Mars: the search for water

There are two new two dispatches from the scientific front lines of the Martian quest. The first is that the initial sample examined in the Phoenix lander's onboard laboratory showed no water. Mission scientists were quick to point out that was not a surprise, though, because the sample sat for days on the lab's sifter while they tried to shake the clumpy stuff through, and any water would likely have vanished into the dry Martian atmosphere. The second is that scientists are still trying to figure out whether the whitish material exposed by the probe's sample collection scoop is ice or salt. One way this will be analyzed is to take repeated photographs and see whether the amount of material changes over time: salt should remain as is (absent one of those nasty Martian dust devils) while ice sublimates and should reveal itself by shrinkage.

Meanwhile, scientists are getting really cool microscopic images of the soil that did make it into the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) lab. As Scientific American describes it, "The high-resolution images particles of a range of different sizes, from bigger, black, glassy particles thought to have been forged in ancient volcanoes down to finer, more iron-rich grains that may have resulted from the glassy pieces grinding together."

COMMENT: It's pretty awesome to just step back a minute and think about what NASA is doing here. An array of complex instruments was launched into space on powerful rocket booster, traveled years and millions of miles, dropped through the atmosphere of another planet, landed perfectly, and is now operating with no significant problems to serve as the eyes and hands of human science. It's really quite something. We as a species are entitled to give ourselves a pat on the back.

Len Cormier, R.I.P.

A sad farewell tonight to Len Cormier of PanAero LLC. Len, who worked in the launch business for half a century, was best known as a tireless designer and promoter of reusable space vehicles. He didn't get enough backing to finish his contender for the X-Prize, but it did not slow him down: he kept proposing updated concepts to the NRO, to NASA's COTS program, and to anyone else who might support what he felt was a practical road to more affordable and reliable launch.
His latest design was “Space Van 2011”, a two-stage horizontal takeoff and landing craft that he believed could service the ISS and do other orbital missions for a fraction of the cost of a space shuttle or a Soyuz.
COMMENT: I knew Len only by correspondence, but he was a very helpful person to anyone with space interests, and clearly devoted to his dream of moving us one step closer to a spacefaring civilization. The Earth could use more Len Cormiers. Farewell, voyager.

Can microbes solve the energy crunch?

Answer: maybe, at some point, thanks to some cutting-edge genetic engineering. A company called LS9 has demonstrated that an altered bacterium can consume agricultural waste and excrete crude oil. In about a month, the company intends to actually run a vehicle on "bug poop."
COMMENT: It's too early to predict whether this approach will make a significant impact, but it's an example of the human ingenuity which the "we're doomed" school of thought discounts too quickly.

Building blocks found in space rocks

A sceintific team led by Zita Martins of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London reports it has found precursors to DNA and RNA in a meteorite. The molecules involved, uracil and xanthine, were found in a meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969. It does not prove molecules from space were crucial to life on Earth - they may have formed here independently - but it does show how widespread life-related compunds may be in the vast spaces between worlds.

Death of a red giant

NASA's GALEX satellite has provided astronomers with a sight never before witnessed: the blast of ultraviolet light that comes just ahead of a star going spuernova. The phenomenon had been predicted, but couldn't be seen through Earth's atmosphere. A supernove is normally noticed only days or weeks after the light from its collapse reaches Earth. Now scientists can observe the whole cycle, which has much to teach about the composition, life, and death of stars in addition to being simply awesome.

Another step for private space flight

The firm Space Adventures, in partnership with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation. has arranged for five private citizens to ride up on Soyuz capsules to visit the International Space Station. Now it's taking the next step: ordering a modified Soyuz capsule for a private mission carrying two of its clients. Space Adventures is funding the separate mission to increase its capacity without interfering with regular Soyuz/ISS missions.

COMMENT: OK, this avenue to space is still strictly for people willing to part with a reported $20M and undergo months of cosmonaut training. The backlog of passengers wiling to go to such lengths, though, speaks volumes about the human fascination with space travel.


Thanks to Kris Winkler for pointing me to this item

Are Darwinism and Christianity compatible?

Dinesh D'Souza adds to the debate with this interesting blog post, where he points out that Christians going back to Augustine havve assumed the Biblical account of Creation is allegorical. He argues that only two groups read it literally: fundamentalists and the strident atheists like Richard Dawkins who want to paint all Christians as anti-science fundamentalists.

Microspace news: Farewell to CHIPSat

CHIPSat was one of the smallest and cheapest of modern space science missions, having consumed only $14.5 million when it reached orbit in 2003. The Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer satellite was designed to look for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) emissions. It produced significant science on a tiny budget of $100,000 a year. The mission's "parents" at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory have proposed other experiments and would be happy if NASA turned their bird on again, but in today's space budget climate, even $100K is hard to find. CHIPSat was the first satellite to communicate by Internet Protocol (IP) and the first built by the entrepreneurial space firm Space Dev.
COMMENT: CHIPSat showed everyone that you really could do important sicnece missions "on a shoestring" if everyone did their jobs right. Congratulations to the people of SpaceDev, NASA, UCB, and other organizations involved in this pioneering mission.

Welcome home, Discovery

The STS-124 mission is complete and the crew of Discovery is back on the ground. After some concern over a metal clip that floated free from the rudder, NASA engineers gave the shuttle a "Go" to land, which they did Saturday morning after a 14-day mission to the ISS. NASA now turns its attention to the next mission, scheduled for October, and to repairing the flame trench under the shuttle launch pad, where over 5,000 fire-resistant bricks emplaced during the Apollo era were torn loose by Discovery's launch. No delay to the flight schedule is expected.

Woodpecker redicovered after 80 years

The Caatinga woodpecker (Celeus obrieni) has until now been known from a single specimen collected in Brazil 1926. It's a handsome brown-and-tan bird with a white belly and a showy crown of red feathers. Without a second specimen or even a reported sighting of the species in over 80 years, though, extinction was widely presumed. But now we do have a new specimen, discovered in the Tocantins region by Brazilian ornithologist Advaldo do Prado. Stuart Butchart of BirdLife International commented, “Caatinga woodpecker and rediscoveries like it provide hope for other South American birds currently missing and feared extinct, some of which haven’t been seen for over 150 years.”

Advertisement sent to the stars

The EISCAT scientific radar station on the Norwegian island of Svalbard has used its array of dish antennas (normally used for studying the upper atmosphere) to send a Doritos advertisement toward Ursa Major.
Scientists involved doubt that any alien intelligence will reconstruct the mpeg file and watch the ad, but they will recognize it's a structured message from an intelligent source.

COMMENT: A treaty governing broadcasts meant to be received by alien intelligences has been proposed, and it's a good idea. While "spillover" of Earth broadcasts into space is inevitable, deliberate attempts at communications should be reviewed by a broad spectrum (no pun intended) of scientists to make certain we are sending the message our species would want to send.

Pluto is not a planet, it's a "Plutoid"

If Pluto is not a planet, what is it? What do you call a large body in an elliptical orbit around the Sun that still does not quality for the new International Astronomical Union (IAU) definition of a planet? The IAU has now, in essence, allowed Pluto to save face just a little bit by announcing "plutoid" as the new term for this class of objects IF said objects are beyond the orbit of Neptune.

COMMENT: The IAU's press release really does not make this very clear to the layperson. Some things are just supposed to be what they've always been called. As Stephen J. Gould argued, a brontosaurus should be a brontosaurus even if the rules of nomenclature call for "apatosaurus." And Pluto just should have been given a special exemption for new classifications and labeled a planet simply because the whole world has called it that ever since it was discovered.

From the IAU:

"Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighbourhood around their orbit. The two known and named plutoids are Pluto and Eris. It is expected that more plutoids will be named as science progresses and new discoveries are made.

The dwarf planet Ceres is not a plutoid as it is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Current scientific knowledge lends credence to the belief that Ceres is the only object of its kind. Therefore, a separate category of Ceres-like dwarf planets will not be proposed at this time."

The birth of the bow

This story focuses on an interesting analysis (if still somewhat speculative) concerning just how Native Americans developed the bow and arrow. This weapon system evolved in many cultures around the world and had as its predecessor the atlatl, or spear thrower. University of Missouri archaeologists have documented a wide variety of arrow points appearing about 1,500 years ago, which then were "necked down" to a few types. Their conclusion is that, once the concept of the bow had been developed, artisans tried many different types of points, mated with many varieties of shafts (not preserved). With no understanding of the theory involved, Native Americans went through periods of trial and error before finding a good combination of factors including shaft length and thickness, point size and shape, and design of the bow itself. Once the bow was mature, it quickly displaced the atlatl and became the premier weapon for combat as well as hunting.

