President Obama fires a marshmallow gun and lets robots roam his White House at the White House Science Fair.

Three-year-old Danielle Fairchild probably can’t grasp the magnitude of what she’s enabled. The little girl adopted by Fred and Dale Fairchild in Duluth, Georgia was born with half a thumb and no fingers on her right hand. Half-way across the country a smart teenager and five other girl scouts were looking for a science and technology project to complete.

Danielle Fairchild Writes with Help of Prosthetic Hand

Dale Fairchild contacted Kate Murray and the troop of The Flying Monkeys and a partnership was born. 13-year old Murray was born with a thumb but no fingers on her left hand. Despite this digital abnormality she took up the violin five years ago using a device that clips to the bow and wraps around her left palm. And she thought she could help someone else learn to write.

Upon hearing about little Danielle The Flying Monkeys flew into action, learning all they could about prosthetic limbs, talking to doctors and learning how to build one from scratch.

Fast forward to February 7 as Kate Murray, Gaby Dempsey and Mackenzie Gewell present their prosthetic hand device to President Obama in the White House at the second White House Science Fair.

As the President held the BOB-1.2 plastic device in his hand, he said, “This is outstanding.”

President Obama Pumps Air Cannon at White House Science Fair

The Flying Monkeys won a $20,000 Innovation award from For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego League. FIRST is the non-profit organization started by inventor Dean Kamen, who famously brought us the Segway. And for Murray a trip to the White House is “super exciting.”

She says, “I want to be a mechanical engineer when I grow up. I want to design cars to be more fuel efficient and/or rely entirely on wind or solar energy.”

14-year old Joey Hudy unwittingly stole the show providing spectacular photo opportunities as President Obama listened the story about how the Phoenix teen built his marshmallow air gun from PVC pipe with the help of employees at his local Home Depot. Then he asked if the device was operational and decided on the spot that the two should fire it together.

The President asked that everyone in the line of fire move back because this was an improvised activity while strolling through the student exhibits and talking to the winners of over 40 science fairs and competitions.

Joey Hudy with President Obama Impressed by Power to Shoot a Marshmallow Missile

When the gun popped, press cameras clicked wildly and they caught the child-like wonderment in the eyes of the President, which encapsulated the entire White House science fair.

Clearly, the President was impressed by the caliber of projects presented and the students themselves. He said, “Now, as I was walking around the science fair, I was thinking back to when I was your age. And basically, you guys put me to shame.”

President Obama lauded the whip smart students and their clever projects. But he was struck by something more.

He said, “It’s the fact that you recognize that you’ve got a responsibility to use your talents in service to something bigger than yourselves.”

He said some students will develop new products that change the way we live. He pointed out Hayley Hoverter, the winner of the 2011 Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship’s National Challenge. The 16-year-old Los Angeles resident invented a flavorless, colorless sugar packet that dissolves in hot water.

About her invention the President said, “It could potentially save up to two million pounds of trash each year — and that’s just at Starbucks.” Mastercard gave the teen $10,000 to turn her concept into a working business.

Next the President said that some students will see a problem in their town or city and do something about it. After 14-year old Benjamin Hylak was worried that seniors in nursing homes would get lonely he built a robot attached to a computer monitor. His telepresence robot which moves around the center and allows seniors to connect via Skype with their family and friends qualified him as a BROADCOM Masters Competition 2011 finalist.

Angela Zhang Explains Her Nanoparticle Cancer Treatment

President Obama said, “Inventions like Benjamin’s could make life better for millions of families.”

The same holds for the three representatives from California.

Angela Zhang of Cupertino, who has proposed a potential cure for cancer. This year, she won a $100,000 grand prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for her nanoparticle cancer treatment. She says, “I keep saying 60 years from now I will probably be telling my grandkids everything that happened when I was 17.”

Hayley Hoverter of Los Angeles, who developed sugar packets that dissolve in hot drinks is the now the 16-year old CEO of Sweet (dis)SOLVE. She spoke at TEDx SoCal last year.

Neil de Grasse Tyson with Braeden Benedict at White House Science Fair

Braeden Benedict of Ranchos Palos Verdes designed a device to detect concussions in athletes after one of his football teammates experienced prolonged concussion symptoms and had to stop playing contact sports. The 15-year old designed a helmet-mounted sensory detector that turns red when an athlete is hit hard enough to cause a concussion.

He took the top prize in America’s 2011 Top Young Scientist competition at the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge where he won $25,000 for his efforts.

The President spoke of the adversity several groups of students overcame just to be at the science fair. A rocketry team from Presidio, Texas came from the 4th poorest school district in the nation where most students speak English as a second language. Parents raised money to help the students make the trip to Washington D.C. Mr. Obama said they even sold a goat to make the journey to the White House.

He applauded the winners of the Michigan Regional Contest of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition. Three Detroit students imagined a clean energy future for their city and while they were doing so their school burned down, forcing them to merge with another school while they completed their project. The team said, “(Future City) helps me make a better city to live in.” They designed there vision around a city following the theme of “Fuel Your Future: Imagine New Ways to Meet Our Energy Needs and Maintain a Healthy Planet.”

Samantha Garvey Tells President Obama about Mussels

The President also acknowledged 18-year old Samantha Garvey, who has spent a lot of time with the President lately. The high school senior from New York made headlines after winning a spot in the semi-finals of the Intel science talent search. But more than her ingenious project studying mussel predation on Long Island she captured the attention of America because when she found out she was a semi-finalist she was homeless.

Since then she has appeared on television and sat in the First Lady’s box at the State of the Union Address last month. At the White House science fair the President announced that the teen would like to work for NOAA or EPA some day. Pointing at them he said, “This is Dr. Lubchenco. She is the head of NOAA. Lisa Jackson, right there, head of EPA. You might, you know, just want to hook up with them before you leave.”

The President said that all the students who participated in the science fair inspired him. He said, “It’s young people like you who make me so confident that America’s best days are still to come.”

President Obama Tells Science Fair Students They Are Paving the Way to the Future

Dale Fairchild says that before The Flying Monkey’s created BOB-1 for little Danielle to use as she learns to write the toddler used her right hand like a flipper. But after the molded plastic device arrived, complete with a Vel-cro(TM) strap to attached a plastic pencil holder, the girl began using her fingerless hand to pick things up.

The teen engineers have never met Danielle Fairchild but their prosthetic hand device is going through the expensive and lengthy patent process, placing the teen inventors on track to help many more people besides the little girl in Georgia.

C-SPAN coverage of President Obama’s speech to the White House Science Fair, Feb. 7, 2012. (15:13)

It may have been too much space talk on the Space Coast in Florida during the Republican primary that cost Newt Gingrich his presidential primary momentum. After all the dramatic yet conservative candidate has a penchant for making reasonable, scientifically plausible policy sound like science fiction.

In the run up to the Florida primary the former Speaker of the House called for colonies on the moon by 2020. In a field of mostly anti-science candidates his pro-science stance stood out from the pack. Making several references to John F. Kennedy’s big thinking to put a man on the moon probably didn’t help his case either.

After calling for the moon to become a possible 51st state in the union most people started to dismiss his space ambitions as little more than pipe dreams.

Newt "New Moonie" Gingrich Cartoon

Romney quickly retorted saying he would fire anyone at a company of his who wanted to spend billions of dollars that way.

And it appears that Florida Republicans agreed that space is outside the realm of their earthly politics. Romney trounced Gingrich after many thought it would be a close race.

But scientists and science policy experts say that Gingrich’s space base isn’t so off base after all.

Until three years ago that was U.S. policy. Both Republican presidents with the last name Bush endorsed lunar colonies and spent billions on the idea. President Obama canceled the moon program three years ago after the economy plunged into recession and projected costs of returning to the moon rose well beyond $700 billion.

George Washington University space policy director Scott Pace, who was a NASA associate administrator under George W. Bush says that Gingrich’s moon mission was feasible in 2005. But it is no longer. Pace, who is a Romney space policy advisor, says that going to the moon is definitely doable but figuring out when is the trick.

While campaigning in Florida before the primary Gingrich said, “Some of you may like it and you may dislike it, but I gave the boldest explanation of going into space since John F. Kennedy in 1961.” He added, “I believe in an America of big ideas and big solutions.”

Gingrich’s science-based ideas may have been too big for the Florida electorate to swallow.

It’s not to say that the other Republican candidates are against going to space. On the contrary, all the candidates support a robust private space industry. Here the candidates sound eerily similar to their political foe, President Obama. Since NASA scrapped its shuttle program which left thousands of Florida space workers unemployed all eyes have turned to private companies to fulfill that mission.

After all getting commercial space companies to take over the job of getting Americans to low-Earth orbit is a key part of the Obama space plan. But money is still the issue. In the current budget NASA received $406 million for private space programs though the Administration asked for $805 million.

Still, Gingrich stands further afield than the other candidates who remain quiet on science issues.

Former Clinton science adviser Neal Lane says Gingrich is pro-science. He credits Gingrich with preserving federal science research from big budget cuts in the 1990s.

Lane doesn’t agree with all of Gingrich’s ideas but he says they aren’t crazy.

Syracuse University science policy professor Henry Lambright tells the Associate Press, “[Gingrich] is on the edge of mainstream thinking about big science.”

While campaigning in Iowa in December, Gingrich made a plea to map the brain to better understand neuro-degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. There, he made it personal, wiping a tear off his cheek as he described watching his mother go from being a vibrant woman to one wracked with physical and mental problems in a nursing home.

Then he said his “whole emphasis on brain science” was based on his mother’s depression and mental illness. He said, “It’s not a theory. It’s in fact, my mother.”

In Seattle, the Allen Institute for Brain Science is hard at work mapping the brains of mice to help better understand the human brain. Large undertakings like brain mapping is a common scientific method to evaluate a large problem. Scientists have done similar projects mapping the human genome and trying to understand the basic biology of cancer.

But Arizona State University science policy professor Dan Sarewitz tells the Associated Press, “The trouble is that, in the past, it hasn’t paid off as promised.”

Those big important ideas with little short term pay off seem to sour voters.

Gingrich also raised a few eyebrows about his paranoid preoccupation with electromagnetic pulses wiping out electricity in the U.S. In 2009 he said that “may be the greatest threat we face…we could in fact lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.”

Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich Team up in 2008 Climate Ad

He also stunned many political allies when he appeared seated next to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi in an ad about climate change. Gingrich also wrote a book about the subject, called A Contract with the Earth.

But it seems that his dreams of space are the ones getting him in trouble this primary season.

Alan Stern, a vice president for research and development at the Southwest Research Institute and NASA’s chief of space sciences under George W. Bush says the media criticism of Gingrich’s space plans is unfair. He calls Gingrich a big thinker and a pioneer. Stern says, “When a government guy or politician talks that way, they just get clobbered about being unrealistic and that’s unfortunate.”

And, that’s exactly what happened in Florida.

Exerpts from the Florida Republican debate about Space.

NASA is spending $63 million per astronaut to send them to space on Russian rockets. But a pair of Toronto teens did it for $400. Okay, their astronaut was made of plastic and stood just a couple of inches tall. And he only made it about a quarter of the way to the internationally accepted boundary of outer space which is 62 miles or more than 328,000 feet in altitude.

So let’s say he went to nearer space like so many iPhones and other (ahem) electronics before him. Nevertheless this near space adventure captured the hearts and minds of thousands as well as some amazing images of the edge of space.

Gripping tightly to a Canadian flag, the first Lego man flew almost 16 miles straight up. The two teens who piloted the plastic man’s ride documented the hour-and-a-half-long journey, which has turned into a YouTube hit. And in just a few days Lego man’s Facebook page has gained thousands of fans.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad Show Lego Man at Press Conference in Toronto

Muhammad was inspired by something similar at MIT and other YouTube videos. But he also gives credit to his Earth and Space science teacher, Steven Tors.

The Lego man made it to 85,000 feet — in the middle stratosphere – before the weather balloon popped and a homemade parachute returned him and his precious video cargo to Earth.

Four cameras — two still and two video — captured all the images of Lego man’s trip to the edge of space, which took 97 minutes. In addition to 97 minutes of video capturing the entire experience, Ho and Muhammad snapped over 1,500 digital images. They also included a cellphone with a GPS tracker app in the styrofoam cargo container housing the electronics.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad Retrieve Lego Man after Trip to Edge of Space

Muhammad says, “It sent us the coordinates of its position and that’s basically how we tracked it down.” But for an hour of the decent the GPS tracker didn’t transmit any data. But then at about 6,000 feet the tracker started recording again, allowing the teens to find the Lego Man 97 miles from their Toronto area launch site.

In preparing for the flight the Agincourt Collegiate Institute seniors say that after filling a 12-foot weather balloon with helium, doing some final instrument checks, they launched the Lego man who rose at a rapid 27-feet per second.

But they had to wait a week to see if their experiment was a success. When they retrieved the Lego man the following weekend (it was too dark when they initially tried to find him and school prevented them from reacquiring their citizen science project right away) they say they jumped for joy. But they were scared and excited at the same time, wondering if the cameras captured good images.

They did.

Lego Man Flies to Space (almost), Curvature of the Earth in the Background

Muhammad says, “When we first saw those photos it really makes us think what we are really doing to our Earth and what it is when you look at it from the outside. And, it was really inspiring and emotional too.”

