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Engineers opened the hatch of the Mars 500 space capsule this week and six "cosmonauts" emerged from a simulated three-month interplanetary flight. Next year, the Russian and European space agencies will send another crew on a longer simulated mission to Mars and back, lasting a year and a half. The cosmonauts - four from Russia and two from western Europe - live in isolation in a mock spacecraft outside Moscow, experiencing conditions as close as possible to a real flight. There is, for instance, a communication delay of up to 20 minutes each way, to reflect the time taken for radio signals to travel between Mars and Earth. But the very fact that the two agencies are spending millions to assess the psychological and medical effects of interplanetary travel is a statement of long-term intent. dreaming of mars dreaming of mars "I hope that the scientific data we have provided over the last two months will help to make a mission to Mars possible," said Oliver Kni...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday. Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004. Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth two years later in a canister that detached from the spacecraft and landed by parachute in the Utah desert. Comets like Wild 2, named for astronomer Paul Wild (pronounced Vild), are believed to contain well-preserved grains of material dating from the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago, and thus clues to the formation of the sun and planets. The initial detection of glycine, t...

A NASA study has found that data have found that groundwater levels in northern India have been declining at an alarming rate, by as much as one foot per year over the last decade. Beneath northern India’s irrigated fields of wheat, rice, and barley ... beneath its densely populated cities of Jaiphur and New Delhi, the groundwater has been disappearing, said the US space agency in a statement. Where is northern India’s underground water supply going? According to Matt Rodell and colleagues, it is being pumped and consumed by human activities -- principally to irrigate cropland -- faster than the aquifers can be replenished by natural processes. They based their conclusions -- published in the August 20 issue of Nature -- on observations from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). The GRACE is a satellite system launched in 2002 by NASA and the German Aerospace Center and allows scientists to estimate changes in groundwater storage by measuring tiny variations in the Ea...

Staff Reporter BANGALORE: Groundwater levels in Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi are falling dramatically — by one foot a year — a trend that could lead to “extensive socio-economic stresses” for the region’s 114 million residents, says a scientific paper based on the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s satellite imagery. A staggering 109 cubic km of groundwater has been lost in just six years (2002-08) — a figure twice the capacity of India’s largest surface reservoir Upper Wainganga and “much more” than the government’s estimation, says the paper published in the latest issue of international journal Nature. The depletion is caused entirely by human activity such as irrigation, and not natural climatic variability, concludes the study co-authored by Matthew Rodell, a hydrologist with NASA. Groundwater is being pumped out faster than it is being replenished. The finding is based on images from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a pair of satel...

A full-scale mockup of NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle is coming to the Challenger Learning Center on Monday as it travels from the Kennedy Space Center to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Advertisement The Orion is part of NASA’s Constellation Program, which is developing America’s next-generation human spacecraft, said Jessie Riley Eason, a spokeswoman for the Challenger Center. It will be at the Challenger Center bus ramp at College Avenue and Duval Street noon-3 p.m. The mockup is used in tests to study the environment for astronauts and recovery crews after splashdown.

A new $2 million warning system funded by NASA could help pilots avert rough patches, easing passenger jitters and dodging the type of hard knocks that hit a Boeing 767 jet Monday and injured 28 people. Advertisement Such "clear-air" turbulence lurks without clouds, any warning or a storm in sight. It can cause upheavals in flight attendants with the strongest of intestinal fortitudes and rattle even the grittiest of pilots, not to mention passengers. Flight instructor Scott Haun knows those knocks well. "Even a drop of 15 to 20 feet is substantial if you're not belted in," said Haun, owner and chief flight instructor for Voyager Aviation at Merritt Island Airport. "It's sort of like going off-roading in your car without a seatbelt." In two years, pilots will have new tools, aided by artificial intelligence, to allow them to better tell when the ride is about to get bumpy. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is developing a prototype syste...

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has sent spacecraft to the farthest reaches of the solar system. Its latest mission is a bit closer to home: helping Los Angeles save water and energy while cutting the sprawling metropolis’s greenhouse gas emissions. As part of a partnership with the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the propulsion lab will repurpose technology developed to explore the cosmos and monitor Earth’s environment. “We have people trying to understand what challenges the Los Angeles basin is facing and how some of these technologies and missions being developed by NASA can be relevant,” said Charles Elachi, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an interview Tuesday. Foremost among those challenges is water. The Los Angeles basin is essentially a desert and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s 3.8 million customers depend on water piped in from the Sierra Nevada, the Owens Valley and the Colorado ...