"Unicorn deer" observed in Italy

A deer with one horn in the middle of its forehead is living in a nature preserve in Italy. The animal, a roe deer about a year old, lives in a reserve near Florence. Interestingly, the animal's twin (the births were observed by researchers) has the normal complement of horns. On expert commented that, while one-horned deer have been seen before, they are usually simply missing one horn. Seeing one horn in the center indicates a more puzzling genetic oddity.
COMMENT: "Unicorn" cattle and goats have been produced artificially by grafting the horn buds together in the desired spot soon after birth, but it's not clear whether there are any good prior records of wild animals being born with this feature. This case shows such a genetic freak is possible, raising the question of whether animals like this deer could have played a role in the origins of the unicorn myth.

Checking out of the orbiting hotel

While everyone was focusing on the qualities of Martian dirt (see below), the crew of STS-124, the shuttle Discovery, was executing a near-perfect mission to expand the International Space Station with the Japanese Kibo laboratory. The shuttle should land Saturday. Commander Mark Kelly signed off as they left the ISS with, ""We wish them the best with their expedition and we hope we left them a better, more capable space station than when we arrived. Sayonara."
COMMENT: Another reminder that humanity and its machines are slowly, bit by bit, accumulating the experience needed to build bigger structures in much more exotic places far from Earth.

Baking dirt on Mars

NASA seems to have solved that pesky clumped-dirt problem, and the TEGA instrument will soon be incubating Martian soil looking for interesting stuff.

A cetacean success story: humpbacks rebound

Amid the gloomy news from the conservation world comes a welcome nugget worth cheerign about. The humpback whale was a species hard hit by the whaling trade: some 1,400 animals made up the entire Pacific Ocean population in 1966. Forty-one years after a ban on hunting the species was instituted, scientists analyzing the results of an exhautive photographic survey report there are an estimated 20,000 Pacific humpbacks. Jay Barlow of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center said, "While I agree that conservation concerns are not eliminated, this is fundamentally a good-news story. If the world had more examples like this, I think that the people of the world would be more inclined to believe that conservation can make a difference."
COMMENT: Amen to that.

Messing with Martian dirt

The Phoenix Mars Lander is taking it slow while engineers adjust the procedures for depositing soil samples into the "bake and sniff" bins of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA). The soil is considerably clumpier than expected.
COMMENT: The clumpiness is an interesting fact all by itself, since the Vikings and later probes have characterized Martian soil at lower latitudes, and Phoenix designers thought they knew what to expect.

New view of Earth and Moon

NASA's EPOXI spacecraft has sent back a rare and beautiful view of the Earth and the Moon in the same image.

Still sharp at age 115

Neuroscientists are a bit fascinated by a woman who recently died at the age of 115. She was sharp until the end of her life, and her brain showed almost no sign of even incipient Alzheimer's disease. Her case and others suggest that dementia is not an inevitable consequence of aging. One researcher said, "Our observations suggest that, in contrast to general belief, the limits of human cognitive function may extend far beyond the range that is currently enjoyed by most individuals."

Hunt for ET continues

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has not been in the news for a while, but it hasn't gone away. Some scientists and engineers remains captivated by, and dedicated to, the project despite tiny budgets and the lingering "giggle factor."

A new proposal is to use the Allen Telescope Array, with is hundreds of small advanced dishes, to search the plane of the ecliptic: the plane made by Earth and the Sun. Why? because advanced civilizations in this plane could observe Earth transiting the Sun, and thus are more likely to know there is a planet potentially capable of sustaining life in our solar system. They might, the logic goes, be sending radio signals to see if we on Earth are advanced enough to detect them and reply. Richard Conn Henry of Johns Hopkins, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, and Steven Kilston of the Henry Foundation Inc. are working out the notion.

COMMENT: Human ingenuity and logic will never lose their place in science. If the universe is too big for a practical search, the three astronomers behind this concept reason, then let's look in the places most likely to be looking for us. Here's wishing you the best of luck, guys.

New vertebrates described 2008 = 130!

That's not a misprint. 130. Naturalist Nick Sly set himself to reviewing every available source for new vertebrate descriptions. This number is actually low, since Sly excluded splitting of existing taxa and kept strictly to all-new species, plus he lacked full access to a few key journals and may have missed some species.
His breakdown:
Fish - 74 (56.9%)
Amphibian - 20 (15.4%)
Mammal - 6 (4.6%)
Reptile - 29 (22.3 %)
Bird - 1 (0.8%.

Sly goes into detail on each group in his blog. What an amazing piece of research - and what an amazing reminder that we do NOT know all the species on Earth.

Thanks to Loren Coleman for posting this item. (Loren noted there are at least two lemurs and a cloud rat (all covered in earlier posts on my blog if you are curious) that do not appear on Sly's list, so the mammal count, we know, is low.)

Carribean monk seal declared extinct

The National Marine Fisheries Service has announced that five years of searching have failed to yield a live specimen of the Caribbean monk seal. This makes it the first species of seal driven extinct by human predation, although the Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals are in very bad shape and the Guadelupe and Juan Fernandez fur seals had close brushes with extinction.

What's the white stuff on Mars?

When the Phoenix Mars Lander took its second scoop out of the reddish soil of Mars, it revealed whitish material beneath the surface – tantalizingly similar to the bright patch revealed by the firing of the craft’s landing thrusters. This stuff may be ice, or it may be part of a salt layer formed on top of ice.
COMMENT: Phoenix, like all good scientists, is beginning its exploration by raising new questions. THe world is tuned in for the answers.

Busy day on the ISS

It’s been a great mission so far for STS-124 and the space shuttle Discovery. They’ve made their first spacewalk, attached the huge Japanese Kibo laboratory to greatly increase the volume available for scientific experiments on the station, and delivered the parts for that famous balky toilet. Today (June 4), astronauts are preparing to enter the Kibo module from inside while two others prepare for another EVA tomorrow to hook up equipment and otherwise prepare the lab for its work.
COMMENT: The ingenuity and ability of human space voyagers never ceases to amaze me. I suspect that’s one factor behind the popular fascination with human spaceflight, even as critics question its costs. These are people like us (healthier and smarter, maybe, but generally like us), walking around in the deadliest environment we know and not just doing work but fixing equipment and developing new approaches when something goes wrong.

The best "Lake monster" photo?

In another great contribution from Dr. Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology, he looks at one of the most intensely studied "cryptid" photographs of all time: a single image caught by Sandra Mansi that resembles a long-necked aquatic animal in a place no such animal should be (Lake Champlain). (Actually, such an animal does not exist anywhere, as far as we know, but this picture made a lot of people think hard about that.) Naish agrees with investigator Benjamin Radford the photo probably shows a drifting log, caught at just the right moment and the right angle to make people think, "Plesiosaur? Maybe?" Answer: probably not.
COMMENT: Darn.

Fourth grader names new lizard

When Dr. Aaron Bauer (a former board member of the International Society for Cryptozoology, BTW) discovered a new species of gecko in the South Pacific, he created Project Gecko, encouraging children to submit proposed names. Gemma Farquhar, a fourth grader from New Jersey, won with Bavayia periclitata. Bauer said, “Bavayia periclitata was chosen for its accurate and artistic description. Gemma was able to combine scientific language with creative intellect forming a name that depicts the importance of taking care of the animals that share our world with us." Bavayia periclitata indicates, in Latin, that the animal is "endangered." .

Mars, exploration, and ice

Only days after its arrival on Mars, the Phoenix lander has beamed back an image that has scientists very excited. Poking its camera underneath the spacecraft to look at the terrain scoured by its descent thrusters, Phoenix imaged an exposed patch of light-colored, smooth material. Ice? Water ice?
Peter Smith of the University of Arizona says, "We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface. The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It's not impossible that it's something else, but our leading interpretation is ice."

COMMENT: NASA's webservers have been flooded with visitors wanting to see the latest images from Mars. Whatever debates may be going on concerning future directions in space exploration, it's clear that Mars continues to fascinate the human imagination. Discoveries like this one are reinforcing the belief that Mars can support, at least partially using in-situ resources, human colonists if we choose to send them. I hereby volunteer. (OK, it's easy to say that, because I know I'd be rejected for age and health by the time we are ready to send anyone. But I'd still go.)

