NASA had troubles getting soil the Mars Lander Phoenix collected into its little oven to analyze it.

Through vibrating the filter the Mars soil samples moved inside the tiny oven. The Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument, or TEGA, for Phoenix has actually eight separate tiny ovens to bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile ingredients, such as water.

A proof, if you still need one that NASA scientists are all kids inside their hearts are the names the gave the trenches Phoenix dug until now. The left one in the photo above is called "Dodo" and the right one is called "Baby Bear".

The sample Phoenix is currently analyzing is from Baby Bear.

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The lucky sunny state of Arizona is about to become home to the world’s largest Solar Plant! Thanks to a just-announced contract between Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company (APS), the enormous solar plant called Solana will power up to 70,000 homes, and will be the first example in the country of a major utility getting the majority of its energy from solar. The 1900 acre plant will be completed by 2011 – IF AND ONLY IF Congress renews the clean energy tax credit that’s set to expire at the end of 2008.

This could be a momentous environmental energy venture for the US, so now is the time to get political — we should not let this amazingly positive opportunity slip through the cracks!

The Arizona solar power plant has been named Solana, which means “a sunny place” in Spanish, and will be located 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, near Gila Bend, and cover 1,900 acres. The capacity of the power plant has been projected at 280 megawatts — a capacity which could power 70,000 homes and create 1,500 jobs. The electricity generated by the plant will be sold to APS to the tune of around $4 billion for over next 30 years.

Solana will make use of Abengoa Solar‘s Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology, which is based on solar radiation concentration to generate steam or hot air, which is used by an electric plant to run steam turbines.
The CSP technology uses three different approaches to concentrate solar rays: tower technology, parabolic trough technology, and dish Stirling technology. The Solana power plant would primarily employ parabolic trough technology.

- which we Abengoa Solar is presently operating the world’s first commercial CSP solar tower plant in Spainwrote about last year. This new enormoust solar power plant could be a huge boon for renewable energy, the environment, and the local economy with all the new jobs it will create. But there’s one catch- this week the house will be voting on the renewal of a clean energy bill which would shift about $18 billion in tax breaks from oil companies to renewable energy. Essentially, Abengoa’s ambitious solar plan hinges on the passing of this bill. The current clean energy tax credit will expire at the end of 2008, which would effectively make Solana impossible if it did. So while Solana would be a huge step in the right direction for our society, the fate of its realization lies in the hands of policy makers this week.

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Stargazers are worried about the weather forecast, but if the clouds part in time, Marylanders will get a good look at tonight's total eclipse of the moon - the last one visible here or anywhere until December 2010.

"Baltimore has experienced bad weather for the last few lunar eclipses," said Herman Heyn, Baltimore's original "Streetcorner Astronomer." Both of last year's eclipses were clouded-out here, but if the heavens are visible, Heyn plans to set up at 9 o'clock tonight in the 3100 block of St. Paul St. in Charles Village.

Forecasters were predicting rain or snow before 9 p.m., then partly cloudy skies - perhaps enough to let the moon shine through. Eclipse watchers will have to cross their fingers.

"Astronomers have to be cool about this 'weather-permitting' thing," Heyn said. "Sometimes it seems, as often as not, we're disappointed by the weather, especially around here. Once in a while, we get a break that wasn't predicted."

Behind the clouds or not, at 8:43 p.m., the full moon will begin to slide into the Earth's umbra - the darkest part of the shadow that the planet casts into space.

Gradually, from east to west, the moon's normally brilliant white disk will darken to an eerie reddish or coppery color as sunlight, filtered through all of Earth's sunsets and sunrises, is bent and scattered across the lunar surface.

From 10 p.m. until 10:52 p.m., the moon will be engulfed in the Earth's shadow. It will seem transformed - from the flat-looking white disk we're used to into something unsettlingly ruddy and spherical.

The eclipse will be visible simultaneously throughout the Americas and in Africa, Europe and Central Asia.

After the period of totality ends, the lunar disk will begin to emerge again from the Earth's shadow, becoming fully illuminated again by 12:09 a.m.

If the weather cooperates, this would be the first total eclipse of the moon visible in Maryland - from start to finish - since Oct. 28, 2004. (Last year's were cut short by moonrise or moonset; there were none in 2005 or 2006.) The next one visible here in its entirety wouldn't be until Dec. 21, 2010.

Unlike solar eclipses - which require solar filters or other devices to protect the eyes from the sun's direct rays - lunar eclipses involve only reflected sunlight. They are safe to watch with the naked eye. Binoculars and telescopes are even better.

You can catch the entire spectacle anywhere the moon is visible, but a number of local amateur astronomy groups and observatories are planning public events. They will offer opportunities to see the eclipse, plus a bonus look at Saturn and its rings, through a telescope.

"Saturn will be hovering just a few degrees from the moon, making it unusually easy to spot," Heyn said. "Viewed from Earth, the tilt of the rings varies. ... While their tilt is currently only one-third their maximum, they remain an exciting sight."

Saturn will be the "star" just below the moon, to the left. The true star above the moon is Regulus in the constellation Leo.

The science department at Howard Community College is teaming up with the Howard Astronomical League for a viewing between 8:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. Meet on the roof of the HCC parking garage, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway in Columbia. For weather updates, visit howardastro.org/eclipse/htm or call 410-772-4891.

A viewing in downtown Baltimore starts at 8 p.m. at the Crosby Ramsey Memorial Observatory at the Maryland Science Center. Visitors can look through any of several telescopes and ask questions of staffers.

"It will be a nice opportunity to catch Saturn in the telescope," said Jim O'Leary, director of the science center's Davis Planetarium. "The rings always bring oohs and aahs from visitors."

"We'll make every effort to be here if there's any chance of a break in the clouds," he said. Call 410-545-2999 after 7 p.m. for weather updates.

