Space Station Prepped for Six Crew Members

On May 29, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) will double, from three astronauts to six. In a media briefing held today, NASA said that it has accomplished the necessary tasks ahead of Expedition 20--a Soyuz mission that will carry the second half of the crew, scheduled to launch on May 27. Not only will this complete the station's first six-person crew, but the mission will be the first time that crew members from all five ISS partners--Japan, Russia, Europe, Canada, and the United States--are aboard.
Increasing the crew capacity of the space station is a major advance for space-science research and for travel beyond low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars. "It opens up more possibilities, such as scheduling more science, because we don't have to use all our people for just required maintenance to the station," said Courtenay McMillan, Expedition 20's lead flight director, during the briefing. But, she added, it also presents communication challenges: "Now we have twice as many people and not as many phone lines." When the shuttle or Soyuz spacecraft docks with the station, there are short periods of time when there are six or more astronauts aboard the station, using the additional spacecraft for support. However, it's only for a week or two, and then three astronauts remain living on the station.
The expansion of the station meant modifying its life-support systems. Most notably, NASA built a comprehensive water recovery system that uses specially designed filters and chemical processes to cleanse waste liquids--astronauts' urine and perspiration--so that they become drinkable water. The system has had a few technical difficulties, but according to Dan Hartman, manager of Integration and Operations for the ISS program, it should be operational by next week. A new toilet, crew quarters, galley, and treadmill (named after comedian Stephen Colbert) have also been developed to support the additional crew members.
NASA's main concern, should missions to resupply the station be delayed, is food. "We can handle a month-period slip for resupply, and if that time was going to be extended, then we would react by using other missions," said Hartman at today's media briefing. NASA has acquired a robotic spacecraft from Japan--the H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV)--to resupply the station in between scheduled shuttle missions. The HTV will connect to the Japanese Experimental Module (JEM), called Kibo, and will be "a major new capability to resupply the station, allowing for the launch of rack modules and external and internal payloads," said Hartman.
"The logistics are done, and we have the supplies ready to expand the crew and allow them to stay for an extended period of time," added Ben Pawlik, Expedition 20's increment manager, at the briefing. The station will even have room to support seven additional crew members when the shuttle docks at the ISS.

Space sail could bring used rockets back to Earth

THE risk to spacecraft from a collision with space debris could be reduced by equipping launchers with a gossamer-thin "sail". The idea is to deploy the sail after the rocket has released its payload to amplify the drag of the last vestiges of the atmosphere, and so force the rocket out of orbit.
Rocket stages are a particular risk to spacecraft because they often contain large amounts of unused fuel, which can explode when sunlight heats the tank. Leaking fuel can also act like a mini-thruster, pushing the rocket into an orbit where it may cause a collision. One way to tackle the problem is to vent unused fuel in a controlled way, and drain power from the battery, but this is unlikely to eliminate all collisions.
Now space-flight engineers Max Cerf and Brice Santerre at the European aerospace firm EADS Astrium are devising ways to build a sail that would quickly remove a spent rocket from orbit. The sail or "aerobrake" would be deployed after a rocket has delivered its satellite into low-Earth orbit, slowing it down by friction with the thin atmosphere so that burns up in around 25 years, much earlier than conventional rocket stages, some of which are expected to survive for at least 100 years.

For the final stage of an Ariane 5 launcher, the conical sail would need to have an area of about 350 square metres and be supported by an inflatable mast 12 metres long. Cerf and Santerre propose a number of possible ways to build the mast. The simplest envisages a woven polymer and aluminium tube that is kept inflated by nitrogen gas. Another uses a tube made of polymer composite, which after being inflated with nitrogen is set hard by the sun's ultraviolet rays. A third design uses epoxy resin that is set hard by solvent evaporation.
The pair revealed their designs at this month's Fifth European Conference on Space Debris in Darmstadt, Germany, organised by the European Space Agency.
It's a good idea, says Peter Roberts, a space-flight engineer at Cranfield University in the UK, who is working on similar technology for small satellites. "The risk of fragmentation of end-of-life spacecraft due to impacts from other debris can be greatly reduced by deploying a drag sail."

