SCIENCE

NASA Fuel test a success, shuttle launch day set

By (AP)

To NASA's relief, a fueling test on space shuttle Endeavour uncovered no hydrogen gas leaks Wednesday and paved the way for another launch attempt late next week for the delayed mission.

Last month, potentially dangerous leaks of hydrogen gas thwarted back-to-back launch attempts.

"Nothing in this business is ever guaranteed, but this one I feel really good about, that we got that problem licked and we're not going to see a ... leak again on the next launch attempt," said Mike Moses, a launch manager.

"And there's wood around somewhere here I can knock on," he said,...

By (AP)

A fueling test on space shuttle Endeavour uncovered no worrisome hydrogen gas leaks Wednesday and paved the way for a launch in a week-and-a-half for the delayed mission, NASA said.

Last month, potentially dangerous leaks of hydrogen gas thwarted back-to-back launch attempts.

Early Wednesday morning, launch controllers filled the external fuel tank again to see if repairs plugged the leak. No abnormal leaks were detected during the three-hour test, and preliminary results indicated the repairs were successful, NASA spokeswoman Candrea Thomas said.

That means NASA can...

By (AP)

NASA is filling space shuttle Endeavour's fuel tank for a leak test.

Launch controllers began pumping a half-million gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen into the external fuel tank early Wednesday morning. They want to see whether repairs have plugged a hydrogen gas leak that prevented Endeavour from blasting off last month.

Endeavour won't be flying Wednesday. But if the leak is fixed, NASA will try to send the shuttle to the international space station on July 11.

During two launch attempts in June, hydrogen gas escaped from a plate on the fuel tank that attaches to...

By (AP)

Like a car salesman pushing a luxury vehicle that the customer no longer can afford, NASA has pulled out of its back pocket a deal for a cheaper ride to the moon.

It won't be as powerful, and its design is a little dated. Think of it as a base-model Ford station wagon instead of a tricked-out Cadillac Escalade.

Officially, the space agency is still on track with a 4-year-old plan to spend $35 billion to build new rockets and return astronauts to the moon in several years. However, a top NASA manager is floating a cut-rate alternative that costs around $6.6 billion.

This...

By Alastair Grant (AP)

As he trudges past chest-high ferns and butterflies the size of saucers, George Beccaloni scours a jungle hilltop overlooking the South China Sea for signs of a long-forgotten Victorian-era scientist.

He finds what he's looking for: an abandoned, two-story guest house, its doors missing and ceiling caved in.

"Excellent. This is the actual spot," he yells.

It is on this site, in a long-gone thatched hut, that Alfred Russel Wallace is believed to have spent weeks in 1855 writing a seminal paper on the theory of evolution. Yet he is largely unknown outside scientific circl...

By (AP)

Mysterious space blobs aren't infant galaxies as astronomers once thought. Scientists say they are galaxies going through puberty, all hot and bothered.

A new study using NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory comes up with an explanation for these high-energy glowing blobs that have been observed for about a decade.

One theory was that they were young galaxies cooling off. But the new research says they are hot and chaotic with gas halos and growing supermassive black holes and about to stabilize.

Study lead author James Geach (Geech) of Durham University in England said it...

By (AP)

Scientists have found new evidence that one of Saturn's moons has an ocean beneath its surface. That's important because liquid water is a key ingredient for life.

The moon is an icy body called Enceladus (en-SELL-uh-duss.) It gives off huge plumes of water vapor and ice grains, and scientists used the Cassini spacecraft to sample material from those jets.

They found particles containing sodium salts, which indicates that the plumes arise from liquid water.

But a second team of scientists found no sign of sodium with a different sampling method. They concluded there...

By Daniel Maurer (AP)

A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.

A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.

Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard...

By (AP)

Like the wool sweater that emerges from the dryer a size too small, global warming seems to be shrinking sheep.

On average, wild Soay sheep on Scotland's island Hirta are 5 percent smaller today than they were in 1985, according to a team of researchers led by Tim Coulson of Imperial College London.

"The decrease in body size was due to a reduction in growth rates caused, in part, by the changing climate," Coulson said in an interview via e-mail.