The public also is invited to the Maryland Space Grant Observatory on the fourth floor of the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University.

The observatory will be open at 8:30 p.m., if weather permits. Call 410-516-6525 after 5 p.m. for weather updates. For directions, visit www.pha.jhu.edu/~camer cha/openhouse.htm.

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HOUSTON (AP) — The 10 astronauts aboard the linked space shuttle and space station wrapped up their joint work and got ready to say goodbye.

The hatches between the two spacecraft were to be sealed around midday Sunday.

Atlantis will undock Monday after a nine-day visit to the international space station. Astronaut Daniel Tani — in orbit for four months — will be aboard the shuttle.

Tani expects to have mixed emotions when it comes time to leave. He moved into the space station in October and had his stay extended two months because of fuel gauge trouble that bumped Atlantis' flight from December to February.

"I love living here on the station. It's comfortable. It's fun. It's exciting. The view, of course," Tani, 47, said Saturday. "But obviously, I want to get back and see my family."

"I look forward to some odd things," he added. "I'm looking forward to putting food on a plate and eating several things at once, which you can't do up here. I'm looking forward to spitting my toothpaste out in a sink rather than swallowing it."

Tani's mission was marred by the death of his 90-year-old mother. She was killed in a car accident near Chicago just before Christmas.

He said he's putting together a tip sheet for future space station residents who might have to deal with a family tragedy while they're in orbit, essentially ways to improve communication.

Flight director Bob Dempsey said he could not be more pleased with Atlantis' visit. The two crews installed the new European lab, Columbus, and conducted three spacewalks to hook it up and do other space station chores.

"The mission has gone, by many measures of success, extremely smoothly," he said.

Atlantis and its seven-man crew will land Wednesday at Cape Canaveral, Fla., or the backup touchdown site in California. NASA and the Defense Department want them out of harm's way when the military shoots down an ailing spy satellite.

On the Net:

• NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

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Is there life on other planets in our galaxy?

On the off chance there is, are you listening? Because today, NASA will spin a song into space for the first time — The Beatles' "Across the Universe" will go into deep space at 7 p.m. ET.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the song's first recording.

Paul McCartney is happy about being beamed into space. "Amazing! Well done, NASA!" McCartney wrote in a message to the space agency. "Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

This is also the 50th anniversary of NASA's founding and marks two other anniversaries for NASA: the launch, 50 years ago this week, of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the creation, 45 years ago, of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennae that supports missions to explore the universe.

The Beatles transmission is being aimed at the North Star, Polaris, which is 431 light years from Earth. The song, written by John Lennon, will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.

His widow, Yoko Ono, characterized the song's transmission as a significant event.

"I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe," she said.

McCartney has played to space before. In 2005 he performed the song "Good Day Sunshine" during a concert that was transmitted to the International Space Station. Beatles songs have often been used as wake-up songs for astronauts on orbit, including "Here Comes the Sun," "Ticket to Ride" and "A Hard Day's Night."

Today has been declared "Across the Universe Day" by Beatles fans to commemorate the anniversaries. As part of the celebration, the public around the world has been invited to participate in the event by simultaneously playing the song while it's transmitted by NASA. Many of the senior NASA scientists and engineers involved in the effort are among the group's biggest fans.

"I've been a Beatles fan for 45 years — as long as the Deep Space Network has been around," said Barry Geldzahler, the network's program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington. "What a joy, especially considering that 'Across the Universe' is my personal favorite Beatles song."

ABCNEWS

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The Messenger spacecraft that sped past Mercury on Jan. 14 sent back pictures of a geological formation never seen before in the solar system: a central depression with more than 100 narrow troughs radiating out from it.

Called "The Spider" by scientists analyzing the trove of images and data coming back from Messenger, the puzzling feature is the kind of surprise that researchers live for.

"Messenger has sent back data near perfectly, and some of it confirms earlier understandings, and some of it tells us something brand-new," said principal investigator Sean C. Solomon. "The Spider is definitely in the category of something we never imagined we'd find."

Scientists were also surprised by evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the planet's surface and how different it looks compared with the moon, which is about the same size. Unlike the moon, Mercury has huge cliffs, as well as formations snaking hundreds of miles that indicate patterns of fault activity from Mercury's earliest days, more than 4 billion years ago.

"It was not the planet we expected," said Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "It's a very dynamic planet with an awful lot going on."

Messenger passed by Mercury after a journey of more than 2 billion miles. It will swing by the planet twice more before settling into orbit around it in 2011.

Mercury is among the least understood planets because its proximity to the sun makes it hard to visit and to explore. Among the mysteries researchers hope to unravel is where and how Mercury was formed and the nature of the magnetic fields around it. Earth is the only other planet with such an active magnetosphere.

Solomon said clues into whether Mercury once orbited much farther from the sun, as theorized by many scientists, may emerge as the craft begins to orbit and conducts a chemical analysis of the surface.

Among the early findings is that a crater called Caloris is larger than researchers thought after the Mariner 10 spacecraft sent back the first images of the planet 33 years ago. Scientists now believe it is more than 950 miles wide. The Caloris basin, created by a long-ago asteroid strike, is home to "The Spider."

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NASA managers decided Friday to officially aim for a Feb. 7 launch of the shuttle Atlantis and delay another flight to mid-March as engineers work to replace an electrical connector on the orbiter's fuel tank.

The launch target will allow time to install and test the new connector and avoid schedule conflicts with other spacecraft that, like Atlantis, are bound for the International Space Station (ISS), NASA officials said in a statement.

Atlantis and its STS-122 astronaut crew are now scheduled to launch at 2:47 p.m. EST (1947 GMT) on Feb. 7, two months late, on a planned 11-day mission to deliver the European Space Agency's (ESA) Columbus laboratory to the ISS.

The spaceflight has been delayed since early December by fuel sensor glitches, which engineers traced back to a suspect electrical connector at the bottom of Atlantis' external tank. Engineers are expected to complete the installation of a replacement connector on Saturday, NASA officials said.