STS-124 gets a sendoff

The STS-124 mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery is off and looking good, carrying the $1B Japanese-built Kibo laboratory to expand the International Space Station. On board for use in an eductional demonstration is a "Buzz Lightyear" character doll. In this clever photograph, Buzz's pal Woody waves goodbye during launch.

Space History trivia: Single-stage altitude record?

Nicholas Hill started a thread on sci.space.history asking what the greatest altitude obtained by a single stage suborbital or sounding rocket was. I looked at my old favorites, the Viking and Aerobee and V-2, and found they'd all been left in the dust. I agreed with Allen Thomson's answer of ESA's Maxus series (over 700 km), but Nicholas found we'd all overlooked the British test vehicle Black Knight, which in 1962 hit 795 km.
OK, maybe this is of interest only to space geeks, but I find this kind of historical detective work fascinating... even when I'm not the one who finds the answer.

Placoderms were first live-bearers

I like placoderms in general: in addition to being really cool-looking, the armored fishes are scientifically fascinating and important. A new species from Australia confirms that the placoderms were, in addition to being the first sexually dimporphic vertebrates (OK, we knew that), were the first to bear live young (we DIDN'T know that.) The fossil is so well preserved an embryo attached to an umbilical cord is discernable. Materpiscis attenboroughi, 380 million years old, gets my vote as the fossil find of the year so far.

FIlm Sasquatch, get rich

Bushnell Trail Cameras has promised big money - one million dollars - to the first person who gets a "verifiable photo of Sasquatch" using (of course) a trail camera. There have been rewards before, but Bushnell, a major optics and outdoor gear maker, can deliver - IF its experts (whoever they are) verify the photograph. Full details are yet to be published, but obviously the company hopes for a lot of good publicity, not to mention sales of its trail cameras (the model described at the Cryptomundo post in the above link retails for about $270.)
Trail cameras are increasingly popular in game surveys as the technology improves and the cameras get smaller, more capable, and cheaper while battery life gets longer. They have captured some very rare animals: a recent image of the nearly-extinct Javan rhino was published around the world. There have been some purported trail camera images of Sasquatch before, including the one shown at the top of this link, which didn't impress most cryptozoologists, as it looks more like the tail and rump of a horse.

COMMENT: It seems certain Bushnell is going to get a lot of fuzzy or outright fake submissions. Cryptozoologists who think it likely there is a real Sasquatch out there to be filmed are very interested in learning the details: who is going to verify the photographs and what standards will be applied. This may be problematical. It's arguable that, if you get a photograph of a Sasquatch the only way to "verify" it is to go out to that location and collect the actual Sasquatch. Easier said than done....

Florida Teacher finds New Species

Six years ago, Boynton Beach, FL, high school biology teacher Bud Gillian was swimming when he noticed an odd-looking box jellyfish. Keeping a careful distance, he stayed with the jelly for as long as he could, then headed to shore and began a long program of research and consulting with authorities. In the end, he got what he was after: confirmation he'd seen a previously unrecorded species. Awaiting a formal scientific name when a paper is published later this summer is the Caribbean Banded Box Jelly, a small, highly venomous addition to the known fauna of the Caribbean.

COMMENT: I love stories like this: Interested amateur spots something intriguing, pursues it for however long it takes, and adds new knowledge to science. Congratulations to Mr. Gillian.

Air Force Picks ORS Jumpstart Payload

A SpaceDev, Inc. microsatellite was picked to ride a Falcon booster later next month in the first Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) "Jumpstart" mission, intended to demonstrate rapid test, integration, and launch of a spacecraft. The satellite is intended primarily as a risk reduction payload for the Trailblazer multi-purpose microsat bus, but also carries a suite of experiments.
As SpaceDev reports:

" Jumpstart is a multi-pronged effort set to fly a responsive payload on the SpaceX Falcon 1 Flight 003 mission, currently scheduled for a late June 2008 launch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The spacecraft was built and assembled on schedule and budget at SpaceDev’s Poway, California facility in less than five months. It has been delivered to the ORS Office at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico for final testing and integration...This mission demonstrates the first step of responsive launch with an end-to-end call up within seven months of funding availability and within four months following approval to proceed. In addition, Jumpstart demonstrates several key ORS enabling models: rapid call up of a mission to launch; rapid development, integration and checkout of spacecraft; a concept of operations that allows flexibility late in the payload processing flow to determine which mission will fly; efficiencies in processes and procedures to reduce payload integration timelines; and identification and assurance of payload technical readiness."

COMMENT: It's a worthy effort and will be a step forward for ORS if they make it work. There will be some crossed fingers regarding the booster, which did not make it to orbit on its first two attempts. The schedule, while nothing unusual 45 years ago, is very tight in this era of multiple reviews and multi-month launch prep times, so here's hoping the folks at SpaceDev, ORS, AFRL, and SpaceX (the booster maker) can pull it off. Go Jumpstart!

A startling new view of pterosaurs

A scientific paper published by Darren Naish and Mark Witten argues that the largest of the Mesozoic pterosaurs, or "flying reptiles," had a lifestyle that contradicts nearly every book and documentary ever produced on the topic.
Naish and Witten say the normal view of giant pterosaurs like Hatzegopteryx (10-meter wingspan) as creatures which skimmed the water's surface plucking out fish is contradicted by their anatomy. Their necks were stiff, almost rigid, which makes them useless for reaching down into the highly resistant medium of water and grabbing fish while the animal was still flying forward: the neck would break. The authors also didn't think they were well designed for carrion feeding, wading, or other proposed lifestyles. Instead, they spent much time on the ground, walking in the manner of gigantic quadrupedal storks as they plucked prey animals from the ground. The biggest would have stood nearly as tall as giraffes when they stalked the plains like (as an episode of Blackadder once put it) "giant stalking things."
The authors are careful to note the idea is not entirely original with them, but they've developed it in more depth than anyone else. On the Tetrapod Zoology blog, which includes links to the original paper and some articles about it, Darren and others have patiently answered my questions about this seemingly counterintuitive theory, explaining how the animals could still launch quickly into the air, survive reasonable damage to those seemingly vulnerable wing membranes, etc.
I can't say I'm convinced on every point, but the authors have certainly thought this thing through and are sticking by their guns. Read it: agree or disagree, you'll find you never think about pterosaurs the same way again.
Congratulations to the authors for a truly fascinating "out of the box" contribution to one of palentology's long-running debates.

Stay tuned for "MonsterQuest"

I was just up in Montreal, taping an interview for the show’s “mystery bears” episode (no, I have no “preview” information on any new findings: they took pains not to discuss the other parts of the show, so as not to color my overview of where I thought the topic stood). I know they looked into the classic questions of ursine cryptozoology: MacFarlane's bear (Canada, 1864), Bergman's bear (Kamchatka, 1920), and other oddities. I tried to emphasize taking a scientific, open-minded look at the mysteries of the natural world, even as I explained why the bear has such a hold on the human imagination. When asked about cryptozoology as a legitimate branch of zoology, I emphasized that cryptozoology, properly done, uses the same methods as traditional zoology - going through museums and libraries, talking to local peoples, etc. - but sets the boundaries of inquiry a little more broadly, risking failure and sometimes ridicule to make sure we were not overlooking important discoveries.
I found the crew from the production company to be very professional, and the questions they asked were intelligent and well-informed, if sometimes speculative. I proposed future episodes on Lake Iliamna and Colorado’s “ghost grizzlies” if they get a third season, and we’ll see if those draw any interest.
My thanks to everyone at CMJ Productions who made this a great experience. I am hoping sales of my books go up this year so I can earn enough to cover the souvenir purchases I made on my first-ever trip to Canada.

Coolest pic from Mars

This dramatic and lucky shot from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures the Phoenix lander on its way down through the Martian atmosphere by parachute. It's the first image ever of a lander descending on another world.

On Mars!

After "seven minutes of terror," as controllers describe the descent phase when the Phoenix Mars Lander was out of contact, the spacecraft has safely put its mechanical feet down on the soil of Martian arctic. Images are already streaming back, showing a relatively flat, pebble-strewn landing site and the kind of geometric patterns created in of permafrost regions of Earth as ice freezes and thaws. Missions controllers and managers hugged each other, cheered, and pumped their fists when the craft touched down on its three parachutes and its descent thrusters. Now it's the scientists' turn, and they expect a treasure trove of data to help answer questions like how much water ice the Red Planet conceals and, of course, whether it's ever been - or even now could be - the home of indigenous microbial life.

