Science

Communications satellite launched into space

Sat, 25 May 2013 00:59:52 +0000

A Delta IV heavy lift rocket launches an Air Force satellite into orbit from Cape Canaveral.

The Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.— A new military communications satellite has been launched into space.

An unmanned Delta IV rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Friday evening. The satellite was the fifth Wideband Global satcom spacecraft to be launched.

The satellite, which is being sent into an orbit that follows the earth's rotation 22,000 miles above the equator, will serve the U.S. military with the highest capacity communications currently available.

It will take several months for the satellite to settle into the proper orbit.

Mars hit by space rocks 200 times a year

Sat, 25 May 2013 00:09:46 +0000

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/UA

One of many fresh impact craters spotted by the UA-led HiRISE camera, orbiting the Red Planet on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter since 2006.

By SPACE.com staff

Small space rocks are carving fresh craters into the Martian surface more often than previously thought, researchers say. A new study finds that there are more than 200 asteroid impacts on the Red Planet every year.

These asteroids and comet fragments are usually no bigger than 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) across — about 10 times smaller than the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February. Small space rocks burn up in Earth's atmosphere, never making it to the ground, but they can do damage on Mars because the planet has a much thinner atmosphere.

The holes gouged out by these asteroids are typically at least 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) wide, the researchers say. The 200-per-year space rockl impact rate for Mars was based on a portion of the 248 new Martian craters that have been identified in the past decade using images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft that has been circling the Red Planet since 2006.

"It's exciting to find these new craters right after they form," study researcher Ingrid Daubar of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement. "It reminds you Mars is an active planet, and we can study processes that are happening today."

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera snapped amazingly detailed pictures of the fresh craters at sites where before-and-after images had been taken by the orbiter's wider-view Context Camera and cameras on other orbiters studying the Red Planet, scientists said. The same method could be used to estimate the age of other recent features on the planet, including some that may be the result of Martian climate change.

The new calculation of Mars' cratering rate dwarfs earlier estimates. Based on studies of lunar craters and moon rocks collected by NASA's Apollo astronauts, scientists had calculated that there were just three to 10 yearly impacts on Mars.

"Mars now has the best-known current rate of cratering in the solar system," said HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen.

The research was detailed online this month in the journal Icarus.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original story on SPACE.com.

Memorial Day planet parade: See Jupiter, Mercury and Venus

Fri, 24 May 2013 23:43:22 +0000

The bright triangle of light formed by Venus, Mercury and Jupiter will brighten the sky this weekend. NBC's Ann Curry reports.

By Joe Rao, SPACE.com

A trio of bright planets is shining together in the sunset sky, a must-see night sky sight for stargazers this Memorial Day weekend.

Three planets — Jupiter, Venus and Mercury — can be now be seen in the western sky at dusk, weather permitting, in a rare and beautiful gathering that changes from night to night. Astronomers call a meeting of objects in the night sky a conjunction, but this planet parade is better described as a "Grand Conjunction."

The brightest of the three planets is dazzling Venus, of course. Jupiter and fainter Mercury will also be very close by. All the action is taking place low in the west-northwest sky about 45 minutes to an hour after sunset where, over a span of a week, the three planets will seem to perform slow acrobatics; some might go so far as to call it a celestial pas de trios (French for a ballet of three), low in the evening sky. All three planets will be readily visible to the naked eye, but binoculars will certainly enhance the view. [Amazing Night Sky Photos of May 2013 (Gallery)]

Planets on parade
From Friday to Tuesday, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus will fit within a 5-degree circle — small enough to fit inside the bowl of the Big Dipper — an unusual configuration called a "trio." The planets will appear closest together on May 26, when they are separated by less than 2.5 degrees. For comparison, your closed fist held out at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of the night sky.

Here is a chance to see for oneself that nearby solar system objects generally seem to move faster than more distant ones. Friday night, after darkness falls, we'll have a planet configuration in Taurus the Bull consisting of Mercury (109.5 million miles), Venus (153.3 million miles), and Jupiter (563.4 million). The motions of Mercury and Venus can be detected with the naked eye from one night to the next, but Jupiter's travel against the background stars is not very noticeable in even a week. [Jupiter, Venus & Mercury Get Together (Video)]

Also during the next few weeks we'll be treated to an exceptionally favorable elongation of Mercury for Northern Hemisphere observers. The planet's angular distance from the sun will reach a maximum of 24 degrees on June 12, about 4 degrees less than the greatest possible.

Plan your planet conjunction watch
Here are some key local dates of events for skywatchers viewing at dusk in North America. You can see a video of the three planets' path here as they move across the night sky.

May 24: Mercury appears 1.4 degrees above Venus; Jupiter sits 4 degrees to their upper left.

May 26: This is the evening that the planet trio is tightest together — all three fit within a circle less than 2.5 degrees wide. They form a triangle with Mercury at the top, Jupiter at the lower left corner and Venus at the lower right. The Venus-Jupiter and Venus-Mercury gaps are both almost exactly 2 degrees. And Mercury is in conjunction with Jupiter, the pair separated by 2.4 degrees.

May 28: The two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter are closest together, separated by just one degree (equal to the apparent width of two full moons). In the days leading up to now, Jupiter closes in on Venus from the upper left. This evening, Jupiter appears below and to the left of Venus and in the evenings that follow, then heads on down toward the glow of sunset. Jupiter's brightness easily rivals Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, yet shines only one-sixth as bright as Venus. Even though Jupiter is on the far side of the sun and about as small as it ever appears, in a telescope it still shows the largest disk of any planet. Meanwhile, Mercury shines more than 3.5 degrees above Jupiter.

May 31: The three planets are now separating and going their separate ways; Jupiter sinking lower while Venus and Mercury edge higher up. All three are now stretched out and equally spaced in a diagonal line from upper left to lower right, spanning 8 degrees. Mercury is the highest, Venus is in the middle and Jupiter is down at the lower right.

Sky & Telescope

Mercury, Jupiter and Venus appear close together in the sky, May 24-26, 2013.

Planets compared
Consider some of the interesting contrasts between these three worlds:

Mercury is the smallest and closest planet to the sun; a rocky world with a surface very similar in appearance to that of the Moon, showing extensive basaltic-like plains and heavy cratering, indicating that it probably has been geologically inactive for billions of years.

Venus has often been referred to as our "sister" planet in terms of size, but is so shrouded in a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that its brilliance in our sky is largely due to its high reflectivity (about 76 percent). Thanks to that thick cloud blanket Venus is also the hottest planet, with temperatures of up to 872 degrees F (467 degrees C).

Jupiter is an entirely different kind of planet. It is the largest in our solar system and enveloped in a thick dense atmosphere composed chiefly of hydrogen and helium, and is icy cold (minus 234 degrees F or minus 145 degrees C). Ordinarily it appears second only to Venus in brightness, its remoteness being compensated by its great size. Its surface area is about 130 times that of Venus. It makes one wonder just how the ancient Romans decided to name Jupiter after the chief of the gods, although they knew nothing concerning the planet’s physical characteristics.

After the planets depart
As we transition from May into June, Mercury will be fading steadily, experiencing an 11-fold decrease in brightness in less than a month. As a consequence, this so-called "elusive planet" will be far easier to spot during this upcoming week when it will be brighter as well as setting about 1.5 hours after the sun as seen from mid-northern latitudes.

Friday, May 31, may very well be the last evening Jupiter will be readily visible for most observers. In the days that follow, the combