FT Chronicle

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA says the handful of defects on space shuttle Endeavour are too small to pose any threat.

Mission managers agreed Friday that there’s nothing that would prevent Endeavour and its six astronauts from returning safely to Earth.

Managers came to that unanimous conclusion after reviewing pictures from Monday’s launch and data collected from orbit. Management team leader LeRoy Cain says a cracked thermal tile and protruding ceramic spacer on the cockpit are so small that even if they managed to break off during re-entry and strike Endeavour, no serious damage would result.

Endeavour will remain at the International Space Station until the end of next week. Astronauts need to finish installing a new room and lookout. - AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AFP) – NASA launched a first-of-its-kind solar observatory into space Thursday in hopes of expanding scientists’ understanding of the sun and its complicated workings.

A two-stage Atlas rocket roared off its launch pad from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 10:23 am (1523 GMT), carrying NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) into space.

NASA missed its first launch opportunity on Wednesday because of high winds, but the weather cooperated Thursday despite partially cloudy skies.

The 3.2-tonne satellite was to be lofted into orbit some 22,295 miles (35,880 kilometers) from Earth, circling the planet once every 24 hours during its five-year mission.

“This is going to be sensational,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“SDO is going to make a huge step forward in our understanding of the sun and its effects on life and society.”

Space physicists have called SDO the cornerstone of future NASA missions to study the sun, which is considered the next frontier for US space research.

NASA said the probe will be especially helpful in revealing how changes in the sun alter the levels of radiation and energy within our solar system, and will provide new information concerning the sun and solar system that directly affect Earth, its inhabitants and technology.

Scientists said space weather caused by the sun can affect communications and satellite signals, electrical power lines and other objects and energy transmissions in our atmosphere and beyond.

Telescopes and other gear onboard the probe will scrutinize sunspots and solar flares using more pixels and colors than any other observatory in the history of solar physics.

NASA said the spacecraft will send about 1.5 terabytes of data back to Earth each day — the equivalent of streaming 380 full-length movies.

US physicists said that if they can get a better understanding of the sun’s magnetic field, they can predict how it affects the solar system and near-Earth space to create space weather.

Among the questions researchers hope to answer is how the sun’s magnetic field is generated and how stored magnetic energy changes into kinetic energy, in the form of solar wind and energy particles.

WASHINGTON – In their search to find Earth-like planets, NASA has discovered five new planets beyond the solar system by the use of its Kepler space telescope

The five exoplanets breakthrough “contributes to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets,” William Borucki, NASA chief science researcher for the Kepler mission, said in a statement.

But all five exoplanets are “too hot for life as we know it,” NASA said.

The newly discovered planets are branded as “hot Jupiters” since their bulky masses are compared to Jupiter and but they possess extreme temperatures, which range from 2,200 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,204 – 1649 degrees Celsius).

Their orbits last between three and five days, meaning they follow paths close to their stars, which are hotter and larger than the Earth’s sun, NASA said.

The smallest of the newly discovered planets is roughly the size of Neptune, the fourth largest planet in Earth’s solar system, and the biggest is around the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.

Kepler is NASA’s first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours.

It is searching for planets as small as Earth, including those orbiting stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet.

Remember Hollywood catastrophic films “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon.“

Well, Russia’s got a plan to knock a large asteroid off course and to reduce its chances to collide with Earth using a spacecraft to be dispatched, even though U.S. scientists say such a scenario is slim.

Russia’s space agency Chief Anatoly Perminov told Golos Rossii radio they would call a meeting to weigh up a mission to Apophis saying his agency might eventually invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project.

When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated its chances of smashing into Earth in its first flyby, in 2029, at 1-in-37.

NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000.

Don Yeomans, who heads NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, said better calculations of Apophis’ path in several years “will almost certainly remove any possibility of an Earth collision” in 2036.

Without mentioning NASA’s conclusions, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” Perminov said.

“People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Perminov said.

Perminov wouldn’t disclose any details of the project, saying they still need to be worked out. But he said the mission wouldn’t require any nuclear explosions.

Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON – The discovery of a 4.4-million-year-old skeleton, human-kind’s oldest known ancestor, was the greatest scientific breakthrough of 2009, the prestigious journal Science said on Thursday.

The fossil, known as Ardi, topped a list of the 10 greatest scientific advances for the year, which also featured the discovery of water on the moon and the use of ultra-thin carbon atom sheets in experimental electronic devices.

Ardi, or Ardipithecus ramidus, was the subject of 15 years of painstaking examination by anthropologists who said the find, in what is now Ethiopia, provided untold insights into human evolution.

At 1.2 million years older than “Lucy”, previously the oldest known human ancestor, Ardi helped shatter popular myths about the direct similarity between humans and modern apes.

Many of the traits found in Ardi’s skull, teeth, pelvis, hands and feet, showed that African apes have evolved extensively since sharing a common ancestor with humans.

“(Ardi) changes the way we think about early human evolution,” said Bruce Alberts, Science’s editor.

Among the other developments listed by the journal were the discovery of previously unknown pulsars by NASA’s Fermi telescope, including one located 4,600 light-years from Earth.

The observations helped explain how a pulsar — the rapidly-spinning and highly-magnetized core of a exploded star — works, and how they contribute to electromagnetic radiation in the universe.

Astrophysics provided two more of the top 10 advances of the year, including NASA’s discovery of ice water on the moon.

In October the US space agency slammed a missile into the permanently shadowed Cabeus crater, near the moon’s southern pole, at around 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) per hour.