COMMENT: Congratulations to everyone involved. It's a great day to be an Earthman.

R.I.P. Ernst Stuhlinger

Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the members of Wernher von Braun's inner circle and an invaluable resource to myself and Erika Lishock in writing our book The First Space Race, has died. A physicist who collaborated with James Van Allen on the first American satellite, Explorer 1, he helped develop the Jupiter C/Explorer design, especially the guidance system. When Explorer 1 lifted off on January 31, 1958, Stuhlinger had the critical job of studying DOVAP signals and other data to determine when the booster had arced over to the proper angle for him to manually ignite the upper states and put the satellite in orbit. Stuhlinger was with NASA for many years after the agency absorbed the von Braun team from the Army. He was one of the inventors of the ion propulsion concept now being actively used in deep-space exploration.

Farewell to a great contributor to spaceflight.

Schedule note

Friday, May 23:

I was getting really good about doing the blog daily, but it will be spotty for the next few days. I am off to Canada to do an interview on prehistoric bears for a History Channel program. There are things more fun than that, but there are very few of them.
There's a lot going on in the scientific world, from NASA's preparations for Phoenix Mars lander to a vociferous debate over new enhancements and alleged details of the Patterson-Gimlin sasquatch film (see www.cryptomundo.com). (To me, that film has been analyzed past the point where any new efforts are likely to be valid or useful, if you keep in mind the image was 1.8 mm high on a 16mm frame, but it's the Zapruder film of cryptozoology - people will never stop debating it.)
Just to remind us exploration never stops: a core sample taken 1,600 m below the seafloor off Newfoundland revealed methane-eating microbes living deeper than any life discovered before: not only that, but the sampled organisms were thriving in temperatures up to 100 C.
See:
http://www.livescience.com/animals/080522-deepest-sealife.html

Back soon!

The Yeti and the Bear

If one goes to the website linked above, an archive of the International Bear News is provided. Bringing up the November 2007 issue, page 6 offers an article entitled "The Ninth Bear," about the brown bears of Asia, especially southern Asia. The authors contend the yeti has been shown to be a brown bear, and use "the elusive and symbolic nature of the yeti" to discuss how poorly known these bears are. The authors don't rule out that this area might contain an actual ninth species of bear (in another issue of this publication, it's noted that the critically endangered Gobi Desert population is held by some to be a separate species from Urus arctos.)

Food for thought.

The Real Crystal Skulls

The crystal skull Indiana Jones chases down in his newest movie isn't made up. There are several known skulls carved from quartz crystal, and they are indeed somewhat mysterious. Some are modern forgeries, while others attest to the considerable skill and incredible patience of ancient artisans. None are of extraterrestrial origin, but there are still unanswered questions about how, when, and why they were made.

Flashes from the Moon

How can the impact of a meteor or other cosmic object make an explosion on the Moon without oxygen present? It turns out NASA scientists have had to ask themselves that a lot, and they think they've come up with a solution. Some 100 lunar flashes have been observed over the past two and half years, leading to scientific study of a phenomenon once dismissed as imaginary. Bill Cooke of Marshall Space Flight Center explains that it has to do with the velocities - up to 30,000 mph - with which objects strike the lunar surface (given that there's no atmosphere to slow them down). "At that speed, even a pebble can blast a crater several feet wide. The impact heats up rocks and soil on the lunar surface hot enough to glow like molten lava — hence the flash."

Resources: space-related magazines

In this article, Dwayne Day provides an overview of the major space-related hardcopy publications, from Space News and (my favorite) Quest to Novosti Kosmonavtiki (Spaceflight News) which he describes as the best space magazine in the world - IF you can read Russian.

Why China tested antisatellite weapon

A veteran military space analyst, Joan Johnson-Freese of the U.S. Naval War College, thinks China screwed up in their recent ASAT test, and has now realized it. Essentially, the testing program got ahead of the diplomatic thinking, and the nation was surprised at the hostile reaction to its test. "I think they now are now recognizing that the international condemnation due them was actually moderated," she said.
COMMENT: If this article reports her testimony correctly, Johnson-Freeze said this is the outcome of a Chinese program started in response to the sole U.S. ASAT weapon live shot, which came way back during the Reagan Administration. That seems to me to be connecting two events so separated in time and in political/military context that the case for a causal connection is weak to nonexistant.

Johnson-Freese made a good point about the ballyhoo surrounding China's manned space accomplishments - they are important, but not significant enough to put China in a race with the U.S. She said, "Personally I hate to see the U.S. and China's space programs characterized as competitive. They fly two manned space flights over a five-year period and are perceived as beating the U.S. space program. That's just wrong."

SpaceX hopes third time is a charm

The third launch attempt for SpaceX's small Falcon 1 orbital launcher is now set for late June. SpaceX founder Elon Musk disavows a "stupid comment" (his words) he made three years ago, when he said that three failures might be it. He told reporters on May 14, ""I was asked, 'how many failures can you withstand?' I said, 'well, if we had three failures in a row, then I suspect we would not get any customers, and then it wouldn't make sense to continue.' I was partially quoted thereafter saying, 'three failures and we're out.' That's actually not the full statement. The full statement was if our customers abandon us, then we are out." He added, "We are in this for the long term. SpaceX will never give up. I will never give up. Never."
SpaceX has an order book of 12 payloads awaiting launch.
COMMENT: SpaceX has two things other small entrepreneurial launch efforts did not have: solid customer commitments and significant internal funding. I know these folks and understand their technical approach. The failures were disheartening (and I thought not making orbit on the second attempt was surprising), but I think they will make it work.

God and Science: the latest debate

This article encapsulates the debate at an American Enterprise Institute-sponsored forum that focused around publication of a new collection of essays collecting all points of view. Much of the discussion consists of long-argued points, but a couple of things struck me as worth mentioning. Arch-skeptic Michael Shermer made the interesting argument (a variation on Arthur C. Clarke) that we might not recognize God - that the universe may hold civilizations so advanced that, if we met them, we could not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Philosopher Mary Midgely drew a distinction between science - a widely accepted way of understanding the physical universe - and scientism, which she describes as the view that science has a universal claim on truth and nothing outside it can exist. Nobel laureate William D. Phillips, a physicist, commented, "From what I know about physics, it's not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it." Now that's kind of a frustrating thought.... For a copy of the published results, go to www.templeton.org.

True flying - without a plane

Yves Rossy goes by the nickname "Fusion Man," although "Bird-Man" would be more accurate. He dives from an airplane and ignites four small jets on the wings strapped to his back. The result, demonstrated in dazzling acrobatics high above the Swiss Alps, is the closest any human has gotten to bird-like freedom in the air. It took five years for Rossy to develop the wings and train himself to control them.

The VULCAN Mach 4 project

Speaking of DARPA, the agency now wants to get serious about a two-stage (turbojet+high speed system) propulsion option, dubbed Vulcan, which would allow a plan to leave a runways and accelerate to Mach 4, approximately one Mach number above what the storied SR-71 could do.

COMMENT: The USAF has wanted this kind of ability for a long time, and has seriously pursued it off and on (as budgets and changing priorities dictated). It's not as easy as it sounds to jump from a Mach 3 to a Mach 4 engine: every gain in those speed regimes takes hard work. And a propulsion system which can go from runway to Mach 4 is more of challenge, since, as DARPA points out, it's not going to be a single engine - it has to be some sort of two-stage device like the turbo/PDE option mentioned in the announcement. For a single engine, the high-speed end is outside what turbojets and their derivatives can do and the low-speed requirement means it can't be a relatively simple ramjet or a cutting-edge scramjet (which has a lot more development ahead of it and really only makes since for a much higher speed regime). I've known quite experienced USAF people to express the opinion that transatmospheric (long-range, zero to Mach 12 - 18) aircraft should not be too hard to develop, which made me want to quote Engineer Scott: "I can't change the laws of physics!"

DARPA at 50: Success, Failure, and Promise

THe agency which originated the Internet turns 50 this year. As this article describes, DARPA has had its share of failures and abandoned programs. However, it's one of the few Federal agencies where a reasonable degree of failure is understood to be acceptable. This article chronicles DARPA's pioneering work, from satellite navigation to stealth aircraft, and its less-remembered projects, like the idea of a "mechanical elephant" to transport troops through the jungles of Vietnam. Also covered are idea in development and testing, from autonomous vehicles to synthetic versions of gecko feet that would let soldiers climb walls.