They say they both got goosebumps and were grateful to be able to look at the Earth from a different vantage point.

But these two budding space engineers are not the first to send a weather balloon to the edge of space just to see what it looks like.

Boy Scout troops and pioneering pranksters have been equipping weather balloons with payload containers housing inexpensive video cameras and GPS units and floating them to the edge of space for a few years — since the equipment has become inexpensive enough to be considered disposable if something goes awry.

The next goal for the two Toronto 17-year-olds is to complete 12th Grade.

When “Nice” Peter Alexis Shukoff and “EpicLLOYD” Lloyd Ahlquist combined their comic genius, knowledge of pop culture and intimate love for rap battles, YouTube sensation Epic Rap Battles of History was born. Now with millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions watching for their next historical pairing, the musical artists (for lack of a more descriptive term) struck a chord with geeks online.

For those unfamiliar with rap battles here’s how it works. First, close your eyes and picture Eminem in the movie 8-Mile. Now the rules. Two rappers stand on a stage armed with microphones in front of an audience hungry for confrontation. Then the battle begins. It generally starts with a funny quip about the rapper’s target, the other rapper. Then after a few extemporaneous (yeah, I went there) rhyming verses the battle heats up and gets personal…but never mean.

Albert Einstein v. Stephen Hawking, Epic Rap Battle of History

As Ahlquist told Geek Out, a CNN blog recently, “While battling is confrontational, most times the people battling are doing so just for the sake of the rapping or the show.” His rap name is EpicLLOYD and his specialty is taking on characters from history — real or imagined.

Why do it?

EpicLLOYD says, “We’ve always liked rap and free-styling. Battle rap is something that is inherently engaging and funny because it’s based on punch lines about the other person.”

Their most famous Epic Rap Battle of History has two well known figures throw down. It’s a classic what if scenario. What would Adolf Hitler say to Darth Vader if he had the chance? Over 45 million people tuned in to find out.

While they have no problem pitting non-fictional character against fictional, occasionally they do put two real life people into a fantasy rap battle. And they even pay homage to science.

Shukoff who prefers the rap handle NicePeter says, “Neither of us knew much about physics going into the Hawking-Einstein battle. We knew it was a cool pairing, a cool matchup that appeals to a section of the Internet who appreciate science and mathematics. We dove into it as much as we could, found out about Einstein and talked to people about Stephen Hawking.”

Now the video the duo debuted last year has garnered over 35 million views.

What’s next for NicePeter and EpicLLOYD? Well, historical twosomes. First up — Mario Brothers v. Wright Brothers. That’s sure to be a high-flying rap battle.

NicePeter says, “We’re gonna explore new stuff. I made a pledge to my father to use a Russian character. That will have to happen. There’s a lot of really good rappers from Russian history.”

Now the science

Okay, this is just a fun little ditty and rather light on the science. But there are a couple of things worth mentioning.

3-D image of 6-dimension Calabi-Yau Spaces That May Lie at the Smallest Scales of Unseen Dimensions in String Theory

1. Einstein came up with the theory of relativity. One tenet of his theory of general relativity is that the Universe is expanding, and the far parts of it are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. That’s a mind-blowing concept which the famous physicist alludes to in the opening salvo of the rap battle.

2. Einstein takes a few personal jabs at Hawking who is confined to a wheelchair and speaks through a computer because he is almost entirely paralyzed by a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

3. Hawking comes roaring back later in the battle to scald Einstein with his wit, calling him a p-brane. This term is a witty physics retort, referring to the size of Einstein’s brain compared to Hawkings while also making a reference to a theoretical physics concept. Here p-brane is a spatially extended mathematical concept that appears in string theory.

4. Einstein retorts with a veiled reference to Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time as he mildly threatens him before attacking his black hole theory, which he continues to revise.

5. But Hawking deals the final blow, starting with a Your Momma insult (a common rap battle tactic) couched in math. He refers to all the known particles in the observable universe — a googol, which is estimated to be more than the 10⁷⁹ and 10⁸¹ atoms. Or as mathematician Edward Kasner famously said a googol is “one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.” His nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta coined the term. Then in 1980 cosmologist Carl Sagan famously said writing out a googol “would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.”

6. Hawking goes on to reference the historical myth that Einstein’s famous E=MC² formula led to the atom bomb. Then he invokes Sagan from The Cosmos once more, who said, “If you want to bake apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Hawking delivers the final punch to Einstein by insulting his intelligence (another common rap battle tactic) comparing him to a 1993 Texas Instruments graphing calculator while calling himself a supercomputer. Ouch!

Albert Einstein v. Stephen Hawking

by NicePeter and EpidLLOYD

[Albert Einstein]
When I apply my battle theory minds are relatively blown
So take a seat Steve
Opp, I see you brought your own
What’s with your voice?
I can’t frickin tell
You sound like WALL-E
Having s** with a Speak & Spell
I’ll school you anywhere
MIT to Oxford
All your fans with be like:
“um, that was Hawk-ward”
I’m as dope as two rappers
You better be scared
Cause that means Albert E
Equals M C squared

[Stephen Hawking]
You’ve got no idea what you’re messing with here boy
I got 12 inch rims on my chair, that’s how I roll y’all
You look like someone glued a mustache on a troll doll
I’ll be stretching out the rhyme, like gravity stretches time
When you try to put your little p-brane against this kind of mind
I’m the best
I’m the Snoop Dogg of Science
I’ll be dropping mad apples on your head from the shoulder of giants

[Albert Einstein]
I’m a giant whose shoulders you’d have stood on, if you can stand
I’ll give you a brief history of pain with the back of my hand
You can’t destroy matter or me, for serious
Ripping holes in you bigger than the hole in your black hole theory was

[Stephen Hawking]
There are 10,000,000
Million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, particles in the universe that we can observe
Your mama took the ugly ones and put them into one nerd
You wanna bring the heat
With the mushroom clouds you’re making
I’m about to bake raps from scratch, like Carl Sagan
And while it’s true
That my work is based on you
I’m a super computer
You’re like a TI-82

Created by NicePeter

As a precaution planes that travel over the North Pole are being rerouted. Satellites are bracing for a direct hit and technicians are watching energy grids with unblinking eyes. The reason for all the hub-bub is a big solar storm. The Space Weather Prediction Center issued a warning on Monday when the sun released a coronal mass ejection and sent it hurtling toward Earth.

At first blush, the NOAA-run prediction center called it the worst solar storm since May 2005. But this morning as the

Sunspot 1402 Releases Large Coronal Mass Ejection Jan. 23

So if you’re cell phone isn’t working quite right for the next couple of days, you’ll know why.

But most people will remember this solar storm because it’s going to produce an incredible light show as the Northern Lights and Southern Lights dance across the sky at lower latitudes.

Reports of stunning Northern Lights visible in England, Ireland and Scotland are already being reported. More pics here.

The space weather prediction center created a map, estimating where the auroras will be visible. And it looks like anyone north of Idaho in the U.S. will be able to see a spectacular show as solar radiation smashes into Earth’s magnetic field, releasing light in the process.

Earth Sky recommends, “To see the aurora, you’ll need a nice clear sky with no obscuring clouds. It’s also good to have no moon, which, luckily, is what we have tonight. The moon is traveling across the sky with the sun today and won’t be visible again until tomorrow night (January 25, 2012) when, by the way, it’ll be spectacularly beautiful near Venus in the west after sunset. Finally, you should do yourself a favor and ride half an hour or so beyond the lights of the city to view tonight’s aurora. You might be able to glimpse it from within the city, but more likely city lights will drown the aurora from view.”

The sun is in an active phase of its 11-year solar cycle. More frequent solar storms are likely as the sun reaches is peak activity next year before slowly settling down again.

Rating Solar Storms

Leann Lloyd had the dubious honor of lugging a metallic rock through airport security in Missouri. She was on her way back to Albuquerque and the Meteorite Museum at University of New Mexico after retrieving the missing meteorite.

She says, “It stopped the line and caused a big hub-bub and three or four agents came over and pulled it out.”

The meteorite isn’t that big but because of its density weighs about 50 pounds. And apparently a suspect just walked out of the museum through the front door carrying the space rock before winter break.

Sikhote Alin Meteorite, Stolen from UNM Museum

The museum director noticed the empty case when he was giving a private tour during the holiday closure. He immediately put out an all-points meteorite bulletin through an international collector’s group and within a day had tracked the rock to Missouri, where Lloyd was sent to bring it home.

After orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for eons, the rock hit Russia about 60 years ago and landed in New Mexico when a Russian scientist gave the remarkable specimen to the first director of the musuem. Since then the rock sat still until straying off course just before Christmas.

Kent agee says the rock, which sold for $1,700 is not just a great scientific specimen but also one of historical significance. He places the value of the meteorite at about $40,000. The suspect who sold the stolen space rock used his real name in the transaction so the International Meteorite Collectors Association was able to track him easily.

Though he has not been arrested yet the thief stole the Sikhote-Alin, a 9,000 gram iron-nickel meteorite for the money. The UNM meteorite museum is closed while a full security review is conducted.

John Schooler, a meteorite collector and dealer in Missouri sees occasional alerts on the IMCA site. He says, “It’s not good. But like anyhting of value it has the potential of being stolen. They’ve done this for generations. The size here is unusual. He had to show some physical exertion to do it not just stick it in his pocket.”

Rosie Redfield, at Home in the Lab

The scientists led by a young researcher named Felisa Wolfe-Simon claimed they were able to get Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their physiology and even in their DNA. NASA even hyped the work ahead of the paper’s online publication in the journal Science. The press release announced, “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

However, Dr. Redfield read the paper and immediately knew it was wrong. She hopped online and pointed out the problems in her blog, RRResearch, which contains her frequent musings about life in her lab working with graduate students. On Dec. 4, 2010 she wrote a long post (and one she thought would be read by few,) which set off a firestorm over the arsenic paper.

Since then, she has appeared in the media and at science conferences talking about her post-publication comments of Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life paper. This year the journal Nature named her one of the ten science newsmakers of the year. In addition to saying what many other evolutionary biologists thought about the veracity of the arsenic DNA experiment, she also decided to use her blog as an open notebook where she has been busily trying to replicate the original arsenic experiment.

Her documentation of the process is not just fascinating from a technical perspective (which it is) but she carefully crafts experiments to test each question she has about the Wolfe-Simon study, slowly poking bigger holes in what many biologists regarded as a weak experiment anyway. Redfield isn’t concerned whether she is wrong or right. She just follows the science and looks for explanations along the way.

Her writings almost appear motherly and it’s easy to imagine her as a thesis or dissertation adviser to her students. In one post where she recounts her criticisms of the now-infamous biology paper, she admonishes lead author Wolfe-Simon for having sloppy experimental habits.

Within two days of reading the original paper in the journal Science, Redfield saw the flaws in the Wolfe-Simon experiment. She sees scientists making mistakes as just part of the process. But she chastises the all the scientists involved in that research for remaining silent and never correcting the problem.

She says, “Scientists in particular need to be able to admit their errors – we’re working not only at the frontiers of knowledge but at the frontiers of our abilities. Failure to admit we’ve been wrong is a betrayal of the scientific process.”

Since Wolfe-Simon didn’t admit making any mistakes Redfield says she had to prove the findings wrong.

Of the original arsenic research, she says, “Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.”

So after she completed teaching her genomics class in the spring she turned her attention back to the arsenic experiment, which was clearly nagging at her.

On June 1, she outlined her plan of action for reproducing the original Wolfe-Simon experiment. But from the get-go she said, “If I can’t readily get GFAJ-1 [bacteria cells] growing nicely on the phosphate-based version of the medium the paper specifies, I’ll know that I’m out of my depth. At that point I’ll leave the whole mess for someone else to test.”

Her work revolved around two big questions.

Q. 1. Is the approximately tenfold growth difference between arsenic and phosphorus due to the cells’ use of arsenic in place of phosphorus in DNA, RNA and other biomolecules?

Q. 2. Does DNA purified from cells grown with less phosphorus and more arsenic contain significant amounts of covalently incorporated arsenic?

Just before Christmas, she told me, “This is a really simple experiment, a no-brainer,” which originally she thought might take a couple of weeks. It took her six months.

To start her experiment she sent away for GFAJ-1, the allegedly arsenic-loving bacterium on which Wolfe-Simon based her research of Mono Lake in California. (In some science circles GFAJ stands unflatteringly for Give Felisa A Job).

In September, after several months of open experimentation, Dr. Redfield discovered the arsenic-treated bacteria cells only grew when the cells were streaked out on agar plates. When she tried to use a liquid culture medium, she says, “The cells didn’t look so good.”

But for some reason they grew on the agar plates. And when Dr. Redfield fed the bacteria an amino acid she says they grew like crazy. Once she was able to stabilize the cell growth she grew enough GFAJ-1 to analyze its DNA. She wanted to see if the cells were assimilating arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus.

Dr. Redfield didn’t think that such a thing would be possible and for decades chemists have concluded the same thing. Yet, That’s what the Wolfe-Simon experiment concluded. Redfield relies on the chemistry which says that the bonds with the arsenic would be so weak that they would fall apart within a fraction of a second. According to the chemistry, she says, “The DNA will just fall apart and the cells will die.”