The planet orbits very close to its parent star A Nasa space observatory launched in March this year has observed a planet circling another star. In a test of its capability, the orbiting Kepler telescope detected the planet's atmosphere. Kepler will survey our region of the Milky Way for Earth-sized planets which might be capable of supporting life. The telescopes first findings are based on 10 days of data collected before the start of official science operations. The results have been published in the journal Science. The observations are of a planet called HAT-P-7, known to transit a star located about 1,000 light-years from Earth. This distant world orbits its star in just 2.2 days and is 26 times closer than Earth is to the Sun. The light curve from the planet reveals that its atmosphere has a day-side temperature of about 2,377C (4,310F). "This early result shows the Kepler detection system is performing right on the mark," said David Koch, deputy principal investi...

WASHINGTON — Where to in space? A blue-ribbon panel charged by the Obama administration to review the United States’ human spaceflight program has narrowed the options to seven. In three meetings last week, subcommittees of the panel presented possibilities for space flight after NASA retires its space shuttles, coming up with 864 permutations, said Edward F. Crawley, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a panel member. “All we have to do is get it down to three by next week,” Dr. Crawley said Wednesday, drawing laughter at a meeting at the Carnegie Institution. “That’s not a joke,” he added. Three of the options under consideration will stay within the reduced budgets the administration is proposing for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the next decade. One essentially continues the current program of returning astronauts to the Moon — developed by the Bush administration after the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003 — but gives up on the ...

Felicia is the storm that rules the Eastern Pacific Ocean this week, but Enrique refuses to give up. Felicia is a major hurricane with sustained winds near 140 mph, and Enrique is still hanging onto tropical storm status with 50 mph sustained winds. Both cyclones are close to each other and two NASA satellites captured them together. On August 6 at 5 a.m. EDT, powerful Felicia is still a category four hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. She's far out to sea, about 1,480 miles west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California near 15.5 north and 131.2 west. She's moving west-northwest near 10 mph, and is expected to speed up and start to weaken in the next couple of days because of colder waters in her path. Felicia's minimum central pressure is 937 millibars. Boys can be stubborn, and Enrique is proving that, even though he's a tropical storm with a boy's name. Despite Enrique's close proximity to Felicia, he's maintaining sustained winds ne...

NASA's sustainability base building at Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, Calif. NASA is set to break ground on what the agency expects to be the highest performing building in the federal government's portfolio. Named Sustainability Base, the new building at Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., will be a showplace for sustainable technologies, featuring "NASA Inside" through the incorporation of some of the agency’s most advanced recycling and intelligent controls technologies originally developed to support NASA’s human and robotic space exploration missions. In this 40th anniversary year of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon and humanity’s first historic steps onto the surface of another world, NASA has chosen the name Sustainability Base as an homage to the original "Tranquility Base" and the brave astronauts and other men and women of NASA who accomplished what is generally regarded to be the defining event of the 20th century. Sustainability Base ...

NASA has made a series of critical strides in developing new nuclear reactors the size of a trash can that could power a human outpost on the moon or Mars. Three recent tests at different NASA centers and a national lab have successfully demonstrated key technologies required for compact fission-based nuclear power plants for human settlements on other worlds. “This recent string of technology development successes confirms that the fission surface power project is on the right path,” said Don Palac, NASA's fission surface power project manager at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, in a statement. NASA's current plan for human space exploration is to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 on sortie missions that could lead to a permanent outpost for exploring the lunar surface and testing technologies that could aid a manned mission to Mars. The space agency has been studying the feasibility of using nuclear fission power plants to support future moon bases. Engineers...

WASHINGTON — The case of a former top NASA official, accused of enriching himself and helping a consulting client get $9.6 million in grants, was headed to the jury Thursday. Courtney Stadd, NASA's former chief of staff and White House liaison, "owed the public and taxpayers his undivided loyalty, but he betrayed that loyalty to line his and his client's pockets," said prosecutor Matthew Solomon in closing arguments. Defense attorney Dorrance Dickens said Stadd was following his boss' orders on where to send the grant money. The federal court jury was to began afternoon deliberations in the case of Stadd, accused of breaking ethics laws and lying about it. Stadd had left NASA in 2003 and started a consulting business, but he returned in 2005 as the agency's interim No. 3 official. He declined an offer from Mike Griffin, who had just taken over as NASA administrator, to be considered for a permanent position as his deputy. Stadd said he had two d...

