Readying the Space Shuttle

In a news conference held Tuesday, Nov. 22, Shuttle External Tank (ET) program manager John Chapman, manager of the external tank program, described finding nine tiny cracks, seven of them invisible at the surface, in the foam of an ET undergoing inspection. The hairline cracks occurred close to the area where foam separated on ascent during the shuttle Discovery's STS-114 Return to Flight mission last July.

It is, frankly, difficult to imagine a foam-covered structure the size of the ET going through construction, processing, mating, and filling without ever developing such micro-cracks. As Chapman cautioned, "We're still trying to figure out what this means." Right now, though, everyone at NASA is concerned with trying to get the tanks mated to their Shuttles in the most pristine condition possible. STS-121, the next mission, is planned right now for May 2006.

Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale took pains to point out the next mission will be driven by the ET work and not by a schedule.

In this writer's personal opinion, though, NASA's leaders have to prove they really mean that. Looking at the postings on www.nasawatch.com, rumblings about inordinate schedule pressure have never entirely ceased. At this point, my unsolicited advice is, "To hell with the schedule." Another fatal accident means the end of the U.S. human spaceflight program, maybe for decades. If the Shuttle is going to fly again, everything else must take second priority to flying safely.

Truimph in Space

The Japanese Hayabusa probe became the first craft ever to take samples from a celestial body other than the Moon. The probe touched down on the asteroid Itokawa and and lifted off successfully.
The probe is not in the clear yet for its return to Earth. Controllers of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) put the craft into "safe" mode maintaining a distance of about 5 km from the asteroid while they studied an anomaly that may be propellant gas leaking from one of its thrusters. The probe is 288 million km from Earth and hopefully will return in 2007.
Congratulations are due to the Hayabusa team, along with everyone's best wishes for a safe return for humanity's latest effort to reach beyond this world.

2,000+ New Species from One Survey

A team from the University of San Carlos in the Philippines reports that study of a single area - the seafloor around the island of Panglao in the Philippine province of Bohol - has turned up an estimated 150–250 new species of Crustacea and 1,500–2,500 new species of molluscs. The University reports that,
"The survey has inventoried around 1,200 species of decapod Crustacea and up to 6,000 species of molluscs in the study area of about 15,000 hectares. While the mollusc result was anticipated, the crustacean result came as a total surprise to the researchers. In comparison, the Mediterranean Sea has an area of 300 million hectares and only 340 species of decapods and 2,024 species of molluscs."
Again and again, we are being reminded that we have only begun the task of inventorying the animal species of planet Earth.
As a Psalmist wrote long ago: "So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts."

In addition to the summary at the link above, more details can be found at http://www.panglao-hotspot.org/Templates/new.html

Electronic Warfare - By Fish!

According to a new item in Science News, the modern combat tactic of jamming a rival's sensors is not so modern. Fish do it! The 15-cm brown ghost knifefish (Apteronotus leptorhynchus), which uses an electric field for detection and communication, can change the frequency of its field to jam that of a nearly rival. Simply amazing.

Amateur Makes Pivotal Find

The day of the amateurs - whether they are naturalists, fossil-hunters, or astronomers - is far from over. We think of science as a big-ticket, professional enterprise these days, but it's a big planet and a bigger universe... there will never be enough professionals to cover everything that's out there for us to learn. Witness the story of Texas fossil-hunter Van Turner, who found a peice of backbone that was eventually classified as Dallasaurus turneri, the earliest known mosasaur and an important clue to the evolution of marine reptiles.

Congratulations, Mr. Turner!

A really big ape

A new study indicates the largest known ape of all time, Gigantopithecus blackii, lived well into the time when humans inhabited its Asian home. Indeed, this 550-kg King Kong may have died out only 100,000 years ago.
Aside from the implications for primatology and paleontology, this also created a buzz in cryptozoology. Gigantopithecus (there are at least two species in the genus, with G. blackii being the largest) is the only primate of which we have fossil evidence that could account, based on size alone, for those yeti and sasquatch reports which describe apes up to 8 feet tall or more.
G. blackii is normally depicted as a gorilla-like animal which was normally a quadruped. Its sheer size is the main reason for assuming this. We have only teeth and jawbones, so there's a lot of room for speculation.
The connection with sasquatch seems a reach. Why would an animal of subtropical Asia (it's best known from China and Vietnam) make the journey across the Bering Strait land bridge in sufficient numbers to establish a North American population? This area was not always snow and ice, but it was hardly enticing foraging territory for a plant-eating ape. If sasquatch exists (I doubt it, but I hope I'm wrong) I suspect the ancestor is a somewhat smaller, more adaptable , omnivorous ape whose fossils we have not found yet.