Protecting the Polar Bear

Here is an interesting a CNN column I used as a reference just to point out that I used the term Sci/Tech Blog first (I'm not claiming any infringement, since I never trademarked it, but I just want everyone to know I thought of it first. So there.)
Anyway, CNN's Peter Dykstra ponders the recent decision to list polar bears as a threatened species. There's been a lot of debate on whether this is justified, since it's not firmly documented that the species is declining, and hunting has been limited to a level that doesn't pose a threat. However, fear of the effects of climate change has prompted wildlife organizations and now the U.S. government to insist the bears have to be protected as much as possible.
COMMENT: While I think this is the right call, it does stretch the official definition of a "threatened" species. Whoever the next President is, Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain all have strong pro-environment stands, and we may see a significant expansion of the government's powers and its activity under the Endangered Species Act.

Watch Mars landing live

The Science Channel (which, darn it, I don't get!) will broadcast live on May 25 from 7-9 PM (ET) [4-6 PM (PT)] to cover the descent of NASA's Mars Phoenix lander. Don't miss it!

Aliens, science, and faith

With all the talk of a "war" between science and religion, it's easy to forget that religious scientists, from the monk Gregor Mendel to the century-old Vatican Observatory, have made important contributions to science.
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the current director of the Vatican Observatory, told an interviewer that religion has nothing to fear from science, and vice-versa. He also has no problem with the idea of other intelligences in the cosmos. "How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes asked. He explained that such a stance puts a limit on God's freedom to create, which in Christian doctrine is, by definition, unlimited.
Funes takes an increasingly common Christian view that the Big Bang happened as described by modern physics, but that it's still true "God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the result of chance."

A terrific read: Extreme Expeditions

Extreme Expeditions: Travel Adventures Stalking the World's Mystery Animals, by Adam Davies,is not your average cryptozoology book.
Davies spends a minimum of time rehashing old evidence and instead tells a rollicking first-person adventure tale. Davies, like the late Scott T. Norman, is one of those supremely dedicated amateurs who spends all available time and money poking around in remote, often supremely uncomfortable locations. He found little at the traditional monster haunts of Lake Tele and Loch Ness, believes he saw a large unknown animal in Lake Seljord, and made a significant contribution to research on one of the most probable animals in the cryptozoo, the bipedal Sumatran primate known as orang-pendek. Davies collected hair and a footprint cast for which some well-qualified "mainstream" scientists had no better explanation than "unknown primate."
The book is a jaunty, sometimes profane tale of colorful but basically sane people making a sincere, sometimes dangerous effort to solve zoological mysteries. Whether they turn out to have found new species is almost beside the point. I look forward to a sequel, if Davies survives his future expeditions long enough to write it.

Unique photos: rare whale giving birth

The world's rarest large whale, the Northern right whale Eubalaena glacialis, has been photographed for the first time in the act of giving birth. Actually, Monica Zani of the New England Aquarium got the aerial photos in a lucky encounter in 2005 off the Georgia-Florida coastal area of the Atlantic. The pictures were closely held until Zani and other researchers could prepare and publish academic documentation of what was learned from the enoucnter.
The birth was good news in itself. There may be only 300 of these whales in the Atlantic and another 100 in the Pacific. They've rebounded very slowly from the days of near-extinction caused by whaling. Whalers called them the "right whale" to hunt - they were slow, produced plenty of whale oil along with baleen, and floated when dead. The species remains critically endangered.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for pointing me to this item.

New spider gets named for rocker

Jason Bond, a biologist at East Carolina University, named a new trapdoor spider Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi. "With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice."

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens: close, but not that close

Neanderthals have been bounced around quite a bit over the modern era of anthropology. Were they our ancestors? Our failed cousins? Or were they just a little divergent, a sister race to the rest of us?
While the current majority opinion is that they were a subspecies of our own species, Homo sapiens, a new study argues for the contrary view that they formed a species in their own right. The paper by Argentinean anthropologists, based on 3D computer modeling used to study long-term changes in hominid skull shapes, suggests that Neanderthals were "chronological variants inside a single biological heritage," a fancy way of saying another species derived from the same Homo habilis root stock. By this model, H. sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago, while Neanderthals arose fairly close to the same time but vanished 28,000 years ago.
It's going to be very interesting to see how the resulting debate comes out.

Climate change: Lesser of evils

I don't cover global warming much because, frankly, I get tired of the dogmatically opposite positions and the venomous rhetoric. But this item points up an important lesson: this business is complicated. Recent studies indicate some actions proposed to repair the Antarctic ozone "hole" would exacerbate global warming, and vice versa.
COMMENT: Memo to Al Gore: I respect your efforts, but put away the simplistic approach of blaming of everything (such as the Myanmar cyclone) on human-caused global warming and start educating people about how this is a very complex field and we have a lot of research to do in pursuit of a complete understanding.

The platypus: even stranger than we thought

It's a creature so strange the first scientists to receive specimens thought it was a work of a taxidermist rather than the Creator. The species' ancestors departed from our own around the time of the very first mammals, ca. 160 MYA. The platypus retained some of the reptilian features of the ancestors that scurried beneath the feet of the dinosaurs. Its genome has now been decoded to reveal a mix of ancient mammal, reptile, and even birdlike genes, along with some unique material developed over the eons. This genetic chop suey results in a host of odd habits, from egg-laying to electric-field sensing to the unique method of lactation: pups suck milk directly from the abdominal skin of the mother.
COMMENT: Nature, as Haldane famously said of the universe, is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.

Another clue to the first Americans

A scientific team has dated seaweed and other food remains at Chile's Monte Verde archaeological site to more than 14,000 years ago. It's another bullet in the surprisingly resilient corpse (not to editorialize or anything) of the paradigm holding that the first Americans, the pre-Clovis people, didn't set foot on the continent until about 12,000 years ago. A rise in sea levels since that era may have inundated most of the evidence of a people who moved by sea down the west coast of the Americas, leaving the sotry to be pieced together at scattered sites such as Monte Verde, 500 miles south of Santiago.

Changing the VSE calendar

Most of the news concerning the Vision for Space Exploration and its implementation through Project Constellation has concerned technical problems and schedule slips. However, a coalition of American space companies (and a flock of hired lobbyists) is fighting the uphill (or up-Hill) battle to get Congress to add some $2B to NASA's budget over the next few years to accelerate the Constellation program. One major rationale, as voiced by a spokesman for the United Space Alliance: "The less time we are relying on the Russians for human access to space the better it will be for our program and our country." NASA expects to buy at least 16 Soyuz rides beginning in 2009.
COMMENT: There is a limit to how much you can speed up such a complex program, regardless of funding increases. However, I hope this uphill fight gets won: a decent budget would do a lot to prevent further slips, if nothing else, while helping to keep the NASA workforce intact after Space Shuttle retirement.

Orbcomm: the next generation

Orbcomm's constellation of 34 37-kg microsatellites handling data transmissions, such as tracking vehicle locations, is aging out. The company has now picked a contractor for the next generation. Sierra Nevada Corporation, owner of MicroSat Systems, created a team including MicroSat, Boeing Intelligence and Security Systems, and ITT Space Systems to build the new constellation. There will be 18 satellites in the new constellation, with 12 times the data capacity of the groundbreaking original system. The contract is valued at $117M.

New mission for a microsat

The Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite will have a mass of only 60kg, but this Canadian project will result in "the first space-based asteroid-searching telescope."

Cloud Rat found after 112 years

From Mt. Pulag National Park in the Philippines comes the dramatic rediscovery of a species missing for 112 years. That's actually not a record for the time between finding specimens of an animal - that honor goes to the Bermuda petrel, or cahow, which vanished for three centuries - but the return of the dwarf cloud rat (Carpomys melanurus) is a still a rare good news story for mammologists.
The rediscovery was accomplished by a team led by the Field Museum's Lawrence Heaney. He said, "This beautiful little animal was seen by biologists only once previously — by a British researcher in 1896 who was given several specimens by local people, so he knew almost nothing about the ecology of the species. Since then, the species has been a mystery, in part because there is virtually no forest left on Mt. Data, where it was first found."

Shuttles, tanks, and telescopes

The next Space Shuttle mission is on track for a May 31 launch. (I asked them to speed it up a day so it would celebrate my daughter's 12th birthday, but you know how the government is.) This mission will take the Japanese Kibo lab to the ISS.
After that, the schedule gets fuzzier. The last mission which will service and upgrade the Hubble telescope, set for August 28, will have to be postponed 4-5 weeks due to the need to process two External Tanks for the shuttle and a standby rescue mission, required on this flight because the shuttle can't reach the ISS as a "safe haven" from the Hubble orbit.