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:12:43 AM GMT+0530 Space shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven astronauts touched down at 10:48 a.m. EDT at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bringing an end to a complex mission to install the final section of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory on the International Space Station. All of the STS-127 crew members are doing well after today's landing. "The folks that have worked this mission really deserve a lot of praise for what they got accomplished during the time that we were docked to the International Space Station," STS-127 Commander Mark Polansky said during an afternoon news conference Friday. "In addition to that, it's a tremendous pleasure and honor to bring back a great astronaut from Japan, Koichi Wakata." Wakata returned from the station as a member of the STS-127 crew after serving as the outpost's flight engineer since March. Replacing him aboard the station is Flight Engineer Tim Kopr...

NASA finds more evidence about water in Mars. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently has sent back data showing fractures in the surface that are called water's footprints. It has spied hundreds of small fractures on the surface of the Red Planet. Scientists believe that billions of years ago, those fractures directed water flows through underground sandstone. Scientist believe that this is one more piece of evidence that water used to flow across the surface of our neighboring planet years back. "These structures are important sites for future exploration and investigations into the geological history of water and water-related processes on Mars," said Chris Okubo, a planetary scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. "Groundwater often flows along fractures such as these, and knowing that these are deformation bands helps us understand how the underground plumbing may have worked within these layered deposits." In July, the Jet Propulsion Labor...

(CNN) -- He was not able to fulfill his childhood dream of being a pilot, but Ghanaian scientist Dr. Ave Kludze has arguably gone one better: developing and flying spacecrafts for NASA. The moon, Mars and beyond: All are in the sights of Dr. Ave Kludze. The moon, Mars and beyond: All are in the sights of Dr. Ave Kludze. The 43-year-old didn't enter orbit when controlling a NASA rocket to launch the Calipso environmental satellite in 2006, instead piloting it from the control center on the ground. Nevertheless from growing up in Ghana to being an astronautical engineer and strategist for NASA, he has had a similarly stratospheric rise to the top. Growing up in Accra, Kludze was fascinated by science and how things worked. "I was a very curious kid and I always questioned lots of things, and most of my friends I grew up with, they knew that. And my parents, they were a little bit concerned because sometimes I would take apart a lot of things they would not want me to touch,...

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The British government will push for a computer hacker who broke into Pentagon and NASA computers to serve his jail time in the United Kingdom if a United States court sentences him to jail, a top politician said Sunday. Briton Gary McKinnon is accused of carrying out the biggest ever U.S. military hacking operation. Briton Gary McKinnon is accused of carrying out the biggest ever U.S. military hacking operation. "We'll seek for him to serve any prison sentence, if he is sentenced to prison, back in this country," said Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Britain's governing Labour Party. Hacker Gary McKinnon, a British citizen, has admitted breaking the law and intentionally gaining unauthorized access to U.S. government computers. The U.S. wants him extradited to face trial there, while he has been fighting to be tried in Britain. He bases his case partly on the fact that he has Asperger syndrome, a type of autism. He lost an appeal at the H...

On July 20, Americans marked the 40th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon — this country's triumph in the space race launched by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. However, the Apollo 11 crew that executed that historic mission — Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon, and Michael Collins — spent more time talking about the future than past glories in an appearance July 19 at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. They called for a mission to Mars to revive interest in the U.S. space program, to the point of placing a colony on the red planet. Bob Carlton, one of the men behind that successful moon landing in 1969, agrees with that goal, but is pessimistic about whether it can be achieved. "It would be worthwhile to go to Mars, but it probably won't be us that does it because we're no longer motivated," said Carlton, who grew up in Rainbow City and served as flight controller in charge of guidance, navigation and control systems f...

Posted 33 minutes ago Updated 9 minutes ago No complaints here... Koichi Wakata wore the moisture-absorbent, odour-eating and bacteria-killing proto-type underwear for a month. No complaints here... Koichi Wakata wore the moisture-absorbent, odour-eating and bacteria-killing proto-type underwear for a month. (Reuters: NASA) A Japanese astronaut has boldly gone where no-one has ever gone before - and so have his underpants. Koichi Wakata wore moisture-absorbent, odour-eating and bacteria-killing proto-type underwear for a month as he worked in the orbiting International Space Station (ISS). Seeing the results may not be for the faint-hearted but this month-long undies experiment was all in the name of science. In a video link-up only a few days before landing back on Earth, Mr Wakata said he had come clean with his fellow crew members about his space undies. His understanding crew members did not even complain after Mr Wakata chowed down several space curries but, as they say, in space ...