Controversy on Flores Man

Anthropologists are sharply divided over the validity of Homo floresiensis, despite recent finds that extend the presence of these meter-tall humans of Indonesia, indicating a population that persisted from 95,000 years BP to as recent as 12,000 years. Some, like Robert Eckhardt of the Penn State University, consider the remains found so far indicate nothing more than a group of people prone to genetic defects including subnormal stature and microcephaly. In my admittedly amateur opinion, this is not a logical position. It's one thing to find a single skeleton and dismiss it as a "freak." In this case, we have material (admittedly incomplete) indicating this race survived for more than 80,000 years. A population subject to universal or very frequent microcephaly and other defects is simply not going to survive and reproduce for very long. While skeptics legitimately wonder if a being with such a small brain could produce the stone tools and other artifacts found in association with Flores, the evidence so far is that they could - because they did.

Important Report on National S&T

The National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy has produced a very clear and urgent report,
Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future .
It identifies two key challenges coupled to science and engineering: creating high-quality jobs and providing clean, reliable energy.
Recommendations: improve math and science education: expand basic research: make US more attractive to high tech students, engineers, etc.: and provide incentives for innovation.

Comment: Like most clear and urgent reports, this one will probably be ignored. Reports only matter when the President and Congress turn them into legislatiopn and budget inputs. This reprot is bold and forward-looking. Therefore, I'm not expecting much action.

The Robot Fish

The London Aquarium is now host to the world's first autonomous, self-navigating robotic fish. Developed by the University of Essex, in southeast England, the fish are intended as a public demonstration of robotic technology, but project leader Huosheng Hu notes, "This work has many real-world applications including seabed exploration, detecting leaks in oil pipelines, mine countermeasures and improving the performance of underwater vehicles."

Comment: Some technology is just plain cool. This qualifies, definitely.

Science Policy News

The best source for keeping up with what's happening in science policy and funding is the American Insitute of Physics news page. The AIP staff is especially good at staying on top of each step of Federal budgeting actions.

New Book "Shadows of Existence" delayed

This pains me enormously, but I must report that my second book on zoological discoveries and mysteries has been postponed again.
The publisher, Hancock House, contracted with a printer that turned out to be unreliable.
Shadows of Existence recounts the last decade of discoveries and rediscoveries in the world of zoology. The decade of the 1990s brought a wave of new species descriptions, especially of mammals, and the trend has continued into the 21st century. New deer, rodents, birds, sharks, and other vertebrates are entering the textbooks along with enormous numbers of invertebrates of all types and sizes, from microscopic creatures to a weird squid, seven meters long, that looks like an animated microwave tower. The book also delves into the mysteries of cryptozoology, separating rumor from science and showing there are still intriguing questions about creatures in the shadows.
I do have a chance to add some updates, so I'll be doing a quick revision to cover events like the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Further updates to come...

Meanwhile, the real Shuttle news

The "Tiger Team" formed to examine the unsettling External Tank foam-shedding events on the flight of STS-114 has reported in. While the exact causes remain a little fuzzier than NASA would like, the team did offer recommendations for safer flight:

Near-Term:
Remove and replace the entire length of the LO2 and LH2 PAL ramps using improved application processes.
Implement modifications required to prevent cryopumping through bi-pod heater wiring.
Investigate the possibility of venting ice/frost ramp "fingers".
Improve hardware protection provisions to minimize the potential for collateral hardware damage during processing.

Long-term:
Elimination of the PAL ramp at the earliest possible opportunity coincident with rigorous aerodynamic test and analysis.
Develop hard covers for ice/frost ramps and implement in conjunction with PAL ramp elimination.
Eliminate tank traffic to the extent possible in the long-term and implement a no-touch processing policy.
Develop and certify nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques for all ET TPS applications.


For the full report and other Shuttle news, see:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

Space Shuttle News from The Onion

The Internet's answer to The Daily Show offers this enjoyable nuggest about government rule-bending.

The Onion "reports" that...
"NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has yet to respond to recent allegations that he used NASA space shuttles on as many as one dozen unauthorized outings to such destinations as New York City, the French Riviera, and his vacation home near Ketchum, ID."

Click the headline above for the whole story! :)

Obituary: Michael Ward

Michael P. Ward, British physician and mountaineer, has died. While Ward has many important feats of mountaineering to his credit, including pioneering work on Mount Everest, he is known in cryptozoology for being co-discoverer, with Eric Shipton, of the "yeti footprints" in 1951. In 1972, primatologist John Napier wrote that he would dismiss the yeti except that the Shipton-Ward prints were the one piece of evidence that "simply sticks in my throat." The prints, which look like a primate's but with an anomalously broad heel, small big toe, and long second toe, have never been convincingly explained.

Africa's First New Monkey in 21 years

The "Highland Mangabey" (Lophocebus kipunji) has become the first new monkey species described from Africa since 1984. Biologists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found this brown, long-haired primate on the slopes of a Tanzanian volcano, Mt. Rungwe. It's a large monkey, with a head and body length of up to almost a meter. The animal has long been known to local hunters, and it was their discussions with visiting scientists that led to the animal's discovery. Oddly, after being unknown to science for so many years, the animal was discovered almost simultaneously by two biologists 350 km away. This second population lives in the Ndundulu Forest in the Udzungwa Mountains. The species includes only an estimated 500 to 1,000 individuals, and it is considered highly endangered.

China's Second Human Spaceflight Succeeds

Astronauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng safety returned to Earth by parachute in their Shenzhou VI spacecraft, making China 2-for-2 in successful human spaceflight missions. The mission lasted five days. Popular celebrations of the flight included firecrackers and dragon dances, while the nation's leaders celebrated the scientific, technological, and political advances made by the flight. The Shenzhou program has reportededly cost about $2.3 billion (U.S. dollars) so far.

"Pop Rocks" from the Ocean Floor

In 1960, unusual deep-sea volcanic rocks were dredged up from the waters off Mexico, near Guadalupe. They broke apart with loud popping noises when brought to the surface. A very few additional sources of popping rocks have been found, mainly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, but it took 45 years to relocate the site of the original discovery. Scripps oceanographers have finally accomplished that, finding the rocks on a volcano 3,200 meters down. The rocks "pop" due to concentrated bubbles of volcanic gases trapped inside. When the rocks escape the confining pressure of the deep sea, the bubbles expand with enough force to break the rocks open. The gases in the bubbles will give geologists a window back in time to examine the concentrations of these elements and compounds (helium, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor, etc.) trapped when the mantle was being formed.

The Next American Spaceship

The team of Northrop Grumman and Boeing team revealed its planned version of the Crew Exploration Vehicle, NASA'a next crewed spacecraft. (Click on link in title above.) The CEV is intended to fly orbital missions bweginning in 2012 and lunar missions by 2018. It's a modular system, much more capable than the Apollo "stack" is somewhat resembles. There is room for six astronauts in the crew module, which is coupled with a service module and a launch-abort system.

For Something Different...

Science Frontiers is a unique newsletter collecting snippets of information about scientific anomalies and curiosities from sources ranging from peer-reviewed papers to textbooks to popular media. I'm not talking about things like UFOs, although they occasionally do turn up, but such items as why the "red shift" measurement does not always work as it should for astronomers, why "earthquake lights" appear to be a real phenomenon but do not appear in all cases, and a report of traces of tobacco, a New World plant, in an Egyptian mummy. The newsletter is put out by an organization called The Sourcebook Project, which has culled hundreds of years of scientific and popular literature for this stuff, also available in collections:

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sourcebk.htm
The Project also sells a variety of mainstream and non-mainstream science books. The newsletter ($7/year for six issues of the print edition) is a very mixed bag, but always fascinating reading.

China Launches Two Men Into Space

China announced the launch of its second human spaceflight mission, this one carrying two men. The Shenzhou VI was lofted by a Long March 2F booster with Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng aboard. The five-day mission took off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. This is China's first human space flight since the nation's inagural Shenzhou mission, with Yang Liwei aboard, in October 2003. China is the third nation, after the US and USSR, to launch an astronaut with its own spacecraft and booster. The astronauts on this mission will spend time in an experiment module attached to the craft's nose, where they will carry out medical and other scientific tests. This mission is a major step toward China's announced goal of a permanent crewed space station.