COMMENT: There's something here I'm missing. We've been flying shuttles for over a quarter of a century. NASA should know by now how long it takes to do everything and how much "fudge time" needs to be built into schedules. The need for a major postponement because of ET preparation baffles me. Has NASA still not learned the art of realistic scheduling?

New species of dolphin identified

Freshwater dolphins are, on the whole, a rare and interesting group, having abandoned the seas dolphins have adapted to so well in favor of inland waters. Now there's a new one. The Bolivian river dolphin (Inia boliviensis) has been identified as a species of its own, rather than a population of the Amazon pink river dolphin, or boto (Inia geoffrensis). In Bolivia, the Prefecture of the Department of Beni, in the northeastern region of the country, celebrated by declaring the animal "a Natural Heritage."
All rivber dolphins are of concern to conservationists, and the baiji or Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) is likely extinct. Fernando Trujillo of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) warns: "River dolphins are amongst the most endangered of all whale and dolphin species. The pressures on them are immense, as was highlighted by the recent news of the extinction of the baiji in Asia. Urgent action is needed if we are to prevent Amazon River dolphins from suffering the same fate."

A bake sale to build a rocket

In Belleville, Missouri, Gary Streeter and his friends plan to lower the cost of access to orbit by building the entire launch vehicle and satellite themselves. "In terms of a group putting together and launching a rocket and getting into orbit, I'd say it's pretty rare, actually," FAA spokesman Hank Price said. Actually, it's never been done, and Streeter admits he needs some new funding sources. Local donations and other methods, including bake sales, aren't getting him off the ground.
COMMENT: OK, Streeter and friends are basically trying to eat an elephant with chopsticks. But I salute them for the effort. And I hope that, somehow, they pull it off.

A haul of new species

An expedition comprising scientists from Conservation International (CI) and Brazilian universities has completed a survey in one of South America's important and endangered biological "hot spots," the Cerrado region of Brazil. The results: 14 new species, including a very small woodpecker to go with eight fish, three reptiles, one amphibian, and one mammal.
COMMENT: These surveys by CI find new species everywhere they go - no exceptions. That's important to keep in mind.

What color is a brown bear?

The title question is not at all simple. The range of coat colors among bears studied in Alaska and the nearby regions is amazing. We have black bears (Ursus americanus) which are brown and brown bears (Ursus arctos) which are black, just for starters. Then there are the blue-gray black bears and the white black bears. There are dark brown bears with striking blond cubs. There's even a black bear running around with a streak of reddish-brown hair running down the middle of its back, like a punker with a Mohawk haircut. The moral of the story: Genes are like cards. A deck will produce a lot of familiar hands, but also some pretty unusual ones.

Thanks to Meredith Fowke for this item.

Anchorage and the three dozen bears

OK, the official metropolitan area of Anchorage, Alaska, is a big place, and not all heavily populated. And everyone knew brown bears wandred through the outskirts. But a new study showing that Anchorage overlapped with the ranges of some three dozen bears was a stunner to state officials.


Anecdote that may be true:
Actual conversation between Anchorage airport tower and pilot of taxiing plane:
TOWER: Bear left at the taxiway.
PILOT: We see him.

A busload of satellites from India

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) put up 10 satellites in a so-far flawless mission launched yesterday. It was the 13th flight of the PSLV, whose main payload was an Indian remote sensing satellite, the 690-kilogram Cartosat-2A. Accompanying the main payload were an 83-kilogram Indian mini-satellite and an international flotilla of eight nanosatellites, with masses from three to 16 kg, provided by institutions in Japan, Canada, and Europe. The 10 satellites add up to a record for a successful launch.

LockMart takes a shot at ORS

Lockheed Martin has announced it's filed a slew of proposals with the USAF's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office at Kirtland AFB, NM, in response to three Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) asking for new ideas. As Lockheed Martin described it, "These include responsive spacecraft bus and payloads technologies; a multi-mission low earth orbit modular space vehicle; and responsive launch, range and system architecture and modeling technologies. Lockheed Martin responded to each of these BAAs with innovation and end-to-end solutions." ORS is expected to award contracts later this year.
Further quoting the press release,
"The need to design, build and deploy responsive space systems that provide timely data to the warfighter is a top priority for our customer," said Phil Bowen, director of Surveillance and Intelligence Systems at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. "Our responsive space capabilities combine Lockheed Martin's proven experience and leading edge technologies in providing affordable and responsive solutions and we look forward to collaborating with the ORS office and our industry teammates on this important initiative."
The release says LM has " designed, built, and launched over 150 small satellites, demonstrating its ability to field highly innovative capabilities rapidly at very low cost." Hmm. I don't doubt the number, although to get that many "small satellites" they must be using a definition for "small" along the lines of "anything that didn't require a Titan IV class launcher." The definition of "very low cost" is likewise a bit suspect. LM has not, understandably, shared the details of their ideas yet. There's no question they have some top engineering talent, and hopefully there's some really innovative stuff in that batch.

Suiting up a penguin

Pierre the penguin, kept at the California Academy of Sciences, had been losing his feathers and was reluctant to go in the water. His keepers had a novel idea: fit him with a wetsuit. Even the colors match (at least on the back - he's now the only penguin with a black belly. Maybe he can just say he's wearing a cummerbund with his tuxedo). Things are now going just swimmingly for Pierre. (I'd put in much worse penguin puns if I could think of any.)

Thanks to Kris Winkler for this item.

Thawing a Colossal Squid

Want to see an 11-meter colossal squid thawed out and dissected? You can tune in via the Web. Scientists in New Zealand will start thawing Monday to have the rare specimen of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni ready for a dissection on Wednesday. The animal was caught off Antarctica over a year ago.

NASA Ames has new partner for microspacecraft

This marks another step by NASA Ames to explore the potential of microspacecraft and cooperative multi-spacecraft networks. I'll just reprint the NASA release in full here. There's an obvious synergy with DARPA and the Air Force and their fractionated spacecraft (F6) work I blogged on earlier.

RELEASE : 08-107

NASA Ames Partners With M2MI For Small Satellite Development

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and m2mi Corp., Moffett Field, Calif., announced Thursday they are taking a revolutionary step forward in improving telecommunications and networking from space.
Under the terms of a cooperative research and development agreement, only the third in NASA's history, NASA Ames and m2mi will work together to develop very small satellites, called nanosats, for the commercialization of space.
"NASA wants to work with companies to develop a new economy in space," said NASA Ames Center Director S. Pete Worden. "m2mi has great technology that fits excellently with our goals, while enhancing the commercial use of NASA-developed technologies."
Nanosatellites are small satellites weighing between 11 and 110 pounds. A large number of these satellites, called a constellation, will be placed in low Earth orbit for the new telecommunications and networking system.
"The constellation will provide a robust, global, space-based, high-speed network for communication, data storage and Earth observations," said m2mi Chief Executive Officer Geoff Brown. "Nanosatellites take advantage of the significant technological advances in microelectronics and will be produced using low-cost, mass-production techniques."
Under the agreement, NASA and m2mi will cooperate to develop a fifth generation telecommunications and networking system for Internet protocol-based and related services. The cooperative effort will combine NASA's expertise in nanosensors, wireless networks and nanosatellite technologies with m2mi's unique capabilities in software technology, sensors, global system awareness, adaptive control and commercialization capabilities. Fifth Generation, or 5G, incorporates Voice Over Internet Protocol, video, data, wireless, and an integrated machine-to-machine intelligence layer, or m2mi, for seamless information exchange and use.
"This initiative shows great promise in revolutionizing mobile communications critical in meeting future needs," said Badri Younes, NASA deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation. "This project also will leverage m2mi's capabilities in software expertise to automate global system awareness and provide intelligent adaptive control."

T. rex: a new link to birds

Analysis of proteins in the soft tissues of an amazingly well preserved specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex indicates the animal's closest living relatives are not reptiles, but birds. The evidence comes from a femur discovered in 2003 in the famous Hell Creek Formation in the north-central United States. The analysis was led by John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, who reports, "We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds – ostrich and chicken – better than any other organism that we studied. We also show that it groups better with birds than modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards."

Space policy under the new President

As this article by Rand Simberg lays it out, we now know enough about the space-related thinking of the three remaining major U.S. Presidential candidates to project their impact upon NASA, and especially on NASA's human spaceflight program.
The signs are troubling.