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Washington, August 2 (ANI): The NASA Innovative Partnerships Program and the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation have announced the Green Flight Challenge, which is a flight efficiency competition for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon. The prize for the aircraft with the best performance is 1.5 million dollars. The competition is scheduled for July 2011 at the Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, California. A variety of innovative experimental aircraft using electrical, solar, bio-fuel or hybrid propulsion are expected to enter. Several major universities and aircraft builders have expressed their intention to enter teams in the challenge. To win, teams must use cutting-edge technologies in mechanical and electrical engineering, structures, aerodynamics and thermodynamics. As a national showcase of “green” technology, the challenge is expected to help advanc...

Viking 2 entered Mars orbit on Aug. 7, 1976, and set about separating fact from fiction surrounding the red planet. In 1906, "Mars and its Mystery" (Little, Brown and Co.) theorized that a "large, irregular, dark region" contained "bodies of waters, or seas. Š From remote times it has been taken for granted by the best of minds that other worlds besides ours sustain life." Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who developed the Saturn V that launched Americans to the moon, and Willy Ley discussed long-held theories in "The Exploration of Mars," (The Viking Press/1956). They wrote: "This was the picture of Mars at mid-century: a small planet of which three-quarters is cold desert, with the rest covered with a sort of plant life that our biological knowledge cannot quite encompass." In the mid-1890s, astronomer Percival Lowell was lecturing on Martian features he called canals, Mark Littman stated in "Planets Beyond" (Wiley Sc...

Astronaut Koichi Wakata (R) of the Japanese space agency JAXA, and other crew members take part in a news conference after they returned to Earth aboard the space shuttle Endeavour at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida July 31, 2009. From right are Wakata, David Wolf, Thomas Marshburn, Julie Payette of the Canadian Space Agency, Christopher Cassidy, Pilot Douglas Hurley and Mission Commander Mark Polansky.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

The Review of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee is expected to publish its report at the end of the month. It is charged with the thankless task of reaffirming or redirecting NASA's vision for space exploration. What should the agency be doing with its existing hardware and its plans for the future? The real catch is the part of their charter that reads, “fitting within the current budget profile for NASA exploration activities.” Money isn't NASA's only problem, but it has been its biggest problem for decades. NASA is one of the most successful agencies in history, providing the best return on investment of any government agency in my lifetime. My main concerns with NASA's plans going forward include the decision to ground the space shuttle, the woefully inadequate funding for the last several decades and the absence of a space program that will restore the sense of wonder and adventure to space exploration that we knew in the 1960s. The continuing debate for ...

Computerworld - After a grueling and technically intensive 16-day mission in space, the seven-person crew of the space shuttle Endeavour safely touched down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this morning. The shuttle landed as scheduled at 10:48 a.m. ET. It was a picture-perfect landing for a shuttle that had a tough time getting off the ground due to a gaseous hydrogen leak that scuttled two scheduled launches and bad weather that derailed three other attempts. The shuttle finally blasted off on July 15 - its sixth launch attempt. Yesterday, mission control specialists found that one of Endeavour's forward thrusters, which control altitude and speed upon re-entry, failed during a test of control systems. As shown today, NASA had reported that the shuttle could land safely without the thruster. Returning from orbit, the shuttle and its crew left behind a new porch for the Japanese laboratory on the International Space Station, new batteries installed to store power collected from...

Many people doubt the value of America’s manned space program and the billions of dollars spent on it annually. These naysayers simply don’t see what good comes from going to space. The value of human exploration of space is lost on them. They get no thrill from knowing men and women have left this mortal coil for the blackness of space, that men have walked on the moon and littered the rocky orb’s surface like inconsiderate campers. The fact is, the U.S. space program has spawned dozens of products, from enhanced baby formula to advanced means of breast cancer detection. NASA research has helped give us scratch-resistant lenses, more aerodynamic golf balls, voice-controlled wheelchairs, improved aircraft engines and advanced lubricants. But the latest innovation to come through the space research and development pipeline may just be the most significant — semi-permanent underwear. Astronaut Koichi Wakata spent the past four and one-half months aboard the International Space Station. H...