But she also refutes the Wolfe-Simon conclusion based on biology. Dr. Redfield imagines DNA is like a zipper. She says, “The teeth of the zipper have to be the same size or the zipper will get stuck.” Arsenic is too big to work in place of phosphorus.

After getting the arsenic-laden bacteria to grow, she figured out that the Wolfe-Simon experiment only worked because the agar plates the original researchers used for the cell growth contained a minute amount of phosphorus, which contaminated the experiment by giving the cells just enough to grow.

She says, “I think they used a reagent that wasn’t purified and discovered it had three or four micro molars of phosphorus.” In the paper and in responding to Redfield and other criticism, Wolfe-Simon says that the bacteria couldn’t grow on the little bit of phosphorus on the agar plate. To that Redfield says, “It was lame. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”

When she did her own experiment, Redfield used reagent grade chemicals and grew her bacteria in arsenate almost to the specified density. When she added just three micro molars of phosphorus she got the same result as the Wolfe-Simon paper.

Once she was able to stabilize the growth of GFAJ-1 cells containing different amounts of arsenic, she sent the bacteria off for analysis at Princeton to see if any of the arsenic made its way into the DNA of the bacteria, as posited by the Wolfe-Simon paper. She expects those results in a couple of weeks.

She says,” I’ve grown the bacteria with and without arsenic and extracted the DNA and sent it off.” Once she gets the DNA analysis she’ll do some more experiments and then write a paper about the whole process.

For the last year Dr. Redfield has helped demonstrate how science can be self-correcting. In the media coverage, experts quickly reached a strong consensus — that the arsenic paper was flawed. And with her open science experiment on a blog, Redfield invited curious colleagues to contribute to the experiment, which was working at the edges of what is known in biology and experimenting in unfamiliar territory.

Unfortunately, many people look to this newsmaking event as an example of how science gets things wrong. Some people only heard the original arsenic life story and missed the vibrant discussion of the research and its correction.

In the process of the hub-bub around whether arsenic is a building block of life one evolutionary biologist with a popular blog said, “Rosie Redfield must be the tyrant queen of science.” P.Z. Myers, the outspoken atheist blogger biologist gave her the title, which she wears proudly.

Through it all, Dr. Redfield has remained very sympathetic to Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young post doc responsible for the paper about arsenic life. Redfield has not spoken directly to Wolfe-Simon but sent her an apologetic e-mail after an interview she gave appeared more strident than she intended.

Rosie Redfield understands what it’s like to be a misunderstood scientist. For the last 20 years she has focused on how bacteria reproduce. In 2000 her work raised eyebrows when she wondered, “Do bacteria have sex?” She believes they do, despite what conventional biology says.

To Wolfe-Simon she says, “I understand having an exciting, important idea where everyone thinks you’re wrong.” But, she cautions, “You have to do good science; that’s the only thing that will see you through.”

She feels sorry for how this biological brew-hah went down. Despite what Redfield considers an error in not admitting a mistake, she thinks that the other co-authors on the paper were also complicit in not correcting things before they reached publication and public discourse.

Redfield says, “You can be seen to screw up and it’s not a disaster. That’s just science.”

Science writer David Dobbs followed the story since it broke and says Wolfe-Simon is now caught in the fallout from an over-the-top media press of which she is both part author and something of a victim.

Redfield agrees with his characterization of how both NASA and Wolfe-Simon’s mentors and former lab bosses seem to have abandoned her. In a Wired article in September he notes, “It appears they bought and fueled the bus; put bright lights and banners on it; cheered as Wolfe-Simon drove it a bit wildly honking the horn; and have now thrown her under it.”

Redfield says, “Everyone involved made big mistakes. But the big betrayal wasn’t the errors but the failure to admit them.”

And of her new moniker as tyrant queen of science, she says, “Finally the recognition I’ve been waiting for.”

Just a couple of weeks after announcing the discovery of a planet within a distant solar system that is orbiting in what astronomers called the habitable zone for life, another exciting announcement adds two more confirmed planets to the list.

Since its launch in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning hundreds of thousands of distant stars, looking for the slightest wobble, which would indicate the gravitational pull of planets as they orbit their sun. The Kepler team has been studying and investigating dozens of Earth-like candidates, including two around Kepler 20 in the constellation Lyra.

The star Kepler 20 houses two planets nearby that are Earth-like in size. One is just three percent larger in diameter than Earth and the other is nine-tenths the size of Earth. But unlike the previous discovery of Kepler 22b — a watery world with a temperature of about 72 degrees — these are rocky planets with scorching temperatures too hot for any life we can imagine.

They are situated in a tightly packed planet pile with three other known planets, all very near the host star. Kepler-20e has an orbit of six days, while Kepler-20f has an orbit of 19.6 days.

Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f are the closest sized planets to Earth discovered to date. The confirmation of these two planets is significant because planets the size of Earth are just hard to find and this shows that Kepler is up to the task. This gives scientists hope that they will find life outside of our solar system.

Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f Compared to Earth and Venus

It may be a bacteria, mold or single-celled life form but astrobiologists are encouraged by this news.

Linda Elkins-Tanton, who studies planetary formation at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington says the larger of the two planets, Kepler-20f, is especially intriguing. She says, “If it was formed with water, which I think is possible, it could have been habitable in the past.”

Alan Boss, also an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution says science would be remiss not to look for life-inhabiting planets outside of our solar system. He says, “That does not mean that we necessarily think that only exact Earth twins could be inhabited, just that we at least had better be able to find Earth twins, and then along the way we will be certain to uncover all sorts of other types of exoplanets that should be habitable, and perhaps even inhabited.”

Francois Fressin is the lead author of the paper announcing the discovery which appears in the journal Nature. He says though the planets are about the right size they are definitely not right for life. Kepler 20e is about 1,400 degrees F while Kepler 20f is 800 degrees.

In his paper, he writes, “Theoretical considerations imply that these planets are rocky, with a composition of iron and silicate.” And he notes, “The outer planet could have developed a thick water vapour atmosphere.”

Boss puts this discovery and the Kepler 22b discovery a couple of weeks ago in perspective as he tells ABC News, “In less than 20 years, we have gone from not knowing if any other planets exist in the universe, to being able to look out at the night sky and realize that essentially any star we can see has at least one planet, and a good number of those are likely to be habitable.”

He adds, “That is a revelation that has not yet dawned on the general public, and even astronomers are having their minds blown when they think about it.”

Just ten years ago University of Washington astronomers Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee created the Rare Earth hypothesis, which suggested that the conditions for life are so particular that for us to find any sign of life elsewhere would be nearly impossible. In that time, astronomy as a whole has revised that theory.

But Ward and Brownlee’s also posited the idea of a habitable Goldilocks zone around a star which is neither too hot nor too cold and where the conditions for life are just right. That planet must orbit its star at a distance similar to that of Earth or Kepler 22b.

So far Kepler has found 54 planets that lie in the habitable zone around distant stars. But the team is backlogged with another 2,000 probable planets that await further study.

Comet Lovejoy has Close Encounter with the Sun

The comet was discovered earlier this month by an Australian amateur astronomer, named Terry Lovejoy. He spotted the comet, first called Kreutz sungrazing Comet C/2011, in broad daylight with his Celestron C8 telescope and a Canon camera.

This is the first time since the 1970s that a ground-based telescope has spotted a comet of this class. Thanks to Lovejoy’s observations space-based telescopes could be trained to watch what scientists thought was going to be the demise of the newly discovered comet.

It was set to be a routine comet suicide. Astronomers had watched this happen 2,000 times before and no comet had ever survived a brush with the broiling sun. They thought that the comet would melt away on December 15 when it entered a zone around the sun where temperatures reach several million degrees.

NASA had a front row seat, with telescopes pointed at Comet Lovejoy as it made its final solar approach. First astronomers reported they saw the sun’s corona “wiggle” as the comet got close to the sun.

Karl Battams tells the Associated Press, “I was delighted when I saw it go into the sun.” It’s quite a treat to witness a relatively infrequent event like this live. But he says, “I was astounded when I saw something re-emerge.”

Comet Lovejoy was a shadow of its former millions of tons self. Dean Pesnell, a NASA scientists who tracked the comet’s hair-raising journey says, “It looks like the tail broke off and is stuck” in the sun’s magnetic field. The comet spent more than an hour in the sun’s grip.

The comet came within 90,000 miles of the sun and didn’t disappear, leaving astronomers scratching their heads and scientists at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory excited to study the phenomenon.

Some say to survive the dirty snowball was much bigger than originally thought and others say the comet may have a rocky core.

Pesnell equates this event with an ice cube being placed on a hot barbeque grill. He says this comet is related to a comet that buzzed Earth back in 1106.

After surviving its perilous trip to the sun, it now continues to make its wide orbital swing through the solar system. Astronomers think it’ll be another 800 or 900 years before it gets close enough to the sun again. That’s plenty of time for it to build back up and regrow its missing tail.

For physicists the search for the elusive subatomic particle that gives all things mass is tantamount to the search for the Holy Grail. That’s one reason why scientists call the much-theorized but never seen Higgs Boson the God particle.

Now an update on research from the European nuclear agency CERN indicates that particle phsycists are hot on the trail of the Higgs and will either observe it or rule out its existence by next year.

But that’s what they thought last year at this time. And again in April of this year. The elusive Higgs Boson is proving to be more elusive than ever. But scientists are certain they have narrowed the search.

Here’s what they have discovered.

The latest data show the mass of the Higgs probably falls somewhere in the lower end of the spectrum of mass that is produced as the Large Hadron Collider busily smashes atoms beneath the Swiss-French border. Scientists believe the Higgs most likely has a mass of 124 to 126 billion electronvolts. Two separate teams at CERN pegged the boson in the 114 to 130 billion electron volts range. But there is an outside chance that the mass may be much larger, somewhere above 476 billion electron volts, according to teams at the A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS or ATLAS detector.

Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian physicist who runs the ATLAS project says the hottest region to find the Higgs Boson is in the lower mass ranges of the collider. She says, “The most important result is that we have been able to restrict the most likely mass region to a very narrow range.”

But what does that narrow range really mean?

Well, first of all an electronvolt in physics is measured as a unit of energy, a unit of mass, a unit of momentum, a unit of distance and sometimes a unit of temperature. Using some very complicated math these different uses of the eV are justified. For the sake of this explanation, I’ll describe an electonvolt as a unit of mass, since that’s how the particle physicists at CERN are treating it as they search for the Higgs Boson.

In particle physics it is common to interchange mass and energy. the mass of one proton is about one billion electronvolts. The kinetic energy created by a mosquito in flight is about one trillion electronvolts of energy or 1 TeV. The size or mass of that energy is also measured as 1 TeV.

The Higgs Boson hunters are looking for something less powerful than a flying mosquito but bigger than a proton. They are searching for something with a mass of between 124 and 126 billion electronvolts or 124-126 GeV.

CERN’s Director General Rolf Heuer says, “The window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller.” But he warns while physicists are all atwitter over finding where in the mass spectrum the Higgs lives, no one has been able to actually find it yet.

British physicist Peter Higgs and others theorized the existence of the tiny particle more than 40 years ago to explain why fundamental particles have mass. Fundamental particles are building blocks of atoms–protons, neutrons and electrons. Throughout the 20th Century phsycists discovered even more elemental particles, including quarks and leptons. But long ago, the atom itself was viewed as the most elementary of particles, as its name means indivisible.

Now the most elemental particles physicists can imagine are either fermions or bosons. Particles associated with matter are called fermions and particles associated with the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear interactions and gravitation) are bosons. The direction of the particle’s spin determines is classification as a fermion or a boson. Bosons have integer spin while fermions have half-integer spin, which is broken into 12 flavors.

All of this theory is part of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics. And by answering this one big question–where does everything get its mass?–scientists will be able to put another piece of the universal puzzle together and come closer to understanding if Albert Einstein’s theory of Relativity holds firm.

In addition to the Higgs Boson, gravitons and sparticles are other theorized but never seen subatomic particles that scientists would like to find. Elementary bosons that mediate the strong and weak forces have been found. And the Higgs could explain why particles have mass. Gravitons are the theorized particles that carry the gravitational force and sparticles are the supersymmetric counterparts to ordinary particles.

MIT Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek wants someone to find the Higgs in order to tie up an important loose end of the Standard Model. He says proving the existence of the Higgs Boson would be “a vindication of the equations we’ve been using all these years.”

He views the $10 billion CERN experiment at the Large Hadron Collider to be a giant clerical project of theoretical physics. When it comes to the Standard Model he says, “It’s really nice to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”

But beyond validating the Standard Model of physics finding the Higgs in the projected low mass range would also support a few other theories — like supersymmetry — that not just confirm the Standard Model but expand and improve it. He says, “That will mean the Large Hadron Collider will have another wave of brilliant discoveries in the future.”

Wilzcek told the Associated Press that the mass range reported on Tuesday is “perfect” to meet that requirement. He says, “It fits so beautifully with everything we know.” He’s a believer who calls this week’s announcment “awesome, just beautiful work.”

