-to-explain cosmic quirks and the potential, but comfortably distant, dangers.

Much of what they keep finding plays out like a stellar version of a violent Quentin Tarantino movie. The violence surrounds and approaches Earth, even though our planet is safe and ''in a pretty quiet neighborhood,'' said Wheeler, author of the book ''Cosmic Catastrophes.''

One example is an approaching gas cloud discussed at the meeting Friday. The cloud has a mass 1 million times that of the sun. It is 47 quadrillion miles away. But it's heading toward our Milky Way galaxy at 150 miles per second. And when it hits, there will be fireworks that form new stars and ''really light up the neighborhood,'' said astronomer Jay Lockman at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia.

But don't worry. It will hit a part of the Milky Way far from Earth and the biggest collision will be 40 million years in the future.

The giant cloud has been known for more than 40 years, but only now have scientists realized how fast it's moving. So fast, Lockman said, that ''we can see it sort of plowing up a wave of galactic material in front of it.''

When astronomers this week unveiled a giant map of mysterious dark matter in a supercluster of galaxies, they explained that the violence of the cramped-together galaxies is so great that there is now an accepted vocabulary for various types of cosmic brutal behavior.

The gravitational force between the clashing galaxies can cause ''slow strangulation,'' in which crucial gas is gradually removed from the victim galaxy. ''Stripping'' is a more violent process in which the larger galaxy rips gas from the smaller one. And then there's ''harassment,'' which is a quick fly-by encounter, said astronomer Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

Gray's presentation essentially showed the victims of galaxy-on-galaxy violence. She and her colleagues are trying to figure out the how the dirty deeds were done.

In the past few days, scientists have unveiled plenty to ooh and aah over:

-- Photos of ''blue blobs'' that astronomers figure are orphaned baby stars. They're called orphans because they were ''born in the middle of nowhere'' instead of within gas clouds, said Catholic University of America astronomer Duilia F. de Mello.

-- A strange quadruplet of four hugging stars, which may eventually help astronomers understand better how stars form.

-- A young star surrounded by dust, that may eventually become a planet. It's nicknamed ''the moth,'' because the interaction of star and dust are shaped like one.

-- A spiral galaxy with two pairs of arms spinning in opposite directions, like a double pinwheel. It defies what astronomers believe should happen. It is akin to one of those spinning-armed flamingo lawn ornaments, said astronomer Gene Byrd of the University of Alabama.

-- The equivalent of post-menopausal stars giving unlikely birth to new planets. Most planets form soon after a sun, but astronomers found two older stars, one at least 400 million years old, with new planets.

''Intellectually and spiritually, if I can use that word with a lower case 's,' it's awe-inspiring,'' Wheeler said. ''It's a great universe.''

------

On the Net:

American Astronomical Society: http://www.aas.org/

Hubble Space Telescope: http://hubblesite.org/ 

    Astronomers Describe Violent Universe, NYT, 11.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Odd-Universe.html

Deep Impact Spacecraft Zips Past Earth

January 1, 2008
Filed at 5:40 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A comet-busting NASA spacecraft zipped past Earth on Monday on its way to rendezvous with another comet in an extended mission that will also see it hunt for Earth-sized planets around a cluster of stars. The Deep Impact probe made the first of three flybys designed to use the planet's gravity to hurtle the spacecraft toward comet Hartley 2 for a 2010 meeting.

At its closest, the spacecraft was 10,000 miles above Australia.

''We're taking laps around the sun until the comet comes,'' said William Blume of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In 2005, Deep Impact became the first spacecraft to crack open a comet by releasing a copper impactor that smashed into Tempel 1, giving scientists their first glimpse of the interior. The mothership survived and was placed in safe mode before it was tapped for an encore.

The new mission, known as Epoxi, calls for Deep Impact to meet Hartley 2 about 12 million miles from Earth at the time of the encounter. Deep Impact will hover 550 miles from the half mile-wide surface and use its two telescopes and infrared spectrometer to map features and record gas outbursts.

On its way to the comet, Deep Impact will spend six months using one of its telescopes to search for Earth-sized planets around five nearby stars, which are known to have Jupiter-like planets orbiting them.

The extended mission, managed by JPL in Pasadena, cost $40 million, compared to the $333 million it took to collide with Tempel 1.

NASA initially wanted Deep Impact's second act to be an exploration of comet 85P/Boethin in 2008. But to scientists' surprise, a bevy of ground and space telescopes were unable to spot it this fall. Astronomers believe the comet may have shattered into specks too small to be seen from Earth.

Mission managers then asked the space agency to change course and visit Hartley 2 -- which required a path correction and an extra two years of travel.

------

On the Net:

Epoxi mission: http://epoxi.umd.edu

Deep Impact mission: http://www.nasa.gov/mission--pages/deepimpact/main/index.html 

Deep Impact Spacecraft Zips Past Earth, NYT, 1.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Comet-Mission.html