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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.