Senator Barack Obama is sounding like a supporter, but in vague terms that don't reassure anyone given his stated plan to delay the Constellation/VSE programs by five years and divert the money to education. His more recent statements indicate he's realized that would result in a "brain drain" and make it much more difficult to ever execute the VSE, but he has yet to address his contradictory plans and spell out specifics.

Senator Hilary Clinton has endorsed a continued robust human spaceflight program and left open at least the possibility of a meaningful budget increase for NASA. She has, however, not mentioned the Moon and Mars as destinations. Her advisor Lori Garver's speech to the AAS last November (which I blogged - see the archives) came closer to endorsing a continuation of the Bush VSE, but the candidate appears to have backed away from that. Pessimists fear we may see a repeat of Clinton 1 - a plus-up for Earth observation work, but a crippling of efforts to extend a human presence beyond LEO.

Senator John McCain has been explicit in endorsing the continuing drive for a human presence on the Moon and eventually Mars. The question in his case is funding. He's not committed to an increase for NASA, and his his plans for a budget freeze for all except military and veterans' programs might mean NASA must hobble along much as it does now, doing its best with assigned missions that are beyond its assigned funding.

Movie bear kills trainer

"Rocky," the 320-kg brown (or grizzly) bear (Ursus arctos) which wrestled a human in the Will Farrell film "Semi-Pro," was in a routine training session when he killed his trainer with a single bit to the neck. The bear had no previous record of aggressive behavior, and the training facility had operated without incident since its founding in 1992. As Roy Horn (of Siegfried and Roy) found out in 2003, even the best trained of carnivores still has instincts the most conscientious trainers don't always understand. I've read of a hand-raised cougar which broke away from its handler to attack a stuffed deer (an animal the cougar had never even seen alive) in a diorama at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Authorities have not decided whether Rocky must be put down.

Flores Hobbits had big feet

Big, flat, feet, to be specific, with a short big toe more reminiscent of australopithecines than of other humans. A reconstruction of the almost-complete left foot of the main specimen, LB1, shows the foot was abnormally long (by modern human standards) compared to the creature's height, which would have required a deeper knee bend and resulted in a walk people today would find "funny looking." Researchers from the State University of New York who worked on this analysis thought that a foot so different from that of a modern human was another point for the "separate species" side of this debate.

Soyuz: not a smooth trip

NASA officials admitted to some concern, but played down any threat to the safety of astronauts, after a Soyuz capsule with American, Russian, and South Korean occupants came down over 400 kilometers off target and subjected the occupants to a sustained load over over eight Gs. This is the second time a Soyuz had a similar problem after entering the atmosphere at the wrong attitude courtesy of a problem in separating the service module from the crew capsule. The comments of NASA associate administrator for space operations William H. Gerstenmaier at a news teleconference betray some ambiguity:
"I don't see this as a major problem, but it's clearly something that should not have occurred."
"We may have missed the probable cause" (after the first incident, blamed on a frayed wire)
"I have complete confidence in what the Russians are doing. They were very concerned about this. They treated this with the same diligence as we would in the United States."

Darwin's archives posted to the Internet

For those who want to understand more about what Charles Darwin actually thought and said, this new site contains a treasure trove of material. To quote:

"This site contains Darwin's complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published: also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.
Almost all is online only here: such as 1st editions of Voyage of the Beagle, Zoology, Descent of Man, all editions of Origin of Species (1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th & 6th); important manuscripts: Beagle Diary & field notebooks, Journal, transmutation notebooks and Autobiography.
Forthcoming: more editions, translations, introductions & manuscripts."

More microsat notes: UK and China

In last week's edition of Space News, the founder of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., Sir Martin Sweeting, has blessed the sale to EADS Astrium. He says he approved it after Astrium guaranteed SSTL will retain its own identity. I have enormous respect for Sir Martin, and I hope my earlier gloom-and-doom post on this subject proves unfounded.

In another interesting bit, an article translated from the Chinese news service Xinhua says the Shenzhou VII human spaceflight mission, to be launched this October, will include the release of a small satellite. According to Gu Yidong, one of the Shenzou system designers, "Apart from conducting environmental surveys in space and basic scientific experiments, the small satellite can also link-up with the space lab. It can therefore effectively extend the function of the space lab. This is tantamount to extending the premise of the space lab from several hundred meters to dozens of kilometres."
This is pretty intriguing. It implies the smallsat will be able to dock and undock, or move several hundred km away (to test communications and control, perhaps?)

Thanks to Bart Hendrix for passing this item along.

Bergman's strange bear

I'm writing today to correct an error in my own books and to note how a mystery about the brown bear (Ursus arctos) has been with us for 72 years now.

In 1936, Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman published in the Journal of Mammology his notes on the bears of Kamchatka. In addition to his observations of living bears, he was shown the skin of a colossal, short-furred, solid black bear. He wrote that local hunters told him the very largest bears always looked like this. He recounted how another scientist had photographed an exceptionally large bear skull from the same region and described a pawprint 25cm across (18cm is a very large bear).

Several writers on the topic, myself included, have said Sten Bergman (not, incidentally, to be confused with Christian Bergmann, author of Bergmann's Rule), proposed the name Ursus piscator, later realigned as Ursus arctos piscator by other authorities, to describe a possible new species or subspecies of these huge, black, short-furred bears.

Looking now at the source material, I find that's not so. Bergman wrote of the possibility these bears were a separate species or subspecies from the brown bear, but he referred in his article only to an already-established scientific name, Ursus piscator (first used in 1865) used for all Kamchatkan brown bears.
Some sources still use U. a. piscator for Kamchatkan brown bears in general, although brown bear taxonomy remains inconsistent. So the lesson there is always to look at original sources (thanks to the two people who wrote me on how to get the 1936 article) and not just repeat another secondary source, even a respected source.

The mystery of Bergman's bear remains unsolved to this day.

Launch vehicles for ORS

In other news from Orbital Sciences, the USAF's Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) has ordered three more Minotaur launch vehicles based on surplus ballistic missiles in support of the Pentagon's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office. The $40M contract covers one Minotaur I (based on the Minuteman ICBM) and two Minotaur IVs (based on the larger Peacekeeper ICBM). Payloads are not yet assigned.

C/NOFS is Aloft

The latest U.S. military smallsat, the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite, was launched successfully by an Orbital Sciences Pegasus rocket over the Reagan Test Site in the Kwajalein Atoll. The satellite, with a "wet" launch mass of 395 kg, will study ionospheric changes and help forecast likely outages in communications satellite capabilities. The satellite builder is General Dynamics (of which I spoke a bit too harshly in an earlier post, although I still think the absorption of Spectrum Astro into a megacompany was not a good thing for the smallsat world).

A tale of a hobbit's tooth?

From Australian professor of anthropology Maciej Henneberg comes the most bizarre claim in all the bizarre history of the "hobbit," aka Flores man: that a tooth believed to be 18,000 years old shows evidence of having had a cavity filled, and therefore must be much younger. The claim brought a response from Flores co-discoverer Peter Brown that The Australian describes as, in part, "unprintable." Henneberg is part of a collection of scientists terming themselves the Pathology Group, which has advanced the notion the Flores fossils are from one or more pathological modern humans. He describes some of the attacks by the "pro-species" side as "scratches on a toilet wall." The Flores case provides a window into just how vigorous (and sometimes ungentlemanly) scientifc debate can be. (See the April 2, 2008 item, below, on women in science: this battle is an example of the idea discussed there.)

News of Vietnam's giant turtle

Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi harbors a strange inhabitant for a tiny, polluted body of water - a gigantic turtle. While it's been suggested this is a new species, scientists according to this news item have identified it as one of the world's few living specimens of Swinhoe's soft-shell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei), a species thought extinct in nature.
Well, almost extinct. The wild population outside of this lake is now known to number at least one, since biologist Nguyen Xuan Thuan has photographed a specimen in a lake west of Hanoi. That still makes a total of only four living turtles known from this species, which may measure a meter long and weigh over 140kg. (The remaining two are in zoos in China.) Biologists have now turned their attention to nearby waterways in the hope there are a few more of the huge reptiles lurking and the Swinhoe's turtle might yet be pulled back from the edge of extinction.