NASA also pushed back the planned Feb. 14 launch of the shuttle Endeavour to mid-March. That mission, STS-123, will deliver a robotic arm addition and the first segment of Japan's Kibo laboratory to the ISS.

The new shuttle launch dates, as well as a decision by Russia's Federal Space Agency to move the launch of an ISS-bound unmanned Progress cargo ship up two days to Feb. 5, were tailored to suit the work schedules of the space station's current Expedition 16 crew, NASA officials said.

In addition to a spacewalk repair of starboard solar wing motor slated for later this month, the station's three-person crew is also gearing up for the arrival of the European cargo ship Jules Verne. Built for the ESA, Jules Verne is the first of a series of Automated Transfer Vehicles that designed to haul fresh supplies to astronauts aboard the ISS.

Atlantis' STS-122 mission will mark the first of five scheduled shuttle flights slated to launch this year. The shuttle Discovery is scheduled for an April launch to deliver second element of the station's Kibo lab.

A planned August mission, also aboard Atlantis, is aimed at overhauling the Hubble Space Telescope while a September flight of Endeavour will haul fresh supplies to the ISS.

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A federal appeals court barred the Bush administration Friday from looking into the personal lives of NASA scientists and engineers who have no access to classified information, saying the probes are intrusive and unrelated to national security.

The planned inquiry into the employees' backgrounds, finances, alcohol and drug use, mental state and unspecified additional issues amounted to a "broad inquisition" with "absolutely no safeguards" that would limit disclosures to topics that are important to the government, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by 28 scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who were about to be fired in October for refusing to submit to the background checks when another panel of the court issued an emergency order.

The employees "face a stark choice - either violation of their constitutional rights or loss of their jobs," Judge Kim Wardlaw said in Friday's 3-0 ruling.

Their lawyer Dan Stormer said the ruling also applies to workers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View and other NASA operations in the nine Western states covered by the Ninth Circuit.

After a hearing later Friday at which a federal judge in Los Angeles formally issued the injunction, Stormer said NASA had announced it would refrain from conducting the investigations of similar employees at any of its installations nationwide. NASA representatives were unavailable for comment.

"This is a tremendous vindication of the constitutional rights of my clients, all loyal, hardworking scientists who have dedicated their lives to the space program," Stormer said.

The injunction is to remain in effect until the case goes to trial. The government could appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

The 28 employees, most of them with at least 20 years' service, all work for the California Institute of Technology under contract to the NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When hired, they underwent routine background checks of their identity and criminal records, their lawyers said.

The new investigations were ordered by a number of agencies, including NASA, after President Bush issued a homeland security directive in 2004 requiring that employees at federal installations have "secure and reliable forms of identification."

To keep their jobs, employees at the agencies are required to authorize the government to seek information about them from any source, including former employers, landlords, schools and acquaintances. The sources can be asked if they have any negative information about an employee's work, truthfulness, finances, alcohol or drug use, emotional stability, overall behavior or "other matters," the court said.

Lawyers for the employees said the inquiries also may include their sexual orientation and their overall attitude.

The appeals court said it saw no relationship between Bush's 2004 order for a secure identification program and the wide-ranging investigations of "low-risk" employees. Likewise, a 1958 federal law allowing the government to fire employees who threaten national security applies only to those in sensitive positions, the court said.

The scope of the inquiry also may violate the employees' privacy rights, Wardlaw said.

The "open-ended and highly private questions are authorized by this broad, standardless waiver (that employees must sign) and do not appear narrowly tailored to any legitimate government interest," she said.

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After years of delays, NASA hopes to launch this week a European-built laboratory that will greatly expand the research capability of the international space station. Although some call it a milestone, the launch has focused new attention on the space agency's earlier decision to back out of plans to send up a different, $1.5 billion device -- one that many scientists contend would produce far more significant knowledge.

The instrument, which would detect and measure cosmic rays in a new way, took 500 physicists from around the world 12 years to build. But with room on the 10 remaining shuttle missions to the space station in short supply, many fear that it will remain forever warehoused on Earth, becoming the most sophisticated and costly white elephant of the space era.

As a result, the imminent launch of the $1 billion Columbus laboratory -- the kind of scientific workspace that the station's backers always said would be its reason for being -- will take place under something of a cloud.

"We are very excited about the launch of Columbus and believe this will be a major step forward for the international space station," said Martin Zell, who is involved with the European space laboratory as head of research operations for the European Space Agency and is also a coordinator for development of the cosmic ray project.

"But if the [other device] does not make it to the station, it will be a very great setback for the space community and the ISS," Zell said. "It would be the most visible, perhaps the most exciting, experiment on the station."

While the Columbus laboratory will allow scientists to conduct long-term biological, fluid and materials science research in weightless conditions, the cosmic ray detector -- called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) -- would look for evidence of how the universe formed. It would search in particular for evidence of the existence and workings of dark matter and antimatter, which theorists have concluded must exist but have never been identified or measured.

The science is considered innovative and important -- a major Department of Energy scientific review recently concluded that it "may well make some fundamental discoveries." But the fate of the instrument also has significant implications for international cooperation in space.

"The credibility of the United States is at stake here, because NASA made a commitment to bring Columbus and AMS to the space station," said Samuel C.C. Ting, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who conceived the project in 1994 and drew in collaborators from 60 institutes in 16 nations to build and fund it. "After all this work, it would be a terrible blow if the instrument cannot be used."

By Marc Kaufman

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 2, 2007

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A fearsome fossil claw discovered in Germany belonged to the biggest bug ever known, scientists announced Tuesday. The size of a large crocodile, the 390-million-year-old sea scorpion was the top predator of its day, slicing up fish and cannibalizing its own kind in coastal swamp waters, fossil experts say.

