spaceboy

News: "The astronauts aboard the International Space Station will make a spacewalk next week to prepare for the arrival of the first cargo craft to be sent to the orbiting outpost by the European Space Agency, NASA said on Wednesday.
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News: "A meteorite from Mars has been discovered in Antarctica, one of only about 30 known martian space rocks on Earth.

'We've gotten something like 13,000 meteorites from Antarctica and this is only the sixth one from Mars,' Timothy McCoy, curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian Institution, said by telephone on Wednesday.

The rest of the known martian meteorites on this planet were found outside Antarctica, McCoy said by telephone.
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HoustonChronicle.com - Private spacecraft to fly again in September: "The SpaceShipOne craft that cracked the commercial space flight barrier will be launched in September in a bid to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize, pioneering aviation designer Burt Rutan announced today."

HoustonChronicle.com - NASA fuel tank redesign addresses foam problem: "The foam that detached on liftoff and led to the space shuttle Columbia disaster last year has been removed from redesigns of the fuel tanks that launch shuttles into space, NASA officials said.

NASA approved a redesign that installs heaters in place of some of the foam, which is applied to the fuel tanks as a shield against ice buildup, according to a statement released by the space agency on Monday. Foam will still cover most of the tanks, but heaters will be used in parts of the bipod area, where the fuel tank attaches to the spacecraft.

'This is a fix that really gets to the root of the technical problems that caused the loss of Columbia,' said Michael Kostelnik, a NASA deputy associate administrator."

The New York Times > Science > More Astronauts Approved for Space Station: "Nations involved in the International Space Station have agreed to increase the number of astronauts working aboard and to look at ways to accelerate the launching of Japanese and European research modules, program officials said Friday."

The Globe and Mail: "The international Cassini spacecraft has taken new images of Saturn's two-faced moon Iapetus, possibly offering clues to why the moon has a dark hemisphere and another that is bright, scientists said Thursday.

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory hope Cassini's observations of the mysterious moon help determine where the dark material comes from.

The spacecraft took pictures of Iapetus (pronounced eye-APP-eh-tuss) at a distance of 2.9 million kilometres on July 3, a few days after Cassini entered orbit around Saturn."

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Ammonia on Mars could mean life: "Ammonia survives for only a short time in the Martian atmosphere so it must be getting constantly replenished.

There are two possible sources: either active volcanoes, none of which have been found yet on Mars, or microbes."

Grant's Blog

The Australian: Hawking backflip defies gravity [July 16, 2004]: "Next week at a conference in Dublin, the wheelchair-bound Oxford University academic will recant his controversial 'black-hole paradox'.

It's an idea he first proposed in 1976 and involves the complicated physics of black holes, or dense objects such as what remains when some stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own weight.

Leading cosmologist Paul Davies, of Macquarie University's Australian Centre for Astrobiology, heard rumours earlier this year about Dr Hawking's intellectual conversion. 'Evidently, something has caused him to change his mind, but he's being very coy about what it is,' Professor Davies said yesterday.

Even the organisers of the 17th International Conference on General Relativity know little of what the great thinker will say or why he's saying it. 'He sent a note saying, 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it',' said Curt Cutler, chairman of the conference scientific committee."

VOANews.com: "After three failed launch attempts, the U.S. space agency NASA has finally sent the Aura satellite into orbit.

A Boeing Delta 2 rocket carrying Aura blasted off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base early Thursday. The $785 million satellite separated from the rocket an hour later and entered orbit at 700 kilometers above the Earth.

Aura is designed to monitor the planet's atmosphere, focusing on pollution and the condition of the ozone layer that protects Earth from the sun's radiation."

Guardian Unlimited | Today's issues | Useful excrement: "During a two-year expedition to Mars, a crew of six astronauts can generate over six tons of waste. The current protocol is to ship the faeces back to Earth. Nasa, however, are funding research to create a membrane microbial fuel cell that would recycle the excrement to provide drinking water, fertilizer and electricity. A waste of space? Certainly not."