Titanium reveals explosive origins of the solar system

The solar system emerged from a well-blended soup of dust and gas despite being cobbled together from the remains of multiple exploded stars, new meteorite measurements suggest.
Meteorites form a fossil record of the conditions that existed when they formed. By looking at the chemical makeup of some rocks, evidence has mounted in recent years that sun and the rest of the solar system formed from a cloud of debris blasted away from a number of supernovae.
But it is still unclear what that cloud – the solar nebula – looked like or how many stars might have been involved in the Sun's birth. Now, a team led by Martin Bizzarro of the Natural History Museum of Denmark has found one clue.
Bizzarro and colleagues measured the levels of titanium in meteorites from the moon and Mars as well as inclusions in some meteorites that are thought to be the oldest rocks in the solar system.
Stable forms
Titanium is a good probe for conditions billions of years ago because it does not evaporate easily. It also has a number of stable isotopes – forms of the element that contain different numbers of neutrons – that can be used to cross-check each other.
Although the concentration of titanium varied from rock to rock, the team found that two isotopes of titanium – titanium-50 and titanium-46 – were always found in the same ratio.
"It is quite astonishing," since these two different isotopes probably formed in different stellar explosions, Bizzarro told New Scientist. Titanium-46, which contains 22 protons and 24 neutrons, is created inside the cores of massive collapsing stars.
Titanium-50, which contains 22 protons and 28 neutrons, is commonly created when white dwarf stars explode as type Ia supernovae after gorging on a companion star.
Well mixed
If these two types of titanium come from two sources but are always found in the same ratio, the solar nebula must have been very well mixed. The level of mixing seems to exceed what meteorite researchers have seen in the isotopes of other elements, Bizzarro says.
"People thought that the isotope anomalies typically reflected that the cloud from which the solar system formed was not very well homogenised," says Bizzarro. He suspects the differences that are seen between the planets, asteroids, and other rocks came later, when the young sun was more active, sending out vaporising solar flares.
Stray cloud
But there may be alternative explanations for the seemingly universal ratio of titanium concentrations.
The mix could also be explained if a stray cloud of dust containing both varieties of titanium hit the early solar system, says Jeff Hester of Arizona State University in Tempe.
"Then you could have wild inhomogeneity in how the dust was distributed in the solar disc, while preserving the association between the two isotopes of titanium," he says.

NASA may send fleet of spacecraft to Venus

Two high-altitude balloons built to hover in sulphuric acid clouds could be part of a future fleet of spacecraft sent to Venus, a NASA advisory team says.
The multi-billion-dollar mission concept – which is being considered for launch in the next fifteen years – could help reveal more about Venus's runaway greenhouse effect, any oceans it may once have had, and possible ongoing volcanic activity.
It could be the next flagship mission sent to a planet, after a planned mission to Jupiter and its moons set for launch in 2020.
The Venus mission would cost some $3 billion to 4 billion and would launch between 2020 and 2025, according to NASA, which in 2008 tasked a group of scientists and engineers to formulate goals for the mission.
The team's study, which will be released in April, outlines a plan to study the hazy planet, which has more in common with Earth than any other in terms of distance from the Sun, size and mass, but evolved into an inhospitable world where surface temperatures hover close to 450°C and sulphuric acid rains from the sky.
The team's mission concept includes one orbiter, two balloons and two short-lived landers, all of which would launch into space on two Atlas V rockets.
"Our understanding of Venus is so low, we really need this armada," says planetary scientist Mark Bullock of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, one of the team leaders.
Signs of water
As an ensemble, the spacecraft could help reveal what happened to Venus's oceans. Researchers believe water was once plentiful enough to have been able to cover the entire planet in a layer 100 metres deep.
But Venus's hothouse climate eventually dried up most of this water, a process that might have also slowed and eventually stopped plate tectonics on the planet.
The landers, which would only last a few hours in the intense heat, could look for evidence of minerals formed by water. Since such hydrated minerals have a limited lifetime, they could help reveal how long Venus's oceans might have lasted, a question that could shed light on whether life might have arisen on the planet.
Long-lived balloons
The mission's two balloons would each carry a gondola full of scientific instruments to sniff the atmosphere at an altitude of 55 kilometres.
The last balloons to study Venus, sent by the Soviet Union, descended into the planet's hazy atmosphere in 1985. Each is thought to have lasted just a few days. But the NASA balloons could be designed to last for a month, enough time for each to circumnavigate the planet seven times.
The mission could also help reveal more about the origin of Venus's current carbon dioxide atmosphere, which produces crushing surface pressures 90 times those on Earth.
Cataclysmic impact
It's unclear whether the planet once lost much of its atmosphere in a cataclysmic impact, like the Earth did in the impact that formed the Moon, later replenishing it with volcanic activity, or whether it has held onto its original atmosphere.
The balloons and descending landers could study this by measuring isotopes of xenon, an unreactive gas that is relatively heavy and therefore should stay put in the atmosphere, barring any violent impacts. If lightweight isotopes of the gas are relatively abundant, that would suggest that the planet has held onto much of its original atmosphere.
The balloons would also be test particles that could be used to track Venus's super-fast winds, which, for reasons that are still not understood, move around the planet 60 times faster than the planet's surface rotates.
Active volcanism
The orbiter could reveal whether geological activity continues on the planet, by looking for bulges on the surface that could signal ongoing volcanic activity.
This activity has been hinted at by the presence of sulphuric acid in the atmosphere, but never seen. Venus boasts the most volcanoes of any planet in the solar system, and nearly 90% of its surface is covered by basaltic lava flows. Finding ongoing volcanic activity in certain spots would help account for the planet's extreme climate.
Although such a mission is at least a decade away, preliminary work may need to begin now. "Because it's such a challenging mission, we are going to recommend NASA begin investing in the required technology right away," Bullock told New Scientist.
Balloon tests
At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, research is already being done in the hopes of eventually getting funding to launch a smaller balloon-only mission to Venus, called VALOR.
The balloon is made of high-strength polymers and coated with aluminium to deflect most of the Sun's radiation, which could cause the balloon to heat up and burst. A layer of Teflon protects the balloon from sulphuric acid in Venus's atmosphere.
Later this year, the team is planning its first in-air deployment of the balloon. A helicopter will be used to carry the folded-up prototype to an altitude of 2 to 3 kilometres, where it will be released and inflated with helium while dropping to Earth beneath a parachute.