Jaekelopterus rhenaniae measured some 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) long, scientists estimate, based on the length of its 18-inch (46-centimeter), spiked claw.

The find shows that arthropods—animals such as insects, spiders, and crabs, which have hard external skeletons, jointed limbs, and segmented bodies—once grew much larger than previously thought, said paleobiologist Simon Braddy of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

"This is an amazing discovery," Braddy said.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, supersized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies," he added. "But we never realized, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were."

The newfound fossil creature is estimated to be at least one and a half feet (46 centimeters) longer than any previously known prehistoric sea scorpion, a group called eurypterids.

Braddy and co-author Markus Poschmann of the Mainz Museum in Germany report the find in the latest issue of the journal Biology Letters.

Poschmann uncovered the fossilized claw in a quarry near Prüm in Germany.

Rock layers encasing it suggest the creature lived in a brackish coastal swamp or river delta, the researchers said.

Water Bug

Smaller sea scorpions are known to have crawled ashore to mate or shed their outer skins. But "there's no way this monster bug would have been able to do that, because it was just too big," Braddy said.

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They are the zestiest bits of matter in the universe. They can zing through space for millions of years at essentially the speed of light and with 100 million times the energy produced by the biggest particle accelerators on the earth, before crashing occasionally into Earth’s atmosphere and dying in a spray of microscopic fluff.

Since these ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, as they are known, were first glimpsed in 1963, physicists and astronomers have scratched their heads wondering where they came from and what gargantuan process could produce such energies — wondering, even, if they were real.

Now 370 scientists and engineers from 17 countries in a group known as the Pierre Auger Collaboration say they finally have evidence of a fitting answer: supermassive black holes that rumble at the hearts of many galaxies, crushing stars and gas out of existence and spewing jets of radiation and subatomic particles into intergalactic space.

Using a new array of cosmic ray detectors known as the Pierre Auger Observatory, which is spread over an area the size of Rhode Island near Malargüe, in the pampas of Argentina, the scientists traced some of the highest-energy cosmic rays back to the vicinities of nearby galaxies bubbling with black hole fireworks, so-called active galaxies.

The work is reported today in the journal Science.

“The age of cosmic-ray astronomy has arrived,” said James Cronin, a Nobel-prize winning physicist at the University of Chicago and the co-founder of the Auger observatory.

“We’re really just getting started,” he added in an interview.

Each of the cosmic rays studied had energy in excess of 57 billion billion electron volts, about the energy of a nicely hit tennis ball. By comparison, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, will accelerate protons to a mere 7 trillion electron volts when it turns on next summer.

“Such energies are so extreme that they could arise in only the most violent places in the universe,” the authors of the report wrote.

Because such active galaxies trace the general distribution of matter in the local universe, Dr. Cronin and others cautioned, the cosmic rays could originate with other objects, but the black holes’ known tendency toward violence makes them prime suspects. The important thing, Dr. Cronin said, is that for the first time researchers have shown that the high-energy rays do not come uniformly from all directions in the sky.

Until now, cosmic rays, which are often electrically charged particles like protons or atomic nuclei, have seemed to come from everywhere. Because magnetic fields bend the paths of charged particles after the particles are spit from the sun or some distant exploding star, they wander in curved, meandering paths, erasing the direction of their origins. They move under the influence of galactic and even intergalactic magnetic fields before smashing into our atmosphere and causing a cascade of other particles that eventually trigger detectors on the ground.

But ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have so much energy that magnetic fields can barely nudge them. The galaxy cannot contain them. As a result, when they hit Earth they should point to within a few degrees like bullets back to their origins.

Study of these rays has been hampered by the fact that they are so rare; only an estimated one per century falls on a half square mile of Earth.

The observatory began collecting data in 2004 and since then has recorded a million cosmic rays, including 80 of the high-energy kind. The collaboration hopes to build a twin array in Colorado to begin doing cosmic ray astronomy in the northern sky.

SOURCE

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When the Soviet Union launched a basketball-size satellite 50 years ago this week, it touched off a race for space that became a hallmark of the cold war. It was a two-player game with high technological and geopolitical stakes. It led to the US Apollo program, which placed the first humans on the moon. And it led to the Soviet Union's Mir program, which yielded Earth's first long-duration manned space station.

Half a century later, the world appears to be on the verge of Space Race Version 2.0. The objective: the moon. China, Japan, India, and Europe, as well as Russia and the United States, have either placed themselves at the starting line or are hovering close by.

At a global conference on space exploration in Hyderabad, India, last week, for instance, China reiterated its intent to set up an outpost on the moon after 2020. The effort would build on a series of unmanned lunar missions, beginning with a robotic orbiter China is preparing to launch this fall. Earlier in September, Japan launched a lunar orbiter, and its space agency has announced a goal of sending astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a lunar outpost by 2030. And India is getting set to launch a mission next year. Meanwhile, the US is pressing ahead with its Constellation program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. Some analysts caution that many of these are plans without budgets yet, and thus talk of a space race is premature.

"Only poets write strategies without budgets," says Joan Johnson-Freese, a specialist on China's space program. "There's a difference between conceptual discussions and programs that are adequately funded to carry them out."

As if to underscore the point, last month NASA administrator Michael Griffen acknowledged that China may beat the US back to the moon. Americans won't be thrilled about that, he noted, "but they will just have to not like it."

Others suggest that with the advent of the X Prize's $30 million purse for the first team to land a working rover on the moon, space races in the geopolitical sense will become increasingly obsolete or irrelevant as private industries find ways to make use of the moon's resources or service future lunar outposts.

Still, Dr. Johnson-Freese adds, "there certainly is the perception of a race between the US and China" as well as a perception of a race within Asia.

Part of that perception is a question of timing, suggests George Whitesides, who heads the National Space Society, a space-exploration advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

"We find ourselves unexpectedly in a time where virtually all of the space powers are sending probes to the moon," he says.