CERN’s Heuer says a Higgs Boson with a mass of between 124-126 billion electronvolts “is not so bad for supersymmetry.”

And by next year he hopes to have some solid answers. He says, “We need to get a lot more collisions next year to get a definitive answer to the Shakespearean question, ‘To be or not to be.’”

The question is the subject of movies, science fiction novels and our own curious minds. Are we alone in the universe? Prevailing scientific wisdom says yes but more and more the answer appears to be no.

With the advent of more sensitive cosmological equipment to scan the night sky, astronomers are able to see smaller objects with ever greater detail. The Kepler space telescope has been focused on a region of space containing over 100,000 stars. Scientists have been watching those stars for the tiniest hint of a wobble, indicating those stars could be hiding planets.

Now, the hunt for exoplanets — planets being discovered outside of our own solar system — is on and the results are startling.

Ten years ago, two University of Washington astrobiologists postulated that Earth is a rare planet indeed. In their book Rare Earth, Don Brownlee and Peter Ward suggested that for life to exist elsewhere in the universe very specific conditions must be met. They called this the habitable or Goldilocks zone, where a planet wasn’t too hot or too cold to support life. It had to have a certain amount of sunlight from its nearby star. So it had to be located in a solar system with other planets a certain distance from its star.

Building on that set of criteria, professional astronomers, undergraduates, citizens and curious skywatchers are all becoming planet hunters. Now the science is improving to the point where a new discovery yields the planets size, mass and even its average surface temperature.

Finding a Planet in a Star Stack

Kepler 22 Star System, Showing Kepler 22b in the Habitable Zone

British author and astronomy expert Ian Ridpath explains the way astronomers find new exoplanets.

“NASA has this space telescope called Kepler which has been staring for the past couple of years at this one particular area of sky containing over 100,000 stars. And it’s been looking for very slight dips in the star’s brightness as something goes across in front of the stars.

“It’s called the transit method. Now if it does that three times in succession then the NASA scientists think that is good enough to conclude that what is causing the dip in light is a planet.”

That’s why astronomers are so excited about the confirmation of a new exoplanet, Kepler 22b. By all calculations it is located in a habitable zone around its star, known as Kepler 22. The star, which is smaller and cooler than our sun is located between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Kepler 22b orbits around the star and may be the right distance from the star to support life. But the size of the planet — about 2.4 times that of Earth, really excites scientists. It is rare for a discovery to find a planet in the same size range as our own blue planet. Of the 28 planets found so far his is the smallest planet ever confirmed by Kepler.

Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA says, “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin.”

It’s much easier to spot a big planet, like a gas giant the size of Jupiter. But those are not likely candidates for the search for life, microbial or intelligent. Kepler 22b is about the right size and appears to have a liquid water surface. In fact, it looks like the entire planet is covered in water.

That coupled with measurements pointing to the temperature being about 72 degrees gives astronomers hope that life may exist there.

NASA Artist Rendering of Kepler 22b, Covered in Water and with Clouds

William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center says the Kepler team got very lucky in detecting this planet. He says, “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

On Saturday, a $2 billion science project will begin what NASA is calling a flagship mission to Mars to see if the red planet is capable of sustaining microbial life.

Equipped with 17 cameras, an on-board science lab, the six-wheeled rover named Curiosity will do what its predecessors Spirit and Opportunity failed to do — determine if there is liquid water on Mars that has the building blocks of life.

With the countdown at just over two days, team members are ready for launch. They say the robot-like rover will not be able to determine if there is life on Mars, unless something jumps out in front of the camera once the rover has safely landed in what scientists believe could be a dry lake or sea bed.

The Mars Science Laboratory has four mission goals, including determining if life ever arose on Mars, characterizing the climate, understanding the geology and preparing for human exploration in the future.

The Curiosity rover has 10 science instruments to search for evidence about whether Mars ever had environments favorable for microbial life, including the chemical ingredients for life like carbon. The rover will use a laser to look inside rocks and release their gases so its spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth.

Gale Crater, Where Curiosity Will Land

While Curiosity begins where Spirit and Opportunity left off, a second Mars space orbiter nicknamed MAVEN will join the new roving science lab in 2014 to take upper atmosphere samples in an effort to understand what caused the Martian atmosphere -and water- to be lost to space, making the climate increasingly inhospitable for life.

Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says, “The ultimate driver for these missions is the question, did Mars ever have life? Did microbial life ever originate on Mars, and what happened to it as the planet changed? Did it just go extinct, or did it go underground, where it would be protected from space radiation and temperatures might be warm enough for liquid water?”

Curiosity will answer those questions.

NASA wants You! Do you have what it takes to be an astronaut? That’s the question NASA is asking the American public this week.The space agency is seeking a new crop of astronauts and put out a splashy public call for the 9-15 available jobs. To qualify applicants must possess a bachelor’s degree in engineering, biology, physical science or math. And a master’s or doctorate is preferred.

All candidates must be English speakers who are fluent in Russian because right now the U.S. is without a manned space program. It is working with private industry to stay in the space race but works closely with Russia to send astronauts to the International Space Station.

The recruits that NASA acquires now may be in the running to be the first people ever to set foot on Mars sometime in the 2020s, according to the NASA astronaut recruitment video.

How much does an astronaut make? $64,724.00 to $141,715.00 according to the astronaut job posting at USAjobs.gov.

Here’s the full recruitment video for the 2013 astronaut candidate class. Applications will be accepted now through January 27, 2012.

An aircraft carrier-sized asteroid is hurtling through our cosmic neighborhood. 2005 YU55 is going to be zipping by on November 8 in what scientists are calling a close encounter. The asteroid is not going to hit Earth but it will be about 15 percent closer to Earth than the moon, making it quite an astronomical event.

This is the first time that scientists will have a front row seat to view an asteroid that they know is on close approach.

Barbara Wilson, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tells the Daily Mail in the UK, “While near-Earth objects of this size have flown within a lunar distance in the past, we did not have the foreknowledge and technology to take advantage of the opportunity.”

For the occasion NASA is pulling out the big radio telescope guns to get a clear picture of what will whiz by next week. Radar, visual and infrared imaging will follow the track of the big space rock and gather as much information as possible. This will help scientists better track its course, which does pose a minor threat to Earth. The next time this asteroid will be close to Earth will be in another hundred years.

NASA says, “Although 2005 YU55 is in an orbit that regularly brings it to the vicinity of Earth (and Venus and Mars), the 2011 encounter with Earth is the closest this space rock has come for at least the last 200 years.”

The next time a rock of this size will buzz Earth will be in 2028.

Scientists have been following 2005 YU55 and for six years and have been preparing for its near-Earth arrival for months. Generally space-based telescopes and instruments study asteroids up close. But this will be a “science target of opportunity” for spacecraft Earth to scan the asteroid.

Dr. Wilson says, “When it flies past, it should be a great opportunity for science instruments on the ground to get a good look.”

Starting November 4, the Deep Space Network antennas in Goldstone, California will begin tracking the asteroid from the ground. Then on November 8 — the day the asteroid makes its closest pass of Earth — the giant radio telescope at Arecibo Planetary Radar Facility in Puerto Rico will begin bouncing radio waves off the giant rock to understand its composition, size, surface features and other physical properties.

Asteroid 2005 YU55 Approach Animation, Showing Relation of Earth and The Moon (click image to view)

The closest 2005 YU55 will get to Earth is about .85 lunar distances or 201,000 miles. That distance is not enough to have any affect on anything here on Earth, including tides or tectonic plates.

Radar observations made in April 2010 by the Arecibo telescope show the asteroid to be about 1,300-feet wide and sphere shaped. It slowly spins, with one rotation about every 18 hours. The asteroid’s surface is likely dark. And amateur astronomers who want to get a glimpse at 2005 YU55 will need a telescope with an aperture of 6 inches or larger.

NASA Goldstone Antenna Points Skyward

The Arecibo radar is 30 times more sensitive than Goldstone but not fully steerable. Goldstone is fully steerable but not as sensitive. Together, the two instruments are complimentary.

JPL radar astronomer Steve Ostro says, “The closer the target, the better the echo.” Using the radio wave echos astronomers generate detailed three-dimensional models of the asteroid, define its rotation and get a good idea of its internal density distribution. Dr. Ostro says, “You can even make out surface features. A good echo can give us a spatial resolution finer than 10 meters.”

2005 YU55 will be close enough for astronomers to get high resolution, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 meters, which means scientists will be able to see any features that are just over six feet across on the surface of the asteroid, including any moons that might be accompanying the big rock.

The last time a space rock as big came this close to Earth was in 1976, although astronomers did not know about the flyby at the time.

NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called “Spaceguard,” discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them, and plots their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.

Generally people in the far northern latitudes get to see the solar wind dancing with the magnetic field around Earth. But because of increased solar activity, the northern lights have been more visible further south, including Alabama, Georgia and even Florida.

An automated NASA camera that takes a picture of the sky every minute in Huntsville, Alabama captured 20 minutes of the vibrant red and green aurora borealis.

Northern Lights in Arkansas, courtesy of Brian Emfinger, realclearwx.com

Arkansas photographer Brian Emfinger called the view “extremely vivid, the most vivid I have ever seen.” And he says this is only the second time he’s seen the northern lights so far south in a decade.

NASA scientist Bill Cooke found the aurora photos in the Alabama camera’s archive and posted them on the Marshall Space Flight Center’s blog. He says, “They are very rare events and we don’t see them this far south that often.”

Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado monitors solar activity and solar storms, which trigger the colorful auroras. Space weather chief Bob Rutledge says that the solar storm that created the vivid light show was only in the moderate range and shouldn’t have been visible south of Iowa. He also says the storm was unusual because it arrived 8 hours ahead of schedule.

An aurora begins when the sun blasts a magnetic solar wind toward Earth. The wind hits the Earth’s magnetic field, compressing it. That compression excites electrons of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere. When those excited electrons return to their normal state, they release a photon burst seen as red and green colored light.

The most commonly seen northern lights color is green, often seen in nighttime pictures of Norway and the Arctic. Green results from excited oxygen.

Monday night’s display featured the not often seen red light. In fact, most of the sightings in northern Michigan described seeing a blood-red sky. Red auroras also result from excited oxygen atoms. The difference in color comes from the altitude of the excited atoms returning to their ground state. Red northern lights occur higher in the atmosphere while green is at a lower altitude.

The strongest color emissions from nitrogen are in the deep violet end of the rainbow spectrum, which are generally invisible to the human eye. A Nitrogen excited state can also create a red lower border to the northern lights.

According to NOAA this storm was classified as a G2 on a scale of G1-G5. It was spectacular but didn’t pose a threat to satellites or power grids. As solar activity increases in this new 11-year solar cycle more solar storms will give way to more brilliant sky shows. And some will even be seen as far south as the Gulf Coast.

So keep your eyes peeled.

The voice of nature Sir David Attenborough is featured explaining Iceland musician Bjork’s latest venture — Biophilia. It’s part music album reflecting the connection points between sound, nature and technology. It’s an app for iPhones and iPads. It’s a creation generator for fans of Bjork’s music to tinker and play with sound to make an instrumental backdrop for the singer’s powerful a capella voice.

…but much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch. Like the one phenomenon that can be said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound. Sound, harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music. And just as we use music to express parts of us that would otherwise be hidden, so too can we use technology to make visible much of nature’s invisible world. In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create. — Sir David Attenborough, intro to Biophilia

This experiment is described as a multimedia exploration mother application, comprising a suite of original music, and interactive, educational and musical artifacts.

The journey begins deep in the cosmos where galaxies form. Fly through homemade constellations that connect to ten songs, each with a different app and activity. The theme song Cosmogony plays as users decide where to begin their experience.

Biophilia Project Moon App

In Moon, Björk explores the lunar cycles and the effect they have on Earth. The song is based on four different sequences played by four different harpists: Zeena Parkins, Shelley Burgon, Sara Cutler, Carol Emanuel.

About the song, Björk explains, “With each new moon we complete a cycle and are offered renewal — to take risks, to connect with other people, to love, to give. The symbolism of the moon as the realm of imagination, melancholy, and regeneration is expressed in the song.”

The sequences of the song repeat, reflecting the lunar cycles.

18-year-old programmer Max Weisel designed the Moon app for Biophilia. The song is constructed in 17/8 time measure, a far cry from the musical standard 4/4 time. For that reason the app features a musical sequencer with 17 musical moons. Change the position of each moon to change the note it produces. Anyone can create a new melody each time which can be played with Björk’s voice.

Biophilia Virus App

In Virus, Bjork tells the love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it. An interactive game in the app challenges the user to halt the attack of the virus, although the result is that the song will stop if the player succeeds. In order to hear the rest of the song, the players will have to let the virus take its course. Taking some artistic license, the cell nuclei will also mouth along to the chorus.

In her song Thunderbolt the Icelandic impresario uses arpeggios, inspired by the time between when lightning is seen and thunder is heard. She also demanded the creation of new instruments in order to properly show the interdependence of nature, innovation and technology. When she debuted Thuderbolt at the Manchester International Festival in June, she used two Tesla coils as core instruments.