The latest weird idea: ‘Dark gulping’...................Dark-matter instability could have led to a Big Gulp of black-hole creation

No, it's not the next soft-drink campaign. "Dark gulping" is a new hypothesis about how giant black holes might have formed from collapsing dark matter.
Supermassive black holes are a mystery. These behemoths can pack the mass of billions of suns, and often lurk in the centers of big galaxies like the Milky Way. But scientists don't know how they got started nor how they grew so massive.
A new computer model suggests dark gulping is one possible route to forming these monsters. The idea involves invisible dark matter, which is stuff of unknown nature that astronomers know exists because they see its gravitational effects on galaxies......In this scenario, a large cloud of dark matter could interact with gas to form a dense central mass. Depending on how the dark matter stores heat, this mass could be unstable. A small disturbance might prompt the dark matter to collapse quickly, gulping itself down to create a black hole. Though it would originally be invisible, soon it would gobble down regular matter and gas and, with all that material swirling in and being superheated and luminous, become visible.
This hypothesis seems plausible, but there is no proof yet that it ever happened, said Kinwah Wu, an astrophysicist at University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, who built the model with colleague Curtis Saxton.
"It's a viable, possible scenario," Wu told Space.com. "The model works, but it doesn't mean that nature behaves like that. We need more observational proof or disproof of this."
Saxton will present the findings this week at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, England.
Black holes can't be seen because once light and matter get inside one, they are trapped. But on the way in, all the material creates a chaotic mess of radiation that does escape into space. From observations of faraway quasars — bright objects thought to be anchored by black holes and surrounded by intense star formation — scientists think that supermassive black holes existed when the universe was less than a billion years old. Yet most theories about these gigantors can't explain how they formed so early.

Satellite collision could have been far worse

The unprecedented collision between an Iridium communications satellite and a derelict Russian Cosmos 2251 communications satellite on 10 February could have been far worse. One satellite probably did not hit the other's massive body directly but only rammed into a protruding solar panel or antenna, NASA has concluded.
At the end of March, NASA had catalogued 823 large pieces of debris from the collision, well below the roughly 1300 fragments expected from a direct collision of the 900-kilogram Cosmos with the 560-kg Iridium. More pieces are still being catalogued.
Observations show about two-thirds of the pieces came from the Cosmos, a compact cylinder with solar panels covering its circumference. Iridium satellites are longer, thinner cylinders with appendages such as solar panels and antennas projecting from them.
"The Iridium is underrepresented" in the debris, says Mark Matney of NASA's orbital debris programme, so it's possible that something projecting from the Iridium smashed into the Cosmos. That collision, at a velocity of more than 11 km/s, broke up the Cosmos more severely than the Iridium.
"Body-to-body collisions are the worst case. As near as we can tell, that's what happened with the Chinese anti-satellite test," Matney told New Scientist. That test shattered a 750-kg Chinese weather satellite in January 2007, producing thousands of pieces of debris.
"Each breakup has a character all its own" because satellites have different structures, says Matney. Studying the events should help NASA better understand collisions, which are inevitable as satellite and debris populations grow.
So far most fragments remain near the 790-km elevation where the collision occurred. There they threaten the 70 remaining Iridium satellites (including spares) and important Earth-observing satellites. Few of the pieces have reached lower orbits occupied by the International Space Station and the space shuttle.