Bush's speech was a trigger

The mini-moon rush has several triggers, he adds. President Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration has served as the major prod. Moreover, the moon is a good place to stretch technological muscles for fledgling space programs trying to develop skills in robotic space exploration.

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NASA on Monday ordered the replacement of leaky hydraulic seals on the main landing gear of the shuttle Discovery, prompting a possible delay of a liffoff scheduled for Oct. 23.

The leak of hydraulic fluid from the right main landing gear assembly was detected late last week. Efforts to stop the seepage without replacing two seals were unsuccessful, said NASA's Kyle Herring, a shuttle program spokesman.

The landing gear hydraulic system absorbs the weight of the shuttle as the spacecraft touches down on the runway at the conclusion of a mission.

The seal replacement is scheduled to get under way at mid-week.

The work will delay plans to tow Discovery from a protective hangar to the launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 27, but it is unclear whether that will mean a postponement of an Oct. 23 liftoff, Herring said.

Discovery's two-week assembly mission to the international space station will be the third shuttle flight of 2007.

A crew of seven astronauts plans five spacewalks as they deliver and attach a gateway module to the station that will serve as a docking location for European and Japanese science labs. The shuttle crew will also transfer an 18-ton solar power module from the top of the outpost to the left side.

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Associated Press

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- A jumbo jet carrying the space shuttle Atlantis took off Sunday on a return trip to the shuttle's launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A modified Boeing 747 with the shuttle mounted on its back left from the Mojave Desert air base at 6:05 a.m. PDT, said Alan Brown, a spokesman at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

The jet made a planned stop at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb., Sunday afternoon for refueling and to check the connection between it and the shuttle, NASA spokeswoman Jennifer Tharpe said. NASA officials were monitoring the weather in Nebraska and in Florida and will not take off until Monday morning at the earliest, NASA spokeswoman Jennifer Tharpe said.

Atlantis could still make it to Cape Canaveral on Monday, Tharpe said. Managers will decide how to proceed at a 6 a.m. meeting.

Earlier Sunday, the jet made a rare landing on a commercial runway in Amarillo, Texas. It stopped to refuel at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport-- named for the commander of space shuttle Columbia who died along with six others when the spacecraft disintegrated during re-entry in 2003.

NASA spokesman Bill Johnson had said earlier that the jet was not expected to arrive at Cape Canaveral until at least Monday, with the possibility of a Tuesday arrival if weather is bad.

Atlantis, carrying seven astronauts, landed June 22 after a 14-day mission to continue building the international space station.

Unfavorable weather at its Florida launch site forced it to divert to its alternate landing site in California.

NASA prefers to land shuttles in Florida to avoid the cost of transporting them back on a cross-country flight

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A new NASA satellite has recorded the first detailed images from space of a mysterious type of cloud called “night-shining” or “noctilucent."

The clouds are on the move, brightening and creeping out of polar regions, and researchers don't know why.

"It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means," said atmospheric scientists James Russell III of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. "These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed."

The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere satellite first imaged the noctilucent clouds May 25. People on the ground began seeing them June 6 over Northern Europe.

The clouds form 50 miles above the Earth’s surface, in an upper layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. The puffs of water vapor and crystals appear during summer months above the Northern Hemisphere's pole as well the Southern Hemisphere’s pole in summer.

AIM will record two complete cloud seasons over both regions, effectively documenting an entire life cycle of the shiny clouds for the first time. Researchers hope to figure out why noctilucent clouds form and how they might be related to global climate change.

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An experimental spacecraft designed to test the viability of a hotel in space has been successfully sent into orbit.

Genesis II is an inflatable module designed and launched by Bigelow Aerospace, a private company founded by an American hotel tycoon.

The inflatable and flexible core of the spacecraft expands to form a bigger structure after launch.

Billionaire Robert Bigelow hopes to use inflatable technology to construct a manned space station by 2015.

Inflatable spacecraft are attractive because they take up less space on their launch vehicle than solid components and therefore cost less to place into orbit.

Genesis II was launched onboard a Russian rocket, and successfully separated from its launch vehicle 14 minutes after lift-off, engineers said.

Communications were established with the craft after a short delay, before the module beamed back a series of images of its expanding solar panels.

Officials said the craft was functioning well, with communications and air pressure as expected.

Commercial pressure

Bigelow Aerospace - slogan: Getting you excited again about space - hopes to build a full-scale space hotel, dubbed Nautilus, which will link a series of inflatable modules together like a string of sausages.

Genesis II is a 15 ft (4.5m) module designed to expand to a diameter of 8ft (2.4m).

Onboard the company has sent a collection of pictures and other memorabilia from fee-paying customers keen to see their personal possessions photographed in space.

The company also hopes to activate a space-based bingo game to be played by people back on Earth.

Later this year it plans to launch another module, Galaxy, described as a halfway house to a human-habitable space module.

Founder Robert Bigelow has invested some $500m (£250m) in his project, which is vying with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic enterprise to take fee-paying customers into space.

But experts say the costs of commercial space travel need to come down before it can be a success.

As a result, Mr Bigelow is offering a $50m prize to anyone who can design a craft capable of carrying five people to a height of 400km (250 miles) before 2010.

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The European Space Agency (ESA) on Tuesday called for applications for one of the most demanding human experiments in space history: a simulated trip to Mars in which six "astronauts" will spend 17 months in an isolation tank on Earth.

Their spaceship will comprise a series of interlocked modules in an research institute in Moscow, and once the doors are closed tight, the volunteers will be cut off from all contact with the outside world except by a delayed radio link.

They will face simulated emergencies, daily work routines and experiments, as well as boredom and, no doubt, personal friction from confinement in just 550 cubic metres (19,250 cubic feet), the equivalent of nine truck containers.