Oldest living thing on Earth

The title above is usually given to "Methuselah," a bristlecone pine in California which is 4,500 to 5,000 years old. Swedish researchers, though, have a new entry that blows that record away. A cluster of Norway spruce trees in Sweden, they have announced, was living 8,000 years ago. The trunk of a spruce can last only about 600 years, but these trees, clustered on a mountain slope exposed to harsh weather, have maintained a continuous existence by replacing each trunk with a new one. In the coldest times, the plants grew only about a half-meter tall, but warmer times in recent decades have encouraged them to reach higher - which is why they were eventually noticed.

Earthrise

Start your morning with a beautiful video, courtesy of Japan's lunar orbiter Kaguya, of a full Earthrise over the lunar horizon.

Space programs across the pond

The United Kingdom is not generally thought of as a major space player today, but it's been a constant source of ideas on the subject and has developed a number of programs over the last half-century. Britain is recognized today mostly for Surrey's innovative microsatellites, but orbital launch vehicles, spaceplanes, and other advanced projects have percolated up many times (usually to be canceled for want of funding.) This website gives a good overview of the major programs.

Interview: Director Worden of NASA Ames

Former USAF general Simon "Pete" Worden is enjoying his role as director of NASA Ames, where he pushes hard for innovative spacecraft and innovative ways of operating and financing NASA research. In this interview, he riffs on everything from Yuri Gagarin to Google.

Salute to Yuri

And we have come to another April 12, and it is time to raise the vodka glass for a toast to Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space. Gagarin was selected as one of the first class of 20 cosmonauts chosen under the guidance of Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, who called the men his "little eagles." "Little" was true in another sense: the Vostok capsule was even more cramped than its American rival, Mercury, and Gagarin's height of 157 cm came in handy. Gagarin's 108-minute flight on this date in 1961 covered less than one orbit, but he was nonetheless first. Gagarin never returned to space, in part because the USSR would not risk a national hero. It's a little-known fact that cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova once told an audience in Cuba that Gagarin would command a crew on the first lunar flight (with that crew including Tereshkova), but this seems to have been strictly propaganda. Gagarin died in a crash on a training flight in 1968. (The exact cause remains in dispute, and likely always will.) Among the many monuments the Soviets raised to him is one that I can't help but think he would be embarrassed by: a statue of the cosmonaut, looking more like some stylized superhero, placed atop a pillar in Moscow and towering 40 meters above Gagarin Square.

NASA's lunar robot

It's still an unproven concept, and perhaps a far-out one. But JPL engineers are playing with prototypes of a six-legged robot that could take a 15-ton habitat anywhere on the Moon the VSE missions may require. The robot would normally drive (a more energy-efficient mode) on wheels at the end of the legs. When the terrain was too rough, though, the wheels would be locked and the legs would be unlocked, enabling the ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) to stride on its six-meter-long legs at 5 to 10 kph. The linked article includes some cool videos.

Ames aims for the Moon

From the NASA Ames website comes this release on an innovative, low-cost lunar mission:

"MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA is preparing to send a small spacecraft to the moon in 2011 to assess the lunar atmosphere and the nature of dust lofted above the surface.

Called the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), the mission will launch before the agency's moon exploration activities accelerate during the next decade. LADEE will gather detailed information about conditions near the surface and environmental influences on lunar dust. A thorough understanding of these influences will help researchers understand how future exploration may shape the lunar environment and how the environment may affect future explorers.

"LADEE represents a low-cost approach to science missions, enabling faster science return and more frequent missions," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "These measurements will provide scientific insight into the lunar environment, and give our explorers a clearer understanding of what they'll be up against as they set up the first outpost and begin the process of settling the solar system."

LADEE is a cooperative effort with NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The total cost of the spacecraft is expected to be approximately $80 million."

Name a species at Scripps

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has joined the ranks of institutions looking to fund science by allowing patrons to put their names to new species. Current opportunities range from a spiny worm found in kelp forests ($10,000) to a handsome-looking holothurian for $15,000 and on up to a rarer worm found near hydrothermal vents ($50,000). So if you have the money and want to donate to science while naming something permanently and officially after yourself (or someone else - perhaps someone will name a worm or sea slug after a spouse's divorce attorney?) here is the opportunity.

Musings from the National Space Symposium

I had the opportunity yesterday to explore the cavernous exhibit halls of the National Space Symposium held here in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Space Foundation. My kids look forward to my making this pilgrimage each year, since the NSS has the best "goodies" of any space conference exhibition center I've ever been to. Orbital Sciences' foam rockets are always a big hit: they fly all over my house until they wear out.
Other discoveries and adventures:
- I scored only 8 out of 10 at the Space Florida trivia game, which was embarrassing. Space Florida seems to have a bigger booth and more exhibits every year: the state is certainly trying to advertise itself as a home for space businesses, perhaps in anticipation of Space Shuttle job losses.
- A lady at Orbital Sciences refused to confirm or deny that the company is bidding on the Orbcomm 2 replacement constellation, which is pretty funny considering it's been in the press for a year that they are not. I asked the question intending to follow up to ask why they were not bidding, but that first answer kind of befuddled me.
- It's easier to get fat this year at the conference - more cookie, ice cream, and popcorn stations were being used to lure people to booths.
- The US Air Force Academy had on display their Falconsat-2 spacecraft, the one that was on board the first SpaceX Falcon 1 booster that did not, shall we say, perform nominally. The satellite was pretty much intact, although the bus was so twisted and bent it was clearly beyond re-use. The booth spokesman noted that the satellite's location transponder had at least worked well, although it did not have much of a function, as the satellite crashed to the ground about ten meters from the crate used to ship it to Kwajalein.
- My longtime acquaintance Gwynne Shotwell, VP of SpaceX, reaffirmed they are holding June 10 as a firm launch date for the third Falcon 1 launch, the one with the ORS Jumpstart mission. I mentioned that founder Elon Musk had said once that they'd have to re-evaluate the business if they had three failures, but Gwynne's comrade in the booth said Musk had disavowed that as a notion made under a very different business model. Given SpaceX's government contracts and the progress toward larger boosters, it didn't apply anymore.
- I stopped by one of my favorite organizations, Space Dynamics Lab of Utah, to see how this innovative satellites-and-sensors outfit, which helps run the AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites, was doing. SDL leader Pat Patterson told me they were doing great, with numerous new contracts and employment at a record 400-plus.

All for now,
Matt

Surrey sale is final

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) has been sold for 40-50 million GBP to as EADS-owned space company, Astrium. Thales was reported to also be a suitor, which may account for Astrium paying what's generally agreed to be a robust, if not premium, price. Astrium has promised to keep SSTL's independence and character while giving it the resources to bid on some large contracts it missed out on in the past.
COMMENT: I hope SSTL keeps its character and spirit of innovation intact. As I said in the last post, the track record with such acquisitions is not good. But here's keeping fingers crossed.

Lungless frog discovered

Yes, lungless.
From Borneo comes Barbourula kalimantanensis, which gets its oxygen through its skin. The species had been found 30 years ago, but only one other specimen of this rare amphibian had been collected since then. Neither example was ever dissected. Now more frogs have been found in the wild - just in time to stun the biologists who finally looked inside and realized they had the only lungless anuran (frog or toad) known anywhere in the world.

Aerospace history: Kittinger's Leap

Check out this awesome video of Colonel Joseph Kittinger's 16 August 1960 parachute jump from a balloon on the edge of space. The Air Force test pilot's records for highest parachute jump (from an astonishing 31.3 kilometers) and longest freefall still stand today, although there are a few daredevils trying to develop a practical way to exceed them.
Colonel Kittinger (b. 1928) went on to return to operational flying and was assigned to combat duty during the Vietnam war. He spent 11 months as a POW in North Vietnam. In 1984, he set another record by completing the the first solo Atlantic crossing by balloon.

The case of the orange raccoon

No kidding. A raccoon with no black marks and a coat variously described as orange or blond was recently live-trapped after coming up on the porch of an Indiana family in a rural area near Bloomfield to chow down on leftover cat food.
This case is a reminder that the constant shuffling of the genetic card deck in every species sometimes results in a very strange hand being dealt.
The trapper arranged to have the animal taken it deep into the woods and let go.
Looking at the various local stories on this animal, it appears this occurred in February, and the animal (or a close copy, likely a relative given the rarity of the mutation) was live-trapped again in March by a seventh-grader in Greene County. The youngster's family reported calling the Indianapolis Zoo and being unable to convince anyone they really did have an orange raccoon.
More photos and comments are available at www.cryptomundo.com.

I'm not clear on just where the animal is now. Does anybody know?