Life-friendly worlds may snap, crackle and pop

ALIEN worlds that are friendly to life could reveal themselves by radio signals crackling from their magnetic fields.
When struck by high energy particles in the solar wind, an exoplanet's magnetic field may produce radio signals from auroras in the planet's atmosphere. While current telescopes have yet to pick up these crackles, it's an area worth exploring, argue Joseph Lazio at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and colleagues in a paper submitted to Astro2010.
Because a magnetic field helps to preserve atmospheres and oceans, a magnetosphere may signify that a planet has complex surface life. "This is something we think is worth studying at a modest level," says Lazio, "the payoff could be immense."
The snag is that we would need a space telescope 100 times as sensitive as any planned to find auroras within a few dozen light years, because the Earth's atmosphere would absorb the low frequency signals.
That leads some planet hunters to doubt the idea's feasibility. We have never directly detected the magnetosphere from any extrasolar planet, despite strong efforts, says Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley. Yet planetary magnetospheres would be easier to spot at radio frequencies than planets themselves, says Gordon Walker of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who has spotted an exoplanet's magnetic field indirectly by studying its host star. "It's an exciting proposal," he says.

Asteroids won't raise killer waves - but mind the splash

THE odds of encountering a tsunami kicked up by an asteroid strike have just plummeted. Best to hope, though, that you're not underneath the almighty splash such an impact could create.
Small impactors hit us far more frequently than larger ones: a 200-metre asteroid hits Earth about every 10,000 years on average, while 10-kilometre objects like the one that probably killed off the dinosaurs strike every 100 million years. Much of the worry over asteroids has centred on the more likely event of a smaller one splashing down in the ocean and triggering a powerful tsunami.
Now simulations to be presented at an asteroid hazard conference in Granada, Spain, this month suggest that small asteroids do not after all pose a major tsunami threat.
Galen Gisler of the University of Oslo, Norway, and colleagues used software originally written to simulate the effects of underwater nuclear explosions to hurl a virtual 200-metre asteroid into an ocean 5 kilometres deep. The impact initially sends waves hundreds of metres high spreading from the impact site. However, the very height of the waves makes them prone to collapse even in very deep water: they start breaking immediately, like ordinary waves on a beach.By the time they are 30 kilometres from the impact site, they have shrunk to a height of less than 60 metres. The team did not simulate the waves' propagation much further, but extrapolating the shrinkage suggests heights of less than 10 metres by the time they have travelled 1000 kilometres.
That might not seem very reassuring. Tsunamis with open ocean heights of less than a metre can still be very damaging because they rise up as they come ashore and penetrate far inland, but this is related to their long wavelengths and characteristic periods of 8 minutes or more. Asteroid waves would have shorter wavelengths and periods of less than 2 minutes, says Gisler, and so far less penetrating power.
Steven Ward of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has conducted his own simulations and suspects methods in Gisler's calculations meant to smooth away errors are accidentally damping down the waves. Ward's own results suggest much slower wave decay. Gisler responds that his simulations are more realistic, pointing out that previous modelling leaves out fine-scale turbulent motion that helps dissipate wave energy.
A strike near a populated coastline would undoubtedly cause major damage, however. "You don't want to be close to one of these things," says Gisler. "Local effects will include hurricane-force winds and enormous amounts of water falling directly from the sky." His simulations suggest that a 200-metre asteroid would make a splash of billions of tonnes of water, which would descend at up to 300 metres per second within about 20 kilometres of the impact site.
Brian Toon of the Universityof Colorado in Boulder says we should continue surveying for asteroids. "We probably have quite a while before we're going to get hit by a significantly sized [asteroid]," he says. "But nevertheless one of these is going to come at us."

'Sigmoids' on the sun could help predict space storms

The formation and eruption of large "S"-shaped structures on the surface of the sun have been modelled in the best detail yet. Further refinements of the model might help sun-watchers predict severe space storms days in advance.
'Sigmoids' are S-shaped structures that appear intermittently on the sun's surface. Many produce eruptions of hot ionised gas, or plasma, such as coronal mass ejections and flares. If the eruptions are powerful enough, they can zap satellites, endanger astronauts, and knock out power grids .Until now, models of the structures have not been able to reproduce the full lifetime of a sigmoid from its beginnings within the sun to its eventual eruption sometimes days later. But now researchers say they have come up with a simple model that could do just that.
"For the first time, we have built a three-dimensional model that shows in a very nice and self-consistent way the evolution and final eruption of a sigmoid," says Vasilis Archontis of St Andrews University in Scotland.