Communications with the simulated mission control and loved-ones will take up to 40 minutes, the time that a radio signal takes to cross the void between Earth and a spaceship on Mars. Food will comprise mainly the packaged stuff of the kind eaten aboard the International Space Station.

The goal is to gain experience about the psychological challenges that a crew will face on a trip to Mars.

Four of the crew will be Russian, and two will come from countries that are members of ESA, agency and Russian officials said at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget.

In all, 12 European volunteers are needed.

A precursor 105-day study is scheduled to start by mid-2008, possibly followed by another 105-day study, before the full 520-day study begins in late 2008 or early 2009.

Backup for the two volunteers taking part in each of these simulations means that 12 Europeans are needed.

"The selection procedure is similar to that of ESA astronauts, although there will be more emphasis on psychological factors and stress resistance than on physical fitness," ESA said in a press release.

Men and women who think they have the right stuff can download the application form on (http://www.spaceflight.esa.int/CallforCandidates).

The terrestrial Mars-stronauts will not get much glory for their confinement, nor will they get particularly rich.

They will get paid 120 euros (158 dollars) a day, said Marc Heppener of ESA's Science and Application Division.

Viktor Baranov of Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems, where the experiment will take place, said his organisation had received about 150 applications, only 19 of which came from women.

"The problem is that it is very difficult to find healthy people for this kind of experiment," he said.

Assuming that Mars and Earth are favourably aligned, with their closest distance of 56 million kilometres (35 million miles), it would take 250 days to get there, 30 days spent on site to conduct experiments and 240 days for the return, said Baranov.

A trip to Mars is not an early prospect. The United States has set plans to return to the Moon by 2018 and later head to Mars, but without setting a date.

The trip is fraught with many technical challenges, many of which are outranked by the question of keeping the crew healthy and sane.

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WASHINGTON -- Future eastern United States summers look much hotter than originally predicted with daily highs about 10 degrees warmer than in recent years by the mid-2080s, a new NASA study says.

Previous and widely used global warming computer estimates predict too many rainy days, the study says. Because drier weather is hotter, they underestimate how warm it will be east of the Mississippi River, said atmospheric scientists Barry Lynn and Leonard Druyan of Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"Unless we take some strong action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, it's going to get a lot hotter," said Lynn, now a scientist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It's going to be a lot more dangerous for people who are not in the best of health."

The study got mixed reviews from other climate scientists, in part because the eastern United States has recently been wetter and cooler than forecast.

Instead of daily summer highs in the 1990s that averaged in the low to mid 80s Fahrenheit, the eastern United States is in for daily summer highs regularly in the low to mid 90s, the study found. The study only looked at the eastern United States because that was the focus of the funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lynn said.

And that's just the eastern United States as a whole. For individual cities, the future looks even hotter.

In the 2080s, the average summer high will probably be 102 degrees in Jacksonville, 100 degrees in Memphis, 96 degrees in Atlanta, and 91 degrees in Chicago and Washington, according to the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Climate.

But every now and then a summer will be drier than normal and that means even hotter days, Lynn said. So when Lynn's computer models spit out simulated results for July 2085 the forecasted temperatures sizzled past uncomfortable into painful. The study showed a map where the average high in the southeast neared 115 and pushed 100 in the northeast. Even Canada flirted with the low to mid 90s.

Many politicians and climate skeptics have criticized computer models as erring on the side of predicting temperatures that are too hot and outcomes that are too apocalyptic with global warming. But Druyan said the problem is most computer models, especially when compared to their predictions of past observations, underestimate how bad global warming is. That's because they see too many rainy days, which tends to cool temperatures off, he said.

There is an established link between rainy and cooler weather and hot and drier weather, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Rainy days means more clouds blocking the sun and more solar heat used to evaporate water, Druyan said.

"I'm sorry for the bad news," Druyan said. "It gets worse everywhere."

Trenberth said the link between dryness and heat works, but he is a little troubled by the computer modeling done by Lynn and Druyan and points out that recently the eastern United States has been wetter and cooler than expected.

A top U.S. climate modeler, Jerry Mahlman, criticized the study as not matching models up correctly and "just sort of whistling in the dark a little bit."

But Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, editor of the journal Climate but not of this study, praised the paper, saying "it makes perfect sense."

He said it shows yet another "positive feedback" in global warming, where one aspect of climate change makes something else worse and it works like a loop.

"The more we start to understand of the science, the more positive feedbacks we start to find," Weaver said.

Weaver said looking at the map of a hotter eastern United States he can think of one thing: "I like living in Canada."

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The launch of our new LED lights from EcoLEDs (www.EcoLEDs.com) is already proven to be a huge success. Thank you to all the customers who have purchased our new LED light bulbs from BetterLifeGoods (www.BetterLifeGoods.com). In the first 24 hours, the sales of these lights greatly exceeded our expectations.

The primary question that has emerged from conversations with potential customers concerns the perception that LED lights are very expensive. This article attempts to answer that question, as well as providing additional details on where these new LED lights can be successfully used around the home or office.

First, the price issue: LED lights are, indeed, far more expensive up front than incandescent lights or fluorescent lights. Our high-end 10-watt LED light bulb, for example, currently costs just under $100. It replaces an incandescent 100-watt light bulb that typically costs around $1. So at first, the 10-watt LED light seems to be $99 more expensive.

However, lights do not actually work unless they also consume electricity, and thus the real question about the cost of light bulbs must take into account the Total Cost of Ownership, or TCO. What is the TCO for producing 50,000 hours of light with a 100-watt incandescent bulb?

As it turns out, a 100-watt light bulb actually uses 101.5 watts of electricity. Over 50,000 hours (which would require replacing it 50 times with a new bulb), it will use 5,075 kilowatt-hours of electricity, costing approximately $500 (based on ten cents per kilowatt-hour). So a 100-watt light bulb actually costs you $500 to operate over 50,000 hours. On top of that, it produces a whopping 10,150 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions which directly promote global warming and climate change. Mercury is also released into the atmosphere from all the energy usage, thanks to the fact that much of the electricity consumed in the world comes from coal-fired power plants that emit toxic mercury into the air.