Biophilia Crystalline App

Cyrstalline is the lead single on the Biophilia album and it required a new instrument as well. For this Bjork created the gameleste, a hybrid created by combining a gamelan (gong) and a celesta (organ), giving the singer the option of playing the gong remotely like an organ from her iPad. Crystalline tells the story of structure.

Bjork says of the app, “Travel through tunnels and collect crystals to make your own structure of the song.” Each move changes the way the song plays as you pick crystals along the way. Different crystals have a different effect, making the song a living, evolving structure. At the end, each play sees the crystal aggregation they have made and can save and share their structure with others.

The song and app explore structural similarities in crystals and music, using them to express changes between closed and open systems and emotional states in an effort to unify the external and internal worlds.

Cosmogony embodies the harmony of musical and planetary systems. It’s a song inspired by wonder at the cosmos and the question of how the universe came to be. the app acts as the navigation tool to explore the universe of Biophilia in 3D audio by traveling with your fingertips through space.

Bjork Cosmogony Cover

The Cosmogony app also alerts users when new apps are available, by highlighting them within the constellations. It exists to expand on the cosmological and unifying aspects of the mother app function and draws on the lyrics of the song which center around creation myths from different cultures.

Laura Sterritt at Transchordian says, “In this sense, ‘mother’ app takes on an additional meaning by relating to the birth of the universe.”

With her Biophilia project Bjork is embracing technology, collaborating with Apple and National Geographic to break new ground merging music with science to create a new appreciation for both.

Bjork Rocks Science with Biophilia

She tells the Guardian she has a three-year educational tour planned, inspired by Biophilia. The paper reports that in addition to the album, the free mother app and its 10 accompanying song apps, the Icelandic singer is mapping out a string of eight six-week residencies, comprising live performances, scientific expositions, and children’s workshops on nature and music.

Growing up, Bjork says, “My rock star was David Attenborough”. Now the rockstar is helping to reinvent the rockstar, herself.

According to Corey Tate at Spacelab, “The Biophilia experience will have central themes of science, earth, and space; it seems to be at the forefront of the new interactive music cool, with the combination of digital music and interactive experiences on the rise.”

Through 2014, Bjork will visit eight cities around the world, spending a month and a half in each. She will do twice-weekly performances of the album and host scientific exhibitions and classes for students. She says, kids will be able to “try out the instruments on the iPad and write songs and take them home.”

It’s already the largest telescope in the world but by the end of 2013 the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Telescope will be able to see dust that was formed 13 billion years ago. Comprised of 20 high-powered antennas the project will add another 46 over the next two years.

Sitting 16,000 feet above sea level, high on a plateau in the Andes Mountains of Chile, the array will have the capability to witness the formation of stars and galaxies toward the beginning of the universe. This telescope will specialize in mapping gas and dust in the Milky Way and other galaxies, studying stars formation, analyzing gas from an erupting volcano on Jupiter’s moon, Io and studying the origin of the solar wind.

When the telescope array is completed and working at full capacity astronomers will be able to glimpse the Cosmic Dawn, a period of time when galaxies began to form out of the debris of massive stars which died explosively shortly after the beginning of the Universe.

Dr Diego Garcia, one of the operations astronomers at ALMA says that a “new golden age of astronomy” began when the scientists switched on the new array on September 30.

ALMA’s First Image

Dr. Alison Peck, a radio astronomer and ALMA Deputy Project Scientist during construction and testing says the team chose the Antennae Galaxies for ALMA’s first image not just because of the name but “because it is in the process of undergoing the type of spectacular, violent merger that many galaxies may have undergone since their formation, but that we can rarely catch in action.”

The Antennae Galaxies are two spiral galaxies that are in the process of crashing into one another. They are the youngest and nearest colliding galaxy pair ever found.

Dr. Brad Whitmore of the Space Telescope Science Institute says, “The collision of these two galaxies has turned them into an impressive star-making factory. With Hubble, we’ve seen the formation of thousands of massive super star clusters, each with thousands or even millions of young stars in them.”

He says with with ALMA, astronomers will focus on the heart of the collision. They will be able to then study the formation of the Antennae’s “most impressive fireworks and look into the cores of the giant molecular clouds where the star clusters are born.”

The first image from ALMA is vastly different from the pictures from the Hubble Telescope and for good reason. Hubble is in space while ALMA is a ground-based array. ALMA also detects wavelengths about a thousand times longer than those of visible light. The longer wavelengths allow for the study of cold objects like the clouds of dust and gas from which planets and stars form, as well as very distant objects in the early universe.

The ALMA project began in 2003 and as more antennas have been added astronomers have been able to see further back in time by looking deeper into space with ever more clarity.

Dr. Garcia tells BBC News, “We are going to be able to see the beginning of the Universe, how the first galaxies were formed. We are going to learn so much more about how the Universe works.”

One of the projects on ALMA’s docket is the study of AU Microscopii, a young star about one percent the age of the sun with a ring of matter around it that may be in the process of coalescing into planets.

For scientists it doesn’t get any bigger than the Nobel Prize. This year’s winners in the Physics category receive the honor for work they did on the biggest subject available to them or anyone — the universe.

Three U.S. scientists are sharing the prize for their theory of a rapidly expanding universe. Saul Perlmutter receives half the prize for his role in discovering that the light from a specific kind of supernova was dimmer than predicted. Fortunately, another team studying the same thing made up of Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss came to the same conclusion.

For over 100 years physicists — most notably Albert Einstein — had been working with the idea that the universe was expanding, stretching outward as a result of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. But until the new Nobel Prize winners used better technology, more powerful computers and telescopes in the 1990′s the theory lacked observation.

In 1998, the universe was still rapidly expanding and the answer to that big question was literally written in the stars.

In a telephone interview this morning with the Nobel Prize committee, Dr. Reiss remembered first seeing the sign that proved Einstein and others’ theory.

After sifting through all the data he gathered for his experiment looking at class 1a supernovae, he says, “I remember thinking the sign of the answer was I would have said, wrong. I remember thinking, ‘uh, I made a terrible mistake.’”

At the time, Reiss and his team at John Hopkins were seeing the same thing that Perlumutter and his team at University of California Berkeley were observing. Both teams thought there were errors in their calculations and it took a long time to confirm the results. Once the teams shared their results with each other, they knew their discovery was big.

Now the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess will share the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. The trio was honored Tuesday for their work confirming that the universe is indeed expanding but also for realizing that the rate is ever-accelerating over time.

According to the Nobel press release, “The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

“The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.”

When an out of control satellite is plummeting to Earth a few minutes makes a big difference. In the case of the decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite arriving a few minutes ahead of schedule meant that the two dozen or so pieces that survived re-entry hit a remote part of the South Pacific, near the Christmas Islands, half way between Australia and Hawaii. If the satellite had traveled through the atmosphere a few minutes later and debris could have hit a west coast U.S. city like Seattle.

The much anticipated return of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite ended early Saturday morning as it fell from low-Earth orbit, penetrated the atmosphere and spread a 500-mile debris field of burnt metal. Early reports suggested that pieces of the 6.5-ton satellite landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean but NASA wasn’t saying where, until Tuesday.

Concerns that it may have hit land had people staring skyward last Friday night, trying to catch a glimpse. By looking up in the sky amateur astronomers and average citizens caught a few meteors and interesting streaks of light.

A man in Carlsbad, New Mexico says it sounded like a bomb going off at his neighbor’s house. When he went outside to look he found searing hot soot covered pieces of metal which he describes as large ball bearings. A three-inch hole in a tin roof was among the evidence that a high-velocity object left as it fell from the sky. But the timing doesn’t line up with the return of the UARS satellite, though local authorities have filed a report with NASA.

NASA won’t say how it figured out the location of the satellite but some speculate that it used missile tracking systems and other military tools to track and locate the spent satellite.

NASA did say that it determined the exact time the satellite entered Earth’s atmosphere because sensors in the U.S. based satellite surveillance network no longer picked up the satellite signal, indicating it was no longer in space.

NASA is still looking for reports of debris sightings from the small islands near the crash zone and also any reports form airplanes or boats in the area. Since the landing site is so remote they believe that it is likely no one actually saw any pieces of the satellite crash into the ocean, which will then make any efforts to recover the space junk more difficult.

If you want to follow the path of the International Space Station or specific satellites still in orbit go to Real Time Satellite Tracking.

NASA says there could be a spectacular show on Friday if someone spots the re-entry of an old satellite. But that is a big if. The space agency is down-playing any danger associated with a 20-year-old, school-bus-sized piece of space junk crashing into a populated area.

But there is still a chance that someone will spot one of the 26 pieces NASA estimates will survive atmospheric re-entry and land somewhere between northern Canada and southern South America. The agency puts those odds at one in 3,200. So not great but not impossible either.

The reason for such uncertainty of the return of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is twofold. Sun and rockets. With the solar cycle heating up things are moving faster in space, including orbiting satellites. Solar activity is making it difficult for NASA to pin point the exact time and location of UARS falling to Earth.

Because the satellite was launched on space shuttle Discovery in 1991 it doesn’t have fuel left to push the thrusters to help NASA guide falling debris like this away from people.

Those two factors are making careful prediction of the de-orbiting satellite more difficult. But NASA is hopeful that the pieces will land in the ocean or in desert areas.

NASA is working closely with the Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center to pinpoint the re-entry locations. By the time the satellite is getting ready to drop into Earth’s atmosphere scientists should have a better picture what to expect. NASA estimates the debris footprint will be about 500 miles long.

Mark Matney from NASA’s orbital debris program says the motion of the satellite is unpredictable but he believes it will come to Earth sometime on Friday. He says, “It’s coming in a little faster than we anticipated.” And since it is an uncontrolled re-entry there is still a lot of uncertainty.

NASA and the joint space operation center will give public updates daily until Friday when updates will come 12, 6 and 2 hours before impact.

Medium-sized pieces of space debris fall to Earth about once a week, generally landing in the ocean. But some of the pieces of this satellite could weigh up to 300 pounds and pack quite a punch if they hit solid ground.

NASA reminds people who find chunks of the satellite in the next few days or weeks to call local law enforcement to report them. After all the burned up satellite is government property. So don’t try to sell it on eBay.

After months of speculation NASA unveiled its new Space Launch System to take astronauts further than they have ever gone before. While there is no destination yet for this new super-powered rocket, there is plenty of time to quibble over such details.

The Marshall Flight Center in Rocket City, more familiarly known as Huntsville, Alabama will lead the massive undertaking.

The new system is a hybrid of the liquid fuel rockets that sent the six Apollo missions to the moon and the solid rocket boosters that flew the space shuttle program for the last 30 years.

But the new system will be much more powerful, allowing manned missions to asteroids and even Mars.

With the drawings barely complete, those close to the program are glad there is plenty of time to design, build and launch the first rocket. With no plans to test the rocket before 2017 NASA is exploring a tentative date of 2021 for the first manned mission.

The new Space Launch System replaces the Constellation program which was scrapped a few years ago and will include a capsule on the tip of the rocket where cargo and crew will be comfortably flown far beyond current exploration capabilities in near-Earth orbit.

Former space shuttle commander Charles Bolden and the current head of NASA released a video for NASA employees just prior to his public announcement of the new rocket system. Notice that he hints that this system is built to go to Mars.

Besides reconciling conflicting projected program costs to build the Space Launch System will be an engineering feat that the U.S. hasn’t undertaken in decades.

For some a new Moon shot or another major undertaking by NASA is what keeps kids interested in science.

Former NASA adviser Mark McDaniel says, “No other agency in government can inspire our youth to pursue careers in math and science and engineering than NASA can.”

Donald Kessler has been warning space agencies for over 30 years that dead satellites, spent rockets and other debris in low geosynchronous orbit around Earth would eventually start making it difficult to launch spacecraft. Now over a half million pieces of space junk are making rocket launches and leaving the atmosphere more dangerous, with space agencies and companies planning spaceship routes just to avoid orbiting garbage.

Dr. Kessler says, “The hazard is increasing and there is a necessity to start cleaning up space.”

The the former NASA astrophysicist began worrying in 1978 that there would come a time when a collision with existing space junk would cause a cascade. At that point every subsequent collision would lead to more junk and more collisions in a chain reaction. He is the author of a new report by the National Research Council, urging NASA to tackle the problem of space junk.

Two recent events made the problem snowball and have place increased pressure on several countries to take action to reduce the problem.

In 2007 China fired a missile to blow up an old weather satellite. That one event created about 150,000 new pieces of space junk larger than one centimeter, the smallest particles that can be tracked.

In 2009 two satellites collided adding another 100,000 pieces of space garbage to track and making the problem much worse. Both events worked to double the debris field around Earth.

With more than a half million threatening foreign objects, ranging from paint chips to lost astronaut tools, being tracked from the ground, several nations are actively working to make space in space by cleaning up the junk.

Some ideas being floated seem exotic or far-fetched. One includes using a giant magnet to collect all the scrap metal — from satellites and spent rockets. In February Japan announced its plan to send up a giant magnetized net to sweep up space debris. Another suggestion is to use a laser broom.

The new report urges NASA and the U.S. State Department to take space junk seriously because those agencies are in the best position to overcome legal and technical hurdles necessary to solve the problem.

But many people say if you don’t create as much junk there will be less to clean up. Robert Massey, a spokesman for the Royal Astronomical Society says, “But I think actually, fundamentally one thing we have to tackle is the idea of not producing so much of this stuff in the first place.”