Sibling worlds may be wettest and lightest known

A planet orbiting a red dwarf star 20 light years away could be the first known water world, entirely covered by a deep ocean.
The planet, named Gliese 581d, is not a new discovery, but astronomers have now revised its orbit inwards, putting it within the "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist on the surface. "It is the only low-mass planet known inside the habitable zone", says Michel Mayor of Geneva Observatory.
Mayor and his team used the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile to observe the low-mass star Gliese 581, and a precise spectrometer called HARPS to analyse its light.
That turned up the faint footprints of four planets, since the orbiting planets make the star wobble slightly, giving its light a slight Doppler shift. Three of the planets had been identified previously.
The outermost planet had been thought to have a period of 83 days, putting it too far away from the small star's gentle heat to bear liquid water. But that was a mistake. "We only had a limited number of observations", Mayor told New Scientist. Now with three times as much data, he finds an orbital period of 66 days, putting the planet closer to its star – about a quarter of the Earth-Sun distance – and just inside the red dwarf's habitable zone.

Giant space tornadoes create Earth's auroras

On the dark side of the Earth, space is riddled with giant plasma tornadoes that power shimmering auroras, new observations reveal.
Researchers operating the five spacecraft of NASA's THEMIS mission reported the discovery today at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria.
They were measuring how the solar wind, a flow of charged particles from the sun, interacts with Earth's magnetic field.
On the Earth's dark side, the solar wind stretches out the field, forming a region known as the magnetotail. The magnetotail is like a rubber band; when it is stretched too far, "eventually it snaps and releases the energy", says team member Andreas Keiling of the University of California, Berkeley.

Our Planet's Leaky Atmosphere

Many of the gases that make up Earth’s atmosphere and those of the other planets are slowly leaking into space. Hot gases, especially light ones, evaporate away; chemical reactions and particle collisions eject atoms and molecules; and asteroids and comets occasionally blast out chunks of atmosphere.
This leakage explains many of the solar system’s mysteries. For instance, Mars is red because its water vapor got broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen drifted away, and the surplus oxygen oxidized—in essence, rusted—the rocks. A similar process on Venus let carbon dioxide build up into a thick ocean of air; ironically, Venus’s huge atmosphere is the result of the loss of gases.

Dark matter may have ripped up early universe

BY ABOUT a billion years after the big bang, our universe was reionised. Hydrogen atoms were torn apart into electrons and protons, but the perpetrator has been something of a mystery. Could dark matter be responsible?
Neutral atoms, mostly of hydrogen, formed about 380,000 years after the big bang, when the universe cooled enough for electrons and nuclei to combine. Most astronomers suspect that the hydrogen was reionised by the first generation of stars (see diagram). No telescope has ever peered far enough back in time to see the first stars form, but they are thought to have been giants, and their ferocious ultraviolet light could have done the trick.
But Dan Hooper and Alexander Belikov of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, think that dark matter - the unseen stuff that makes up about 85 per cent of all matter - could have reionised the universe. Dark matter is thought to be made of massive particles that are predicted to annihilate when they collide, spewing out radiation.
When dark matter clumped together under gravity in the early universe, some of the particles would have annihilated, resulting in high-energy gamma rays. Each gamma ray would have knocked out an electron from a hydrogen atom, which in turn would have dislodged an electron in another atom, and so on (www.arxiv.org/abs/0904.1210). "A single gamma ray might reionise 1000 hydrogen atoms," says Hooper. "The mechanism could easily have reionised the universe."
Using one unsolved mystery to solve another makes some people sceptical. "We have no evidence yet that any dark matter has ever annihilated," says Charles Bennett, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and principal investigator on NASA's WMAP satellite, which has been studying the reionisation epoch. "I am not saying it is wrong, but it sounds a bit too contrived for me to eagerly accept it."
Hooper says that the European Space Agency's upcoming Planck mission, the successor to WMAP, will study how reionisation proceeded with time. "The time signature of dark matter reionisation will be different from that brought about by stars," says Hooper.