Evolution favors the development of large sheep, which can more easily survive harsh winters, Coulson explained. So the resea...

By (AP)

El Nino may have a split personality.

The warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean has long been known to affect weather around the world, but researchers now say it may come in two forms with different impacts.

The traditional El Nino tends to reduce the number of Atlantic hurricanes. But a form Georgia Tech scientists call El Nino Modoki can lead to more hurricanes than usual in the Atlantic Ocean. Modoki, from Japanese, refers to something that is "similar but different."

The traditional El Nino involves a periodic warming of the water in the eastern part of the...

By (AP)

Governments are failing to stem a rapid decline in biodiversity that is now threatening extinction for almost half the world's coral reef species, a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals, a leading environmental group warned Thursday.

"Life on Earth is under serious threat," the International Union for Conservation of Nature said in a 155-page report that describes the past five years of a losing battle to protect species, natural habitats and geographical regions from the devastating effects of man.

IUCN, the producer of the world's Red List of endangered animals, an...

By (AP)

An 84-year-old University of Chicago researcher has won a half-million-dollar genetics prize for her pioneering work in showing that cancer is a genetic disease.

Dr. Janet Davison Rowley on Wednesday was named the 2009 winner of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation's 2009 genetics prize for her research on recurring chromosome abnormalities in leukemias and lymphomas.

Her work has improved understanding and led to new cancer treatments.

The $500,000 cash prize comes with no strings attached.

Rowley enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1940 at age 15,...

By (AP)

The U.S. and European spacecraft Ulysses has ended its more than 18-year mission to explore and research the region of space above the poles of the sun.

A statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena says Ulysses followed programmed commands Tuesday afternoon that ceased its operations.

Ulysses made nearly three full orbits of the sun while researching the heliosphere, a bubble in space carved by the solar wind.

The NASA and European Space Agency spacecraft was launched aboard space shuttle Discovery on Oct. 6, 1990. Ulysses far outlasted its planned...

By (AP)

NASA and the European Space Agency are about to pull the plug on a robotic solar probe that just wouldn't quit.

The Ulysses probe was launched from the space shuttle Discovery in 1990. It was supposed to last five years. But it's now nearing 19 years, 5.8 billion miles and still going.

Sixteen months ago, the two space agencies announced that Ulysses was freezing up and about to die in a matter of weeks. Somehow it kept operating, sending important science information about an extraordinarily quiet year for the sunspots and solar wind.

That will end on Tuesday when the...

By (AP)

Listen up! Carbon dioxide being absorbed by the oceans is having a puzzling effect on fish _ their ears get bigger.

Now, that doesn't mean you're going to reel in the Mr. Spock of the sea. Fish ears are inside their bodies.

But, as in humans, their ears perform a major role in sensing movement and whether the animal is upright _ abilities that are important for survival.

"It was a surprise," biological oceanographer David M. Checkley of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said of the discovery.

"The assumption is t...

By (AP)

NASA's new lunar probe launched less than a week ago has already sent back some shots of the moon.

The satellite swung by the moon Tuesday and took pictures for an hour, passing within 2,000 miles. Now, it's well past the moon in an elongated orbit around Earth. In October, it will slam into a crater at the moon's south pole.

A second spacecraft launched aboard the same rocket is now circling the moon. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is expected to provide a precise 3-D map of the moon and help pinpoint safe landing spots for astronauts.

The two spacecraft are part of ...

AP News

 

French investigators release report on Flight 447     By Otavio de Souza (AP)

French investigators on Thursday will present their initial findings into what caused Air France Flight 447 to drop out of the sky in the middle of the Atlantic a month ago, prompting one of history's most challenging plane crash investigations.

The Airbus A330-200 plane flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down with 228 people on board in a remote area of the Atlantic, 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) off Brazil's mainland and far from radar coverage.

A burst of automated messages emitted by the plane before it fell gave rescuers only a vague location to begin their search, which has failed to locate the plane's black boxes. The chances of finding the flight recorders are falling as the signals they emit fade. Without them, the full causes of the tragic accident may never be known.

The French air accident investigation agency, the BEA, will present its preliminary report to journalists at its headquarters in Le Bourget, outside Paris.   Read More...



 

 

 

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