Space Junk Breakdown

Pieces larger than ten centimeters tracked by U.S. Strategic Command — 22,000 (only 1,000 of which are live satellites)
Debris between one and ten centimeters — 300,000 (periodically tracked)
Debris smaller than one centimeter — up to nine million (too small to track)

Far far away, toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy sits a true diamond in the rough. Astronomers haven’t been able to see a newly discovered exoplanet but it may prove to be a real gem.

Using deductive reasoning based on crucial pieces of evidence, an international astrophysics team led by Australian space scientists believe they have discovered a planet, five times the size of Earth that weighs about the same as Jupiter. They have decided that the planet is made up of crystallized carbon. In other words, it’s the galaxy’s largest diamond.

Just like diamonds on Earth, the formation of this big bit of bling took some unusual circumstances. The planet used to be a star. That is until a neighboring pulsar stripped the faraway sun of its outermost layers, leaving just its carbon core as a remnant. Acting as a high powered diamond cutter, the pulsar likely absorbed the nearby sun while heat and pressure turned the carbon core into a diamond.

A pulsar is a tiny, dead neutron star that is just over 12 miles across and spins hundreds of times per second, emitting radio waves. In a binary star system like this the pulsar starts to spin faster as it consumes the neighboring star’s plasma. This increases the speed of the pulsar until it becomes a millisecond pulsar, spinning at more than 10,000 times per second. Once the star is stripped it is called a white dwarf and is only one percent of its former self, turning from a star to a planet.

Those radio waves that pulsars emit periodically reach Earth, allowing radio telescopes in Australia, Hawaii and Britain to detect pulsar J1719-1438. Astronomers have also detected a slight modulation in its movement, indicating the gravitational pull of an as yet unseen planet.

Taking detailed measurements of the planet’s chemical composition, pressure and dimensions astronomers determined that the diamond planet is largely made of carbon but because it is so dense it must be in a crystallized form.

Professor Matthew Bailes at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia says the new planet is far denser than any yet discovered.

He says, “The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon — i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun.”

Before De Beers goes into the deep space business to get a closer glimpse of the diamond planet, they should know that it lies about 4,000 light years away from Earth.

And it might not look like your run of the mill diamond here on Earth.

Astrophysicist Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester says, “I don’t imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we’re looking at here.”

A space probe carrying some Lego astronauts is on a five-year trip to Jupiter. The Juno mission launched without a hitch on August 5 and began its journey to the largest planet in the solar system.

With the end of the 30-year space shuttle program, the new face of NASA is space probes not astronauts. Messenger is circling Mercury. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is searching for signs of water on the red planet. The Dawn space probe is orbiting Vesta, a large asteroid. And the New Horizons deep space probe is racing toward dwarf planet Pluto.

And now, the Juno Project is sending a solar-powered probe to figure out how Jupiter came to be. There it will try to find a solid core in the center of the gas giant and it will study its clouds to try to figure out how the planet formed.

Juno’s science mission is:

After Juno arrives in 2016 it will circle Jupiter 33 times over the course of a year and then the $1.1 billion space probe will de-orbit (or crash) into the gas giant in 2017.

“We’re looking for the recipe about how the planets are formed. And Jupiter holds the ingredients.” — Rick Nybakken, Juno Project Deputy Manager

As the sun awakens from a very sleepy period with virtually no solar activity, solar storms are on the rise. The eleven-year solar cycle is expected to reach its maximum level of activity in about 2013 and until things cool down the sun will continue to eject plasma bursts that have the potential to disrupt communications and global positioning satellites here on Earth.

Three giant solar flares shot toward Earth in the last week and while two have passed with little impact to our vital communications a third moderate flare could pose disruptions by week’s end. Yet another reason to unplug in August.

NASA classified this flare as an X 6.9. X is the strongest category on the scale after B, C and M. Within each class the flares are rated on a scale of 1-9.

Sometimes the solar storms can shower Earth with enough energy to reach the ground. In 1989 power was knocked out briefly in Quebec, Canada thanks to a solar storm.

But the biggest storm, knows as the Carrington Event, occurred in 1859 when electricity was novel and telegraphs were the primary means of communications. Reports at the time from telegraph offices said telegraphs continued to work even after their batteries were unplugged and some offices even reported fires.

The solar storm brewing this week is not that severe but NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center called big solar flare a strong event, meaning precautions should be taken but it’s nothing to burn up the airwaves worrying about. In fact the flare erupted on the side of the sun facing away from Earth. So though it was the biggest flare since 2006 the center doesn’t forecast any significant geomagnetic storm activity.

Shortly after Tuesday’s solar burst, short-wave radios experienced some limited disruption in parts of Asia but that’s about it.

If anything, scientists have an unprecedented opportunity to see these flares close up thanks to the orbiting STEREO probes, two NASA spacecraft that are orbiting the sun, one in front of Earth’s orbit and the other behind. Together those of us on Earth get a unique 3-D view of the sun and scientists can study coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which often coincide with solar flares.

Images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are sending back new and exciting pictures for NASA scientists to study.

Scientists believe dark finger-like streaks in the soil on Mars indicate underground, seasonal liquid water streams. It’s not definitive proof that water exists in a liquid form on Mars but it is encouraging news for those hoping to find signs of life on the red planet.

What puzzles astronomers and astrobiologists most is that no NASA sensors have picked up the chemical signature for water. But that may be because there isn’t a lot of it and the thin Martian atmosphere makes it hard to detect once it reaches the surface.

It will be several years before a Mars rover will be able to probe beneath the surface and see if there is flowing water on our planetary neighbor.

Until then encouraging photos of dark streaks that seem to ebb and flow with the seasons will have to keep Mars life hunters happy.

“NASA’s Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form, and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration.” — Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator

In 1978, Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife duo who are known for their mid 20th Century furniture, movie making and other design projects, decided to map the visible world.

Their film, Powers of Ten showed the perspective of moving one order of magnitude every ten seconds. Beginning with a picnic in a park in Chicago, the clever team shows the vastness of the universe, reaching toward the furthest point of our understanding at 10 to the 24th meters.

Then a quick two-second per power return to the picnic before plunging into the microworld beneath the skin of a picnicker and into the subatomic world of electrons and their component parts.

Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, is the curator of the Eames Office and has recently launched the Powers of Ten website where he placed an interactive journey of each step shown in the film.

In 2007, to mark the 100th Birthday of his grandfather, Charles, Eames paid a loving tribute to the creative genius of his grandparents.

Most movies have a beginning, middle and an end. But how can a movie maker portray the vast scope of a story when it starts at the beginning of the universe and proceeds out of order to the present and then to an unknowable future? That’s the difficult task that acclaimed director Terrence Malik undertook in the making of Tree of Life.

Critics were evenly split between loving and hating the film. It was perhaps the most expensive art house film, spending two years on special effects in post-production alone.

And part of that was due to the nature of the movie. Images from the Hubble Telescope were animated and put in 3D to convey the ability to travel through both space and time. The story within the movie begins with the birth of the universe, though it centers around a 1950s Texas family. The interplay between the natural world and the relationships of the characters opened a wide door for science to creep into an emotional context, giving depth and heart to the high resolution images from space.

Chris Lee reviewed the film for Newsweek/The Daily Beast and says, the “eye-popping visuals” set the scene for “trippy sequences that wrangle with themes of cosmic oneness—visuals such as the formation of Earth from the accretion of solar nebulae 4.5 billion years ago, imagery of the universe’s roiling primordial soup and what amounts to a sub-plot concerning a couple of soulful dinosaurs.”

Tree of Life began as a movie Malik conceived in 1978 called Q. After letting it incubate for 20 years, he returned to the film in 1998, which involved shooting microscopic jellyfish on the Great Barrier Reef, solar eclipses and even ice floes in Antarctica.

As Lee says, for Malik Q was supposed to be “a film encompassing his childhood, the creation of the universe, and what it all means.”

After 21 years orbiting in space, the Hubble Telescope sent back its one millionth science observation earlier this month. In sync with the space telescope Malik included some of the most recognizable images in a movie that has been orbiting him almost as long.

Critics argue over why he included these universal images. Perhaps they were used to punctuate a Bible verse mentioned at the beginning of the movie: Job 38, to spur the audience to think about where God is in human suffering. Or maybe the images are used to juxtapose the forces of brute nature and spiritual grace as the film examines two possible life paths and how they neither has to be mutually exclusive.

The style of the film allows the audience to draw its own conclusions and make individual connections. And it gives these beautiful images of distant galaxies a real place in our lives.

Tree of Life (movie trailer)

Pluto may no longer be a planet but it still has moons. Between 1978 and 2005 the little icy world formerly known as the ninth planet in our solar system has revealed moon after moon. Most people may not realize that Pluto has any moons or probably thought it just had one, like Earth.

First there was Charon, which for several decades was believed to be Pluto’s only progeny. Then in 2005, tiny moons Hydra and Nix were discovered.

And last month, while searching for potential rings or other hazards near Pluto the Hubble Space Telescope caught a glimpse of the dwarf planet’s fourth moon. It’s known as P4 for now but the mythological name game has already begun.

Scientists working on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto have been looking for possible dangers the probe may encounter on its way to Pluto. A little blur that was dismissed in 2006 was confirmed to be the a new mini moon, which is estimated to be just 8 to 21 miles in diameter.

Alan Stern, the director of the Southwest Research Institute’s New Horizons program told MSNBC.com’s Alan Boyle P4 was discovered on June 28 and confirmed by looking at archived images and by conducting follow-up observations this month.

Boyle, who is the science editor for MSNBC.com and writes the blog Cosmic Log says, “The find is also a testament to Hubble’s amazing vision.” Using its Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed in 2009 and designed to study dark energy, it can capture images in the near-infrared, visible light or near-ultraviolet spectrum.

And, now it’s helped spot a moon in Pluto’s orbit.

Mark Showalter of the California-based SETI Institute says, “I find it remarkable that Hubble’s cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles.”

When the New Horizons probe reaches Pluto in 2015, scientists are excited for what awaits them.

Stern says, “Pluto’s satellite system is truly knocking our socks off with surprises — it’s magnificently complex, and getting more crowded all the time. I can’t wait till we get there to see what other surprises this planet and its moons have in store for us!”

Pluto's Satellite System Including New Moon P4

Get used to hearing the name Vesta. It’s one of the largest asteroids in our solar system’s asteroid belt, a wide area of spinning rocks located between Mars and Jupiter. After four years of slow and steady travel, NASA’s Dawn space probe finally reached the orbit of the big spinning rock, also known as a protoplanet.

Since June it has been sending back pictures of ever-increasing resolution as the probe approached its destination. Scientists are hoping to learn about the early formation of the solar system by studying asteroids in orbit. And Vesta may just be a target for manned spaceflight, now that a return trip to the moon seems to have been scrubbed.

Dawn reached Vesta’s orbit on July 16. It will spend one year circling the rock learning all it can before heading to the dwarf planet Ceres — also in the asteroid belt — next July. Dawn, which launched in September 2007, is on track to become the first spacecraft to orbit two solar system destinations beyond Earth.

For the next couple of months, Vesta is actually visible with the naked eye from Earth. It’s the brightest asteroid in the night sky. Just look in the tail-end of the constellation Capricorn, a little northeast of Neptune.

Vesta was spotted in 1807 and is the fourth asteroid discovery, made by German doctor Heinrich Olbers at his private observatory in Bremen, Germany. It is named after the Roman goddess of the hearth.

To celebrate this milestone, NASA is encouraging citizen scientists to throw Vesta Fiestas all over the country Aug. 5-7.

It took the Dawn space probe four years to reach Vesta because it used an ion propulsion system to power the craft. This type of propulsion is known as patient propulsion because it starts slow and builds speed over time. It requires solar energy to activate the fuel, in this case Xenon. This allows Dawn to perform like a bigger engine but still have the maneuverability to stay in low orbit over Vesta before dashing to Ceres, which was re-classified a dwarf planet along side Pluto in 2007.

“Today, we celebrate an incredible exploration milestone as a spacecraft enters orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt for the first time,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “Dawn’s study of the asteroid Vesta marks a major scientific accomplishment and also points the way to the future destinations where people will travel in the coming years. President Obama has directed NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and Dawn is gathering crucial data that will inform that mission.” — NASA Chief Administrator, Charlie Bolden

NASA | ART 50 Years of Exploration – SpacePod 2011.06.20 from Spacevidcast on Vimeo.

From Rockwell to Rauschenberg, NASA has had a long tradition of inviting artists to give their perspective on the agency’s work through different forms of art.

Painting, textile, sculpture, music and poetry fill a traveling exhibit called NASA Art | 50 Years of Exploration. NASA art program curator Bert Ulrich takes visitors through an artistic tour-de-force of rocket launches, space shuttle explosions, missions to Mars and Mercury as well as key moments in the agency’s history.

For a brief time, NASA even had an artist-in-residence program. Laurie Anderson has the distinction of being the first and only NASA artist-in-residence after the program was cut following her two-year experience in 2003-2004.