Heavyweight galaxies in the young universe ...........Newfound massive galaxies may force theorists to revisit formation model

Peering into the center of five of the youngest clusters of galaxies known in the universe, astronomers recently found several full-grown, cigar-chomping adults among the myriad of toddlers. The remote galaxies hail from a time when the 13.7-billion-year-old cosmos was less than 5 billion years old. Yet measurements reveal that the bodies are just as massive as galaxies like the modern-day Milky Way, which took at least 10 billions years to mature.
The findings appear to call into question the leading theory of galaxy formation, known as the dark matter model — at least as it applies to the dense regions where galaxies congregate into clusters, says Chris Collins, an astronomer at the Liverpool John Moores University in England. He and his colleagues used the infrared Subaru telescope atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to observe the galaxies, and the team describes the findings in the April 2 Nature.
“No doubt the theorists will want to say that tweaking [the model] in very dense regions will suffice, but I think the problem could be more general than that,” Collins says.
The highly successful model holds that the gravity of a proposed, invisible material known as cold dark matter draws together gas and stars to form galaxies. Due to the properties of dark matter, the model always builds tiny, lightweight galaxies first, merging these small-fry to make bigger bodies. Indeed, dark matter simulations suggest that at such a young age, the galaxies the team examined should have attained only 20 percent of the weight that the astronomers observed.
In the dense environment of a cluster galaxy formation is predicted to occur more quickly. Nonetheless, there doesn’t seem to have been enough time, some 4 billion to 5 billion years after the Big Bang, for the five massive galaxies to have formed by the merging of smaller galaxies, according to the model. The findings suggest that some massive galaxies formed wholesale, rather than building up stars and gas little by little as they cannibalized their neighbors.

Russia to Delay Martian Moon Mission ..............Two-year setback seen as a blow to Russian space program's world standing

PHOBOS: Two possible landing sites proposed for Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission.
7 April 2009—Russia will announce a two-year delay of its flagship planetary mission this month, a project participant told IEEE Spectrum.
The 11-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, designed to land on the surface of the Martian moon Phobos and return samples of its soil back to Earth, was scheduled to lift off October 2009. A number of science institutions around the world have contributed instruments and experiments for the ambitious project. However, according to Francis Rocard, a scientist at CNES, the French space agency, which supplied some of the scientific payloads for the project, Russian space officials are about to announce a postponement of Phobos-Grunt’s launch to 2011.
“What we know is that they are waiting for the 2009 budget [to be finalized], and then they will announce a delay,” says Rocard. Since the orbital mechanics only allow launches to Mars once every 25 to 26 months, the next opportunity for the Phobos-Grunt mission to leave Earth would not come until the end of 2011 or beginning of 2012.
Many reports cite unnamed sources saying there were problems with the spacecraft development during 2008 and 2009, but Russian space officials continue to insist that the mission will leave for Mars as scheduled during the 2009 launch window.
The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft would be the first Russian attempt to send the planetary probe beyond the Earth orbit since 1996, when another mission to the Red Planet involving wide international participation ended in a launch mishap. In the ensuing years, the Phobos-Grunt project had acquired an important political purpose: to prove that Russia was returning to deep-space exploration and could lead a major international science project. As a result, Russian scientific and engineering managers in charge of the project were probably under political pressure to maintain the promised launch date despite overwhelming odds. Although Phobos-Grunt has been on the books since the end of the 1990s, the real funding for the project started in 2007—way too late for the development of such a complex mission, say experts.
Representatives of the Russian space agency and the state-controlled Russian press continued to actively promote the project as late as the beginning of 2009. In the meantime, anonymous postings on Internet forums—such as Novosti Kosmonavtiki, a magazine popular among Russian space engineers—were saying that many critical aspects of the mission, such as flight control computers and software, were in the embryonic state of development, making an October launch seem impossible and calling into question even the 2011 launch date. Critics have long called the Phobos-Grunt an overly ambitious enterprise that is beyond the current experience of a Russian space industry battered by a decade of economic crisis, dwindling staff, inadequate funding, and poor management.
“All this is going to end up in a scandal,” says Roald Sagdeev, a physics professor at the University of Maryland and former director of the Space Research Institute (IKI), in Moscow, which oversees the science program of the Phobos-Grunt mission. “This project became so politically loaded that people involved will probably be reluctant to admit the true state of affairs until the very last minute,” he says.
Lev Zelenyi, the current director of IKI, would not comment when Spectrum questioned him about the status of the mission.
Russia is not alone in having to delay a Mars mission. In December 2008, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, featuring the largest rover yet to drive on the surface of Mars, was postponed from 2009 to 2011. In October 2008, the launch of a European rover, which was expected to focus on the search for life on Mars, had to be pushed back from 2013 to 2016.