So the Total Cost of Ownership for a 100-watt light bulb is well over $500 for producing 50,000 hours of light.

In contrast, what is the Total Cost of Ownership for our 10-watt EcoLEDs light bulb? The LED light itself costs about $100 up front. It uses 10.8 watts of electricity, which adds up to 540 kilowatt-hours over 50,000 hours. That's about $54 in electricity, vs. the $500 needed to power the 100-watt bulb mentioned above. Plus, our 10-watt LED light reduces CO2 emissions by 9,000 pounds, producing only about 1,080 pounds of CO2 instead of the 10,150 pounds produced from a 100-watt incandescent bulb.

The Total Cost of Ownership for a 10-watt LED light bulb is $100 for the light, and $54 in electricity for producing 50,000 hours of light.

Thus, the LED light is $154 vs. $550 or so (electricity + the cost of replacement bulbs) for incandescent lights.

Which brings us to the question: How much would you rather pay for 50,000 hours of light? $154 or $550? It makes obvious financial sense to pay only $154, especially when you're also protecting the environment at the same time.

Why LED lights cost more up front

Overall, LED lights are far less expensive to own and operate than incandescent lights. Still, many consumers are frustrated at the up-front cost. It's tough to fit a $100 light bulb into a tight budget. I share that concern, and I wish these lights were a lot less expensive to manufacture, but the fact is that quality LED components cost more. The copper, aluminum alloys and lenses that go into our LED lights are quality components, not cheap disposable parts like you normally find in an incandescent light. Building a quality LED light costs a lot more money than building a cheap light that you toss into landfill after a thousand hours of wasting electricity before burning out.

LED component prices are falling each year, however, and the future will no doubt bring more affordable LED lights to the marketplace. We anticipate that retail prices will fall 10 percent per year for quality LED lights, and we will of course work to bring down the prices of our own LED lights as quickly as we can. A less expensive light means increased affordability by a greater number of consumers, and that means a greater impact on saving energy and halting global warming. If we could sell these lights for one dollar and not go broke doing so, you can bet we'd be selling them for that dollar!

LED lights will never be as cheap as incandescent light bulbs. However, they will always pay you back in significant savings over time. And as electricity costs continue to rise, LED lighting makes even more economic sense.

As a consumer, you see, you're really buying hours of light, not just the bulbs that produce the light. The cost of the bulb is the smallest part of the equation. You'll find a similar situation with inkjet printers and inkjet cartridges. The printer might only cost $49 up front, but you might spend several hundred dollars in ink cartridges in a single year in order to operate the printer. Thus, the Total Cost of Ownership of the inkjet printer must take into the account the cost of the ink.

Uses for LED lights

Many consumers are wondering where they can use LED lights around their homes or businesses. Can they replace lights in room lamps? Ceiling fans? Desk lamps? Recessed lights?

To answer this question, remember that LED lights are really spotlights. They shine light in a specific direction with a certain beam angle. A wide beam angle shines light wider from side to side, while a narrow beam angle shines light in a narrow cone with extreme brightness. Thus, LED lights do NOT shine light in all directions like a typical incandescent light. This makes them the wrong choice for room lamps with lampshades or any light socket requiring "ambient" light in all directions.

What LED lights are great at is shining light straight down onto a surface or straight up to bounce off a ceiling (like a Torchiere light setup). Our high-end LED lights are fantastic in desk lamps, as they offer extreme brightness and outstanding light clarity that's useful for any work or study situation. They're also perfect for recessed lighting and down lights. I'm actually writing this article with the help of a 10-watt LED light in a small desk lamp that's aimed at my wall. It bounces white light across the entire room, illuminating my keyboard and computer. (It also stays cool enough to touch, since it doesn't waste much electricity as excess heat.)

LED lights are also great for porch lights, garages, sheds or any application where you need to leave the light on all night. That's because LED lights will use only 1/10th the electricity of incandescent bulbs, saving you big dollars on electricity. Even our 3-watt LED light is sufficient for nighttime use where you just want to "leave the light on" around your property.

All of our LED lights produce no UV radiation or IR radiation, making them perfect for use in museums, hospitals, offices or areas where UV radiation might degrade the surroundings (such as illuminating valuable artwork or photographs). The fact that they run remarkably cool also means they greatly reduce the fire hazard normally associated with the use of lights.

LED lights will make incandescent and fluorescent lights obsolete

I will offer a prediction right here: LED lights will render both incandescent light bulbs AND compact fluorescent lights obsolete. Many countries are already banning incandescent lights, and four U.S. states are considering their ban. Compact fluorescent lights will eventually be abandoned as the public learns the truth about their mercury content. Only LED lights offer energy efficiency and environmental friendliness at the same time. That's why LED lighting technology represents the future for both residential and commercial lighting.

Philips says it will even stop manufacturing incandescent lights by 2016, but most consumers will have switched long before then. Within a few years, only the most financially-ignorant consumers will even consider using incandescent light bulbs. Burning a light that wastes 95% of the electricity it consumes is sort of like driving a car that gets a fuel economy of one mile per gallon. No consumer in their right mind would continue to throw away their cash (and destroy the environment) when a sensible, efficient alternative is readily available.

And LED lights will get even brighter, better and less expensive in the coming years. Through EcoLEDs.com, I'm making an effort to bring these lights to eco-conscious consumers around the world. Within a few years, we hope to have lights exceeding 500 lumens of light output that will cost under $50 at retail. The trends are already in place, and U.S. LED component manufacturers are gearing up their factories for higher volumes.