The artists who have graced NASA with their work reads like a who’s who of modern art. It features nearly five decades of creations by artists as diverse as Annie Leibovitz, Nam June Paik, Norman Rockwell, Doug and Mike Starn, Andy Warhol and William Wegman.

Fashion Designer Stephen Sprouse has a 3-D dress with images of the Mars Rover on it that was featured in a New York fashion week show in 2000.

Ulrich says, “Artists have been given a different perspective in how NASA works and they’ve been able to document the agency and the different chapters of NASA’s history through the media of art.”

NASA founding art program director Founding director James Dean once said, “At the core, both art and aerospace exploration search for a meaning to life.”

Seventy-three of nearly 3,000 works in its collection are in a traveling exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C through mid September.

When the final mission of the U.S. space shuttle program blasted off flawlessly on Friday, over one million onlookers gathered in Florida for the launch. Tens of millions more watched on television. But what they couldn’t see amid the liftoff fire and smoke was all the science that was en route to the International Space Station.

Space Shuttle Atlantis has a lot of experiments, including one from a Hawaiian biotech company called Tissue Genesis Incorporated. The company has been working with NASA for ten years to study the effects of microgravity on stem cells regenerated from fat tissue.

The research can be applied to fight vascular disease, improve heart bypass surgery and orthopedics.

Houston’s Odyssey Space Research put two Apple iPhones on the last shuttle mission, not so they can phone home from space but to conduct experiments using mobile applications.

Astronauts will use an app called SpaceLab. The experiment app was built to test iPhone cameras and gyroscopes as well as test the effects of radiation on the devices.

Others hope that iPhones will be able to replace some of the expensive and faulty navigation equipment that generally accompanies most space missions.

Besides biotech and high tech companies sending experiments into space the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program has sent a few projects as well.

A mini lab, about the size of a brick contains both professional and student science experiments. The Materials Dispersion Apparatus (MDA) houses about 90 different experiments, including 11 student experiments.

Ranging from yeast to tomatoes and from goldfish eggs to mouth bacteria student experiments will study the effects of microgravity by comparing samples on the ground to those that flew into space. Students will look for differences in cell structure, behavior or growth of their samples.

And though it is the last shuttle mission to the ISS, one experiment will perform a white-glove test of the space station to see if it is remaining biological clean after years of use. a state of the art lab on a chip will be able to detect biological and chemicals on any surface.

Another novel experiment comes from Arizona State University, where Cheryl Nickerson is working on developing next generation vaccines.

The microbiologist has been studying infection in microgravity and has already discovered that the salmonella bacteria becomes more virulent in zero-gravity.

She says, “Our earlier work showed the potential for spaceflight to provide novel insight into the mechanisms of microbial virulence that may lead to innovations in infectious disease control here on Earth.”

Now Nickerson and her colleague Roy Curtiss III, the director of the Biodesign Institute are hoping to find cures to hepatitis B, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, AIDS and pneumonia by enlisting the help of salmonella.

When the final flight of Atlantis returns she and Curtiss will examine their Recombinant Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine (RASV) payload to determine if microgravity makes the experimental vaccine that already proves powerful against pneumonia even stronger after going to outer space.

All of the space data that the Hubble Telescope is broadcasting is far too much for a handful of scientists to sift through in a timely manner. So using the power of technology and the time and interest of citizen scientists several space-based science projects are underway through a project called Zooniverse.

The latest program is a joint effort with NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. The space agency is enlisting the help of thousands of citizen scientists to analyze images to identify Kuiper Belt Objects.

The Kuiper Belt is a field of icy rocks that begins where Neptune’s orbit ends. Pluto is no longer a planet but it is still the destination in 2015 for the New Horizons program. Once the space probe passes Pluto it will study two other large Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). And that’s where Icehunters comes in.

Citizen Scientists circle white dots in the search for Kuiper Belt Objects to help NASA find targets

The new Zooniverse citizen science initiative starts with all different quality images of the Kuiper Belt, complete with bright stars that wash out images, cosmic rays, asteroids and other noise. People from all over the world log in and pour over pictures, circling potential KBOs.

Scientists look at the objects that many independent participants circle and conduct further analysis in hopes of spotting a good target for the New Horizons misison to study.

Zooniverse has nine live projects looking at different scientific questions relating to the universe. Planethunters is perhaps the most well known, giving citizen scientists the opportunity to find a new extra solar planet.

When Alex de Voogt couldn’t get a crumbling sheath to release an early 20th Century Egyptian knife, he turned to a cutting-edge, high resolution, computed tomography (CT) scanner for help. Using the advanced x-ray technology he was able to see inside the knife covering and reveal writing on the knife blade without disturbing the artifact.

Museum scientists around the world are continually studying parasites, people, or planets. And to learn more about their subject of choice, they routinely use cutting-edge imaging technologies such as infrared photography, scanning electron microscopes, and CT scanners to make it possible to examine details that were previously unobservable.

Now the American Natural History Museum in New York City is offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science as told through the pictures scientists capture in pursuit of their science.

This exhibition, called Picturing Science was the brain child of Mark Siddall, curator in the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology. He gathered more than 20 sets of large-format images that showcase the wide range of research across many different scientific disciplines being conducted at the Museum. The exhibit also showcases how various optical tools are used in scientific studies.

Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies is on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History from June 25, 2011 – June 24, 2012 and is free with Museum admission.

“Very rarely do you find a scientific paper that doesn’t have a picture in it, a scientific figure of some sort. But there’s this wonderful aesthetic that goes with some of these pictures that are just beautiful to look at.” — Mark Siddall, Invertebrate Zoology Division Curator, American Natural History Museum.

A piece of space junk came dangerously close to the International Space Station, causing the astronauts to seek shelter. The spaceflyers aboard the space station beat a hasty retreat to emergency escape capsules as a precaution.

NASA Mission Control says the piece of debris was an “unknown object of unknown size.” It was large enough to be tracked so it was at least four inches in diameter. The space station is designed to handle an almost constant barrage of tiny flecks from old orbiting satellites, spent rockets and other space junk but anything large enough for earth-bound trackers to detect is enough to do damage.

This is only the second time in space station history that the six-man crew had to seek shelter in the Soyuz lifeboats in case the junk made impact. On this near miss, the piece of debris came within about 800 feet of the station.

NASA had only 14 hours notice of the close approach. Generally, with enough advanced warning the space station can be moved to get out of the way. But there wasn’t time to move the whole station, which currently takes a couple of days.

After this incident NASA managers and their Russian space agency counterparts are making changes in computer software to reduce the warning time to get the station out of the way of incoming space junk.

NASA says it doesn’t know how big the piece of debris was or where it came from.

Here is the video feed from the closest approach of the piece of space junk.

While technical teams are looking at making the space station more agile NASA is looking at ways to mop up 50 years worth of space junk.

Perhaps this particular piece of debris was a lost tool bag that astronaut Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper lost during a 2009 spacewalk.

New evidence of muon neutrinos turning into electron neutrinos could pave the way for spotting differences between matter and antimatter. That may not mean much to most people but scientists think it might be a big clue in the search for why matter is everywhere and antimatter is not.

Physicists believe matter and antimatter should behave the same way to preserve the symmetry outlined in the standard model of physics. But matter dominated over antimatter following the Big Bang.

Here are the basics on neutrinos. They are tiny, invisible particles that pass through our bodies millions of times a day. They leave no trace because they are so fast and so light, traveling constantly through space all the time. This characteristic also makes them very difficult for physicists to detect.

Generally, a neutrino detector has to be constructed in an underground bunker where cosmic rays can’t penetrate. One such experiment was just barely underway in Japan when the big 9.0 earthquake disrupted the island nation and brought an abrupt halt to the big physics experiment.

There are three types of neutrinos theoretical physicists have determined but direct observation of Muon neutrinos, electron neutrinos and tau neutrinos has been fleeting to say the least.

The Japanese T2K experiment, which was pushing neutrinos from one coast of Japan to another may have captured the first evidence of the three neutrinos changing into one another en route.

In physics that’s a big deal. And now that physicists have observed the three types of flip-flopping neutrinos scientists just need to study how often this happens so they can apply the same experiments to anti-neutrinos.

The Japanese experiment should be back online by the end of the year.

“People sometimes think that scientific discoveries are like light switches that click from ‘off’ to ‘on’, but in reality it goes from ‘maybe’ to ‘probably’ to ‘almost certainly’ as you get more data. Right now, we are somewhere between ‘probably’ and ‘almost certainly’.” — Dave Wark, Science and Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom and Imperial College London and head of the UK Group at the T2K experiment

How black holes form is one of the biggest questions facing astronomers. For years super-massive black holes have provided a laboratory for physicists to study the light-strangling phenomenon.

Now a six-week study has revealed the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. Using the high-powered orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory pointed into deep space, scientists looked back in time to when the universe was just under one billion years old.

This composite image combines the deepest X-ray image ever taken with optical and infrared data from Hubble. Astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South by pointing the Chandra telescope at the same patch of sky for over six weeks of time. The Chandra sources of this small section of the CDFS are shown in blue. Two "stacked" images, which represent a technique used to find the most distant galaxies in X-ray light, are on the right. The results from this dataset include that black holes are found to be actively growing between 800 million and 950 million years after the Big Bang.

They were surprised to discover that black holes were very common. A team of top astronomers from around the world stumbled onto an x-ray signal from the early universe. Using the deepest x-ray image ever taken, the team led by University of Hawaii’s Ezequiel Treister discovered that massive black holes were present near the beginning of the universe.

Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so great that not even light can escape from them. Before this discovery astronomers had no idea what black holes in early galaxies did or if they even existed.

Treister says, “This is a big step, not a baby step, getting us closer to understand[ing] where the black holes form and when they were created, when they started.”

The new x-ray image not only gave these astronomers a never-before-seen peek into a younger universe but it revealed the presence of black holes that had been previously obscured.

Mitchell Begelman, an astronomer from University of Colorado says, “We never saw before now the smaller black holes that must have existed before these quasars formed.”

Quasars are the brightest spots in the universe. After being mistaken for stars the strange cosmological phenomenon was discovered in the 1960s. Since then further study has shown astronomers these luminous dots are actually powered by massive rotating black holes.

Looking deep into space is like looking back in time because of the finite speed of light. So the higher the power of telescopes and imaging technology the better glimpse we will get of the earliest universe.

This discovery confirms decades of theory.

Begelman says, “Now, we are seeing the first direct evidence of these smaller black holes.”

Astronomers study the developmental stages of black holes in the same way as sociologists study people. They put the lifespan of a black hole into phases of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These observations are the first images of young black holes. They are like seeing their high school pictures.

But like gawky teens these black holes grow quickly and powerfully, eating up all matter within reach.

Kevin Schawinski from Yale University says, “These hungry black holes are feeding on material — gas — at the centers of these galaxies and they will continue to grow from adolescence to adulthood.”

Now astronomers can move much close to the moment of birth and understand where both galaxies and super massive black holes come from.

Schawinski says, “We’ve only just scratched the surface of the first billion years of the universe with their help and there are great prospects of further discovery.”

Scientists say particles from a solar flare will rain down on Earth and possibly cause problems. NASA caught incredible images of the sun as it released a medium-sized solar flare and a spectacular coronal mass ejection. It appeared to cover at least half of the sun with its plasma cloud.

Now it is speeding toward Earth and could disrupt communication satellites and power grids. While the possibility of solar flares always comes with the warning, few think this particular plasma burst will do much to us on Earth this weekend.

Because the flare shot out of the sun away from Earth, we will be spared the brunt of its impact. But the giant super-heated gas cloud is speeding away from the sun at about 3 million miles per hour. So scientists aren’t ruling out the possibility of some disruptions, especially to satellites.

This means that cell phones and GPS units may not operate as they are supposed to so why not unplug this weekend and wait for the solar storm to pass.

The sun goes through 11-year cycles of activity. It is just emerging from an unprecedented quiet period and appears to be exploding into the active phase of the cycle. The first major solar flare since 2006 appeared in February, followed by another big one in April.

NASA is setting its sights on the future of the U.S. Space Program. The agency is unveiling a new space ship, but pushing back when that ship will go into service.

The next generation of manned space vehicles used to be part of the Orion program. Now, the name has changed to MPCV and so has the date when the ships will be ready to explore beyond the International Space Station — perhaps venturing to Mars or an asteroid.

NASA’s Orion program was supposed to have taken astronauts back to the moon beginning in 2014. Now the new launch date is unknown but probably won’t be set until later this decade.

Albert Einstein predicted that large enough objects had the capability to bend light. He was right and astronomers used this technique called microlensing to make an out-of-this-world discovery. It seems that not all planets orbit neighboring stars.

A international team of scientists has found ten planets that are orphans without stars to orbit, roaming freely in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, astronomers believe that these rogue planets may be more numerous than main-sequence stars like our own Sun.

In the latest issue of the journal Nature, astronomers describe how they used microlensing to determine the number of homeless planets floating around in deep space. First, they identified ten Jupiter-size planets that were too far from any light-giving stars. Then they estimated the total number of such rogue planets, based on detection efficiency, microlensing-event probability and the relative rate of lensing caused by stars or planets. They concluded that there could be as many as 400 billion of these wandering planets, far outnumbering main-sequence stars such as our Sun.

This number stunned the study authors.

Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer says, “This is an amazing result, and if it’s right, the implications for planet formation are profound.”

Her colleague and study co-author Takahiro Sumi, an astrophysicist from Osaka University says, “The existence of free-floating planets has been predicted by planetary formation theory, but nobody knew how many there are.”

Now that microlensing has helped find wandering Jupiters, the team is setting its sights on spotting Saturn and Neptune-sized orphan planets. There may be some Earth-sized, rocky planets out there capable of supporting the ingredients for life.

In the future, NASA’s planned space-based Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), will be able to decipher the rapid light blips associated with smaller mass planets detected using microlensing.

Ohio State University astrophysicist Scott Gaudi says, “Detecting Earth-mass unbound planets? That would be very interesting.”

This discovery is likely to open up a whole new sub-discipline in astronomy, the study of unbound exoplanets.

When the Juno spacecraft blasts off this August, it will embark on a mission to understand the origin and evolution of our largest planetary neighbor, Jupiter.

Scientists believe that Jupiter and the sun may be formed by the same heavy elements. So NASA is sending a solar-powered probe to determine if the gas giant has a solid core.

The Juno mission will investigate Jupiter’s origins, its interior structure, its deep atmosphere and its magnetosphere from an innovative, highly elliptical orbit with a suite of seven science instruments. The five-year mission will also include a JunoCam to take the first pictures of Jupiter’s polar regions.

During a year-long experiment, Juno will map the magnetic field of Jupiter in a series of orbits around the poles, wrapping it in a net. This will help scientists determine the dynamics of Jupiter’s interior and of the three-dimensional structure of the polar magnetosphere. NASA animation shows how this will be achieved.
Jupiter’s Magnetic Field

Seattle marketing director Nick Risinger quit his job to travel the world in search of the perfect picture of the night sky. The 29-year-old amateur astronomer took a year and traveled from the southwestern U.S. to South Africa, taking thousands of digital color photos of all billions of stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

After months of painstaking work to stitch them all together, he released his work of art online a few weeks ago. Photopic Sky Survey is the largest true color composite image of the entire night sky as viewed from Earth.

His purpose is to get kids to look up in the sky more and wonder what’s out there. He admits that this giant 5,000 megapixel image can’t be used for scientific purposes but that wasn’t his goal.

Now the astrophotographer has built a website where you can see the photo and even interact and zoom in on particular stars at skysurvey.org.

Even though Albert Einstein’s theory of Relativity was proven accurate during a solar eclipse in Africa in 1919, the many predictions Einstein made are still being tested experimentally.

After 52 years of planning, delays, experimentation and building a Stanford University team with NASA becomes the latest group to prove that Einstein’s theory is correct.

NASA’s Gravity Probe B mission has confirmed two key predictions derived from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which the spacecraft was designed to test.

Einstein predicted that the mass of Earth, with its own gravitational force, is enough to bend space-time. Gravity Probe B proved the so-called geodetic effect. Using ultra-precise gyroscopes, NASA scientists confirmed Einstein’s prediction.

He also said that a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates. He called this frame-dragging

This news is enough to make your head spin. Literally.

The European Space Agency is already working on that project, called Space-Time Explorer Quest. Scientists are testing test the effect of gravity at the sub-atomic level and hope to have some exciting results that will help the the two theories come together to form the much-sought-after Unified Theory in about 10 years.

Space Travel could soon become a reality and Austin, Texas woman will sell it to you. Janie Bullard is one of only 74 licensed space travel agents. She is booking seats on Virgin Galactic. Each seat costs about $200,000 and takes travelers to the edge of space for about five minutes. But already she’s booked almost 500 people for Sir Richard Branson’s commercial spaceflight company.

The CEO of travel company Virtuoso, the umbrella travel group that helps handle the space flights is going to be among the passengers on the maiden flight of SpaceShipTwo, which could launch sometime later this year. The first Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert is still under construction and the ships are still being tested.

To book a spaceflight or if you just want to learn more about what goes into a quick trip to space, visit Distinctive Journeys for more information.

Every space tourist must undergo rigorous astronaut training, including weightless flight training and the effects of three Gs (or three times gravity) on the body.

Dean Kamen Says Knowledge Is Best Investment

Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research & Development Corp. and inventor of the Segway personal transporter, talks about U.S. spending on education and technology. He speaks with Carol Massar at the FIRST Robotics Championships in St. Louis on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart.”

In all likelihood, the next manned spacecraft that launches from U.S. soil will be one a spaceship built by one of four companies. Yes, companies. The federal government is getting out of the space business by contracting services from private companies with advanced designs and concepts for manned space vehicles. NASA showed its commitment to commercializing space transportation by giving more funding to each of four commercial spacecraft companies.

Sierra Nevada Corporation

Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser

NASA extended Sierra Nevada Corporation an $80 million contract to develop its Dream Chaser orbital space transportation system. The company has been working on the Dream Chaser for six years. Through its collection of space and electronics companies the Sierra Nevada Corporation developed the X-37, an experimental ship that is currently flying a secret mission in space. The new contract will allow Sierra Nevada Corporation, located in Sparks, Nevada, to further develop the spacecraft which can then be used by other commercial spaceflight companies as well as official U.S. space missions.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin's New Shepard Crew Capsule

NASA gave Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin a $22 million development grant for its New Shephard program. Based on a 20-year-old technology that failed upon takeoff, the Seattle area company has already improved the design and successfully tested its gumdrop-shaped vertical takeoff and landing vehicle in the desert southwest.

Boeing

Boeing Orion Crew Vehicle, image courtesy of Boeing

NASA extended its space contract with St. Louis-based Boeing, Defense Space & Security. In 2010 NASA gave the company $18 million to continue developing its Orion manned space program. Boeing now has another $90 million to continue that work. NASA scrapped the Orion program several years ago. Big aerospace defense contractors fought over the work and Boeing ultimately beat out rival Lockheed Martin and its partner Northup Grumman for the bid.

SpaceX

SpaceX Dragon Lab, courtesy of SpaceX

NASA awarded $75 million to Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, the commercial space company owned by Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors. The tech billionaire and would-be rocket scientist has the only company that has successfully launched a rocket. Now, the new NASA dollars will be used to improve the Dragon rocket and make it safe for transporting astronauts.

“This award will accelerate our efforts to develop the next-generation rockets and spacecraft for human transportation. With NASA’s support, SpaceX will be ready to fly its first manned mission in 2014.” — Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO

NASA began developing its commercial crew development initiative in 2009 when it decided it would allow private companies to build and operate future U.S. missions to space once it retired the space shuttle program. After President Obama canceled the Constellation program in 2010 NASA began to seriously consider working with private companies that began dotting the commercial spaceflight map several years ago.

Update: Shuttles heading to Washington D.C, New York, Florida and California

After 30 years and 135 flights into space, the US space shuttle is coming to an end. With just two more flights left, NASA is retiring the space shuttle program. Now, the AP’s Lee Powell says the familiar black-and-white crafts are becoming sought-after museum pieces.

While NASA is donating the shuttles free of charge to three lucky museums, each contending museum must raise about $28 million to have the decommissioned space orbiters shipped to their new homes. With only three remaining shuttles looking for new landing pads, a new space race has begun.

For the last year, about a dozen space, science and flight museums have been wooing NASA to get a hold of space shuttles Endeavour, Discovery and Atlantis. There is a fourth shuttle — Enterprise — which was an early prototype for the other shuttles but never flew into space.

The Smithsonian Institution will acquire Discovery and ship Enterprise to New York City’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum while Kennedy Space Center will acquire Atlantis. The California Science Center in Los Angeles will claim the last shuttle Endeavour.

NASA Live Stream here:


Free video streaming by Ustream

Washington state Governor Chris Gregoire says she is disappointed that Seattle lost the bid to get one of the shuttles. As the home to modern flight, Seattle would have been a perfect fit.

“While the Museum of Flight was in the top running, I’m disappointed that NASA did not choose them. However, the full fuselage trainer, that every astronaut including Bonnie Dunbar has been trained on, will soon call the Museum of Flight home. The largest of the trainers, this addition will allow visitors to actually climb aboard the trainer and experience the hands-on training that astronauts get. Visitors will not be allowed in the other shuttles and this trainer is a true win for our dynamic museum. It will help inspire young people to the adventure of space and to the excitement of a career in science, technology, engineering and math.”

NASA engineers in California are working around the clock to put the finishing touches on the new Mars mega-rover before shipping it off to Florida for launch later this year. Wearing his clean suit, AP’s John Mone got an inside look at the vehicle named Curiosity.

After launch to the red planet at the end of 2011, Curiosity will be lowered on cables from a descent vehicle to explore Mars. Part of its mission is to determine if Mars ever housed life. The SUV-sized rover is better equipped than it’s two predecessors and even includes remote sensing equipment to analyze a soil sample with a laser from up to 30 feet away.

The much smaller Opportunity and Spirit ended their five-month exploratory mission of Mars’ surface years ago. First landing on opposite sides of the red planet in 2004, NASA lost communication with Spirit just over a year ago after it lost power in a Martian sand trap. Now hope is fading that the rover will power itself up and continue on its extended mission.

Arizona State University astronomer Jim Bell says the loss of Spirit’s communication came at exactly the wrong time because it was doing some very valuable science, even though it was immobile and tilting away from the sun.

Opportunity continues chugging away, feeding off the solar power that drives them during the Martian spring and summer. During the winter, the rovers hibernate and NASA engineers hope they will be able to re-establish communication when they awake.

Though Spirit’s odometer is stuck at 4.8 miles, Opportunity fully explored one crater and is on its way to another, having logged over 16 miles.

Curiosity is more than a remote controlled rover. It’s a roving science laboratory. The Mars Science Laboratory has four goals: determine if life ever arose on Mars, characterize the climate of Mars, characterize the geology of Mars, and prepare for human exploration.

This latest mission is part of a multi-decade series of missions to send probes to Mars. The data collected will eventually lead to a manned mission to Mars where a settlement could be established.

Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

After a six-and-a-half-year and 93-million-mile journey the Messenger spacecraft has reached its target — Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.

After a tricky maneuver to use gravitational force to enter into the fast-spinning orbit of Mercury the probe began sending back the clearest and closest pictures of the little planet.

Messenger now begins a one-year mission of snapping about 75,000 pictures of Mercury’s surface, which is hot enough to melt iron but may contain ice in permanently shadowed craters that dot its exterior.

The only other time we’ve seen images from Mercury was 30 years ago, when another probe — Mariner — did a brief flyby. Then only blurry, low-resolution pictures captured a tiny bit of the planet’s surface.

Messenger’s second look at the first planet from the sun will be much more detailed and give scientists a treasure trove of new information to better understand Mercury and other planets in our solar system and beyond.

“We are already seeing Mercury with a new eyes and with eight sets of eyes.” — Eric Finnegan, Applied Physics Lab, John Hopkins University

]]> http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/31/mercury-comes-into-view/feed/ 0 http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/30/nasa-mission-to-study-polar-climate-change/ http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/30/nasa-mission-to-study-polar-climate-change/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:59:02 +0000 Michael Bradbury http://www.realscience.us/?p=4071

The earth’s climate is getting a checkup thanks to NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge. It’s a six year mission to study the earth’s polar region from on board an airplane. NASA scientist Tom Wagner explains the mission from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

While the space agency is known for it’s work in outer space, in recent years it has used satellites and other tools to monitor what is happening here on Earth. After Earth-pointing satellites first noticed a major shift at the poles, NASA has been tracking those changes.

Now, planes outfitted with a number of scientific instruments and sensors will begin measuring the height of ice to determine its thickness in the polar regions. Radar will be used to measure the seabed under the ice to see how fast it’s flowing into the ocean.

A gravimeter will measure the shape of seawater-filled cavities at the edge of some major fast-moving major glaciers while a
magetometer will help to see the shape of Earth’s crust and how oceans interact with the ice.

This six-year study will monitor the dramatic changes occurring at the poles, which are also causing changes and affecting climate around the world.

“We’re having an interesting experiment happen on Earth as these places melt.” — Dr. Tom Wagner, NASA Goddard Flight Center

Climate Fact: Greenland is able to grow broccoli for the first time.

]]> http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/30/nasa-mission-to-study-polar-climate-change/feed/ 0 http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/25/virtusphere-rolls-into-the-future/ http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/25/virtusphere-rolls-into-the-future/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:32:59 +0000 Michael Bradbury http://www.realscience.us/?p=4055

It looks like a giant hamster ball but it’s doing far more than exercising its occupants. The Virtusphere, which first rolled onto the scene during the reality television show Shark Tank in 2009, takes virtual reality to a whole new level.

For science, it gives the opportunity to walk through the bloodstream or to soar through the cosmos and understand spaces in a whole new way. Data that scientists have collected can finally be put to use in a meaningful way that gives depth and dimension to some hard to imagine worlds.

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is only one of four institutions that has one of these giant balls of science. The Virtusphere was also a part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington D.C. last fall.

It has applications from training military personnel in a virtual environment and it can even be used to enhance video games. But get inside this ball and scientists can finally walk into the worlds they study, which will allow us all to better understand what’s going on all around us.

]]> http://www.realscience.us/2011/03/25/virtusphere-rolls-into-the-future/feed/ 0
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