'Hidden photons' to send secret emails through Earth

IF YOU shine a laser on the floor, where does the light go? With the right preparation, some of it might pop out at the other side of the world - an effect that could be exploited to transmit secret messages through the ground.
That is the conclusion of Andreas Ringwald at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, and colleagues, who have explored the possibility of hypothetical particles called "hidden photons" (http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.5300). "If such particles exist, then we can use them to communicate," says Ringwald. "It's very simple."
Hidden photons are a class of particles predicted by so-called supersymmetric extensions to the standard model of particle physics. Unlike normal photons, hidden photons could have a tiny mass and would be invisible because they would not interact with the charged particles in conventional matter. This means hidden photons would flit through even the densest materials unaffected.
The only place to spot them is in a vacuum, where they should sometimes "oscillate" into normal photons. There are already experiments searching for this effect: the idea is to shine a laser at a wall in a vacuum and see if any of the photons make it through to the other side by transforming into their hidden counterparts and back again. According to Ringwald's group, if these experiments succeed it should be possible to scale up the apparatus so that the hidden photons become signal carriers and the "wall" becomes any stretch of ground or water.

The five greatest mysteries of antimatter

IT WAS not so long ago that we were hearing how CERN's Large Hadron Collider would produce planet-destroying black holes. Now Dan Brown's blockbuster, due to hit the big screen next month, provides us with another supposed danger emanating from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland: antimatter, the seed of a weapon of unsurpassed destructive power.
While Brown's take on antimatter is fictional, the stuff certainly isn't. We see its signature in cosmic rays, and it is routinely made in high-energy collisions inside particle smashers the world over. In hospitals, radioactive molecules that emit antimatter particles are used for imaging in the technique known as positron emission tomography.
Brown was right about one thing, though: if you want answers to the burning questions of antimatter, CERN is the place to go.

Missing planets suggest stars 'eat' their young

Exoplanets that venture near their host stars are doomed to premature deaths – even before they get close enough to be ripped apart by the stars' gravity, two new studies suggest.
A star's gravity can put a nearby planet on a 'fast track' to spiralling into the star and may also cause the planet to lose much of its atmosphere, the studies say. The research may help explain why few exoplanets have been found right next to their host stars.
More than 300 exoplanets have been catalogued to date. Many are situated close to their host stars, where it is thought to be too hot for gas and dust to collapse into planets in the first place. That implies that the planets came from farther away and migrated inwards.
But strangely, the closest-in ones are commonly found some 0.05 astronomical units (AU) from their host stars (1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the sun). This distance, which corresponds to a three-day orbit around a star as heavy as the sun, is sometimes called the "three-day pile-up".
No one is sure why the planets seem to pile up there. Very close to a star, at a boundary called the Roche limit, planets are dismembered by the star's gravity. But the migration of planets seems to stop well outside this limit.

Experts urge US to share data on satellite orbits

The US government's reluctance thus far to release precise data about the satellites it is tracking is hampering efforts to prevent collisions in space, a satellite industry executive told a congressional committee on Tuesday.
The US tracks and predicts the orbits of the world's satellites and thousands of bits of space junk as small as 10 centimetres across, using radar and telescopes on the ground. But it closely guards its most precise data, and routinely releases only lower-precision data to satellite companies and other countries.
That makes it difficult for satellite operators to predict a collision with another satellite or piece of space junk, said Richard DalBello of satellite operator Intelsat General in testimony to a congressional hearing on Tuesday about space debris and safety.
To help avoid accidents like the one in February in which a Russian communications satellite collided with an American one, some commercial operators are pooling information on the positions and orbits of their satellites, based on their own tracking data.

Most distant object in the universe spotted

Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe – a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth. It detonated just 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic "dark ages", when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space.
The object is a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the brightest type of stellar explosion. GRBs occur when massive, spinning stars collapse to form black holes and spew out jets of gas at nearly the speed of light. These jets send gamma rays our way, along with "afterglows" at other wavelengths, which are produced when the jet heats up surrounding gas.
The burst, dubbed GRB 090423 for the date of its discovery last Thursday, was originally spotted by NASA's Swift satellite at 0755 GMT.
Within an hour, astronomers began training ground-based telescopes on the same patch of sky to study the burst's infrared afterglow. Some of the first observations were made on Mauna Kea in Hawaii with the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the Gemini North telescope.
Other telescopes later measured the spectrum of the afterglow, revealing that the burst detonated about 13.1 billion light years from Earth. "It's the most distant gamma-ray burst, but it's also the most distant object in the universe overall," says Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a member of the team that observed the afterglow with Gemini North.