It was followed four minutes later by a spacecraft equipped with instruments that detected significant amounts of ice water.

NASA was also praised by Science for astronauts’ repairs of the Hubble space telescope, providing unprecedented images of our universe.

Meanwhile physicists working with bizarre crystalline materials managed to create magnetic ripples that could help confirm the existence of monopoles, a theoretical particle with only one magnetic pole.

And physicists operating an X-ray laser at Stanford University got fresh snap-shots of chemical reactions in progress and molecules 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.

The year also saw the advances in the way we use materials, including graphene — highly conductive sheets of carbon atoms.

Scientists examining the ultra-thin structures were able for the first time to manipulate them into nano-scale electronic devices, raising hopes that the advance could spark an entire industry.

In the biological sciences breakthroughs were made in gene therapy and signal pathways, which offer the hope of extending human life.

While gene therapists developed new ways to treat brain disease, hereditary blindness and some immune disorders, those working on signal pathways developed a drug that extended the life-span of mice by around 10 percent.

It was the first time the drug, rapamycin, had been proven to work on mammals.

As climate change topped the political agenda, scientists grasped a clearer picture of plant molecules that could allow them to develop new ways to protect crops against drought.

In the coming year Science’s editors said they expect breakthroughs in stem cell research, cancer cell metabolism and the mapping of the human genome.

With the White House set to decide on funding, the future of human space flight and NASA”s quest to return man to the moon by 2020 and establish lunar bases for further exploration to Mars, may also be decided.

Space shuttle Atlantis with seven-member crew is packing the orbiter and preparing to return home on Friday at NASA’s Florida spaceport.

The space shuttle Atlantis left the International Space Station early Wednesday wrapping the 31st shuttle flight.

NASA replaced the shuttle with a traditional turkey icon on its Mission Control map tracking the spacecraft in honour of the American Thanksgiving holiday.

The seven astronauts includes Commander Charlie Hobaugh, Pilot Barry Wilmore and Mission Specialists Randy Bresnik, Mike Foreman, Leland Melvin, Robert Satcher Jr. and Nicole Stott.

(via NASA)

This gyroscopic dumbbell is a tennis ball-sized device used by NASA astronauts to keep physically fit even in space. It maintains upper body condition that strengthens and rehabilitates muscles in the hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders.

Hold it and rotate your wrist to spin the internal gyroscope up to 13,000 rpm that provides up to 38 lbs resistance to your muscle movements.

A study performed by Southern Utah University proved the gyroscopic dumbbell increased maximum handgrip strength by an average of 11%, and this low-impact exercise can also increase the range of motion in your hands and help rehabilitate carpal tunnel and tennis elbow injuries.

A docking station automatically initiates the spinning, and an integrated tachometer measures and displays the current rpm, highest rpm achieved, and total number of revolutions, allowing you to easily track progress. Docking station requires two AA batteries.

It can be a substitute to your spacious dumbbells.

Resource reading: hammacher.com

WASHINGTON — NASA space agency has launched a campaign to dispel widespread rumors of world’ demise on December 21, 2012, last Monday.

End of time will come when an unknown Planet X or Nibiru collides into Earth. The planet was supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, according to assertions by Internet theorists.

For the possibility of comets instead of a planet, “big hits are very rare,” NASA noted. The last major impact was believed to be 65 million years ago, spurring the end of dinosaurs. “We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs,” the space agency said.

Internet users also accuse NASA of hiding the truth on the planet’s existence, but NASA criticized such tales as an “Internet hoax.”

“There is no factual basis for these claims,” NASA said in a question-and-answer posting on its website.

If such a collision were real “astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye,” it added. “Obviously, it does not exist.”

“Credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012,” NASA insisted.

NASA insisted the Mayan calendar in fact does not end on December 21, 2012, saying that a new period will come after. And it said there are no planetary alignments on the horizon for the next few decades and even if the planets were to line up as some have forecast, the effect on our planet would be “negligible,” NASA said.

Among the other theories NASA has set out to debunk are that geomagnetic storms, a pole reversal or unsteadiness in the Earth’s crust might destroy the planet.

News via Agence France-Presse

NASA successfully launches ARES I-X rocket at Kennedy Space Center at exactly 11:30AM ET on Wednesday after being postponed due to whether condition.

The test flight mission will last for two minutes and the 327-foot rocket is expected to bring NASA one step closer to its exploration goals.

According to the NASA website, the flight is the first vehicle to be launched from the complex since the first space shuttle in 1981.

(via NASA)

The launch of NASA’s new Ares 1-X Rocket was postponed due to delays such as the weather and a cargo ship within the area in the Atlantic Ocean so it was moved by 24 hours.

Launch Control stated that strong winds, with gusts over 20 knots and peaking at 22 knots, were a big hindrances for the rocket launch with clouds which will slow things down. On the word of NASA’s launch blog, “flying through high-level clouds can generate ‘P-static’ (P stands for precipitation), which can create a corona of static around the rocket that interferes with radio signals sent by or to the rocket.”

According to Launch Control, the weather today should be somewhat better than yesterday, with decreased cloudiness and lower winds, both on the launch pad and in the upper levels which makes the launch be 40 percent possible said NASA.

Ares 1-X, a trial version of the rocket NASA hopes will replace the shuttle fleet and return astronauts to the moon. The test rocket includes a real solid-rocket first stage, with a mock second stage and dummy Orion crew capsule on top to simulate the intended weight and size of Ares I. Ares I-X is the tallest booster in service or about to fly and stands about 327 feet high.

(Photo and news via FOXNEWS)