The New York Times > Movies > Critic's Notebook: For Asimov, Robots Were Friends. Not So for Will Smith.: "The movie's retro material, then, may be a kind of a wink at its antique source. But in his book, Asimov also declared war on those who think about robots with fear and trembling, dreading the dangers of technological change. The new movie, though, often seems to oppose Asimov's view. Spooner hates robots, and he may have good reason. So Asimov's old battles are being engaged yet again and may be worth thinking about because they touch on so much more than android design.

Asimov's robots can certainly seem born of a more innocent, less knowing world: one loves hearing children's stories, another malfunctions by drunkenly going around in circles, a third may or may not be masquerading as a well-meaning human politician. Surely this gently imagined future is hopelessly eclipsed now that we have seen the killer android of 'Terminator 2' morph into any human shape out of blobs of mercury, or watched the machines of the 'Matrix' trilogy rule the post-apocalyptic earth, plugging humans into energy pods with elaborate software.

The movie, as if troubled by its innocent origins, even tries to leave the book behind. (A more faithful adaptation is in a published screenplay for 'I, Robot,' written in the 1970's by Harlan Ellison.) Any similarities that remain are on the surface."

HoustonChronicle.com - Panel urges using shuttle crews for Hubble repairs: "On Tuesday, a congressionally approved panel of 20 top scientists concluded a robotic solution would rely on an array of technologies so challenging, the space agency was at least a year away from knowing which would work.

'The committee has recommended that NASA keep its options open, that NASA should not preclude a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope at this point in time,' Louis Lanzerotti, a consultant for Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies who chaired the committee, told reporters."

Why Does Saturn Have Rings? - And how come Earth has none? By Brendan I. Koerner: "Size is a big reason. Saturn is 95 times more massive than Earth and thus boasts more moons and more gravitational pull, both of which are vital to ring formation. Moons, in particular, are the critical factor in the creation of Saturn's 'dust rings,' which are similar to the wispy circles that also surround Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. The icy 'classic rings,' which are the ones depicted in the Cassini images, are a bit more of a mystery, however.

The dust rings, composed of trillions of micron-sized specks, are almost certainly composed of debris from Saturn's 31 moons—although primarily from the innermost 'major satellites,' which include Dione and Tethys. When asteroids and other objects collide with these moons, tremendous amounts of dust are discharged and trapped in Saturn's orbit, forming rings. The Earth, of course, has only one moon, and it's relatively far away given our planet's small size (and subsequently small gravitational tug); the average distance between Earth and the moon is 384,467 kilometers, compared with just 133,570 kilometers for Pan, Saturn's closest satellite. Overall, Saturn has 13 moons that are, on average, closer to the planet than our moon is to the Earth. Debris from the moon is unlikely to be sucked in by the Earth's gravitational embrace because of the relatively great distance between the two bodies. In addition to our dearth of satellites, this is one of the biggest reasons why our planet is ringless.

There are a couple of theories as to how Saturn's classic rings—which are unique to the planet—were first formed. These rings, which consist mainly of house-sized ice chunks, might contain the vestiges of either moons or similar-sized objects that once orbited the nascent Saturn and were destroyed by space debris billions of years ago. But the rings may simply be a consequence of Saturn's formation, which occurred in a far different manner than that of Earth. The giant planet likely began as a core of rock and ice and slowly pulled in surrounding detritus and, more important, gases. (The planet is made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.) The rings, then, may be composed of materials that Saturn pulled close but never quite managed to add to the planet proper. The Earth, perhaps because of its comparatively small gravitational pull, simply didn't develop in this manner—good news for us humans, as gaseous Saturn could scarcely be more inhospitable to life.

Many astronomers believe, however, that Mars—the planet most like Earth—may have dust rings of its own. Mars, after all, has two moons smaller than our own, an important requisite for developing the wispy rings. If the rings are there, they're obviously so faint as to have escaped detection so far. But there are researchers who project that Martian rings, however modest, will be discovered within the next 10 to 15 years."