Asteroid tracked from space to Earth

They saw it coming, and they got what was coming to them. For the first time, researchers not only detected an asteroid in space, but also tracked its progress and then collected its debris after it crashed to Earth.
The car-sized asteroid, dubbed 2008 TC3, landed in northern Sudan on October 7, 2008, scientists report in the March 25 Nature. The study combines for one asteroid data that are usually separate: Comparing data from observations of the asteroid in while it was space with analysis of its meteorite fragments on Earth will yield new insights into asteroids, the scientists say.
Small asteroids like 2008 TC3 are fairly common, with about one asteroid impacting Earth each year. But these small asteroids are usually not spotted until they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. “It’s like when bugs splatter on the windshield. You don’t see the bug until it’s too late,” says physicist and study coauthor Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Bigger asteroids are easier to spot but are much less common. “You’d see a baseball coming towards the windshield much sooner,” Boslough says. And it’s hard to detect the small asteroids because even powerful telescopes can only scan a small portion of the sky each night.
Scientists got lucky when they spotted 2008 TC3 using the Catalina Sky Survey telescope atop Mount Lemmon north of Tucson, Ariz. “It just so happened that the asteroid was coming from the direction that the telescope was pointed in,” says astronomer and study coauthor Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
As 2008 TC3 hurtled through space, researchers studied the spectra of sunlight reflected from its surface to get information about the asteroid’s mineral composition. The spectra showed that the asteroid was likely to come from the mysterious F-class of asteroids, a class only observed in space but not yet found as a meteorite on Earth..
Monitoring 2008 TC3’s progress, researchers correctly predicted that it would impact the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan about 19 hours after it was first spotted. Eyewitnesses reported seeing a fireball as the asteroid exploded over the desert.
Jenniskens and 45 students and staff from the University of Khartoum in Sudan searched for remnants along the asteroid’s projected path. The recovery team eventually found about 47 meteorites from 2008 TC3.
When the researchers got the meteorites back to the lab, they were in for a surprise. “The recovered meteorites were unlike anything in our collections up to that point,” Jenniskens says.
Studying the ratio of oxygen isotopes revealed that the meteorites were of the rare ureilite category. “This is the first time that ureilites were linked to F-class asteroids,” comments astronomer David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Researchers had previously thought ureilite meteorites came only from S-class asteroids.
Following 2008 TC3 also gave the researchers the opportunity to test their asteroid tracking devices. If a dangerously large asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, scientists would want to know that everything worked, Boslough says

Giant mystery blob found near dawn of time..........Galaxy-sized object puzzles astronomers; is it related to a black hole?

WASHINGTON - A strange giant space “blob” spotted when the universe was relatively young has got astronomers puzzled.
Using space and ground telescopes, astronomers looked back to when the universe was only 800 million years old and found something that was out of proportion and out of time. It was gaseous, big, and emitted a certain type of radiation, said study lead author Masami Ouchi, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.
Scientists don’t even know what to call it. So they just called it a radiation-emitting “blob.” They used that horror-film staple 34 times in their peer-reviewed study, which will be published in next month’s edition of the Astrophysical Journal. More formally, they named it Himiko, after a legendary ancient Japanese queen. The photo of it is beyond fuzzy.
“The puzzle is — what is it?” said California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis, who wasn’t on the research team but praised the find. “Often a puzzle leads to a breakthrough. My nose tells me that this object is rather special.”
Ouchi and Ellis said one possibility is that by chance, astronomers captured the moment a galaxy was forming in the early universe — something that never has been seen before.
As astronomers gaze deeper into space, they are looking farther back in time. What Ouchi found was from 12.9 billion years ago. Only three other objects have been seen that are from deeper in time and space.
But what’s most remarkable about this blob is its size: It's 55,000 light-years long, which is comparable to the radius of the disk-shaped Milky Way. According to many theories of the universe, nothing was supposed to be that big at that time in the universe. The other objects from that period are far smaller, Ouchi said.
Ouchi said it also could be two colliding galaxies, or might have something to do with a black hole.

Antimatter scout to hitch last shuttle ride

The crowning glory of the International Space Station has nothing to do with preparing humans to live on the moon or finding a cure for Salmonella. It's a particle detector designed to hunt for an antimatter universe.