LED components will follow price trends of PC components

The LED light industry today is much like the PC industry was in the 1980's. Remember what it cost you to buy a lousy 4.77mHz PC with a floppy disk drive and 64k of RAM in 1981? It was about four thousand dollars -- and it didn't even have color! I remember the first hard drives for Apple computers cost about five thousand dollars... and they only stored only 10 megabytes!

By comparison, you can now by a 4 gigabyte SD memory card for under a hundred bucks at retail! That's a massive reduction in cost as these electronics became cheaper to manufacture and widely accepted by consumers. LED components have been following a similar path. A single component that cost $10 today would have cost $1000 just a few years ago. And a few years from now, it might only cost 10 cents. Prices are falling by 50% a year on LED components, which means LED light bulbs will get increasingly affordable with each passing year.

Even right now, buying LED lights makes great economic sense. They pay you back in 1-2 years in electricity costs alone (depending on how much you pay for electricity), not to mention the benefits of protecting the environment from more CO2 and mercury emissions. That's an environmental cost that consumers rarely factor into their monthly electricity bill, but it's a very real cost associated with wasting electricity.

What is the value of preventing the release of 10,000 pounds of CO2 into the air? What is the value of preventing the release of a kilogram of mercury from a power plant? You see, nobody has really put a price figure on these things because polluting the environment continues to be seen by most American consumers and politicians as a revenue-neutral event when, in reality, it is a huge hidden cost against future economic productivity. Every gram of mercury and every pound of carbon dioxide released into the air places an unknown future cost on the national economy. With this in mind, consider the REAL cost of burning incandescent lights. It's not just what you waste in paying for electricity, it's also what future costs you indirectly impose upon the environment.

Do you get the big picture?

Understanding all this requires "big picture thinking," and sadly, the ability to see the big picture is sorely lacking among many consumers, businesses and lawmakers. Americans seem to be primarily focused on the short-term picture: How much can I save right now? Can I get this cheaper today at the expense of some future hidden burden that will have to be paid by someone else?

Canadians tend to be very well informed about the long-term implications of their present consumption decisions. In fact, many of the customers ordering our EcoLEDs lights are located in Canada. They understand the big picture and realize that paying more money right now for a technology that will save them hundreds of dollars in the long run (while saving the environment at the same time) makes instant sense.

Many Americans understand this, too, but due to our crumbling education system, even the ability to do the basic math calculations required to even understand the Total Cost of Ownership seems to be a rare skill. The vast majority of high school graduates in the United States cannot calculate a 15 percent restaurant tip in their heads. How on earth will they ever understand the Total Cost of Ownership concept for energy-efficient lighting?

I don't have an answer for that. Not everybody will get this. The big picture will only be grasped by some. The others will have to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming about the government banning their incandescent light bulbs. But the smarter, better-informed consumers out there (like NewsTarget readers) get this right now, and they understand that LED lights make instant sense in terms of personal economics and planetary impact.

(Full disclosure: I am the founder of www.EcoLEDs.com which manufactures and sells LED light bulbs, and I have a financial stake in the commercial success of EcoLEDs. A portion of every sale provides financial support to the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center, where I volunteer as the executive director.)

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ORLANDO - University of Central Florida Physics Professor Joseph Harrington and his team have measured the hottest planet ever at 3700 degrees Fahrenheit.

"HD 149026b is simply the most exotic, bizarre planet," Harrington said. "It's pretty small, really dense, and now we find that it's extremely hot."

Using Spitzer, NASA's infrared space telescope, Harrington and his team observed the tiny planet disappear behind its star and reappear. Although the planet cannot be seen separately from the star, the dimming of the light that reached Spitzer told the scientists how much light the hot planet emits. From this they deduced the temperature on the side of the planet facing its star. The team's findings were published online in Nature today.

Discovered in 2005, HD 149026b is a bit smaller than Saturn, making it the smallest extrasolar planet with a measured size. However, it is more massive than Saturn, and is suspected of having a core 70-90 times the mass of the entire Earth. It has more heavy elements (material other than hydrogen and helium) than exist in our whole solar system, outside the Sun.

There are more than 230 extrasolar planets, but this is only the fourth of these to have its temperature measured directly. It is simple to explain the temperatures of the other three planets. However, for HD 149026b to reach 3700 degrees, it must absorb essentially all the starlight that reaches it. This means the surface must be blacker than charcoal, which is unprecedented for planets. The planet would also have to re-radiate all that energy in the infrared.

"The high heat would make the planet glow slightly, so it would look like an ember in space, absorbing all incoming light but glowing a dull red," said Harrington.

Drake Deming, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, and a co-author of the Nature paper, thinks theorists are going to be scratching their heads over this one. "This planet is off the temperature scale that we expect for planets, so we don't really understand what's going on," Deming said. "There may be more big surprises in the future."

Harrington's team on this project also included Statia Luszcz from the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University, who is now a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Sara Seager, a theorist in the Departments of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jeremy Richardson, an observer from the Exoplanet and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA Goddard, round out the team.

Harrington is no stranger to significant findings. His research was published in Science magazine in October 2006 and in Nature in February 2007. In the first of those papers, Harrington's team used Spitzer to make the first measurement of day and night temperature variation on a different extrasolar planet. That research found that a Jupiter-like gas-giant planet circling very close to its sun is as hot as fire on one side, and potentially as cold as ice on the other, a condition that may also hold for HD 149026b.

February's publication documented a landmark achievement. In a project led by Richardson, the group captured enough light from an exoplanet to spread it apart into a spectrum and find signatures of molecules in the planet's atmosphere -- a key step toward being able to detect life on alien worlds.

Harrington's team fared well in this year's stiff competition for observing time on NASA's orbiting infrared facility. They will observe HD 149026b using all of Spitzer's instruments in the coming year, to gain a better understanding of the planet's atmosphere. Harrington is a professor in UCF's growing program in planetary sciences.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center, Pasadena, Calif. JPL is a division of California Institute for Technology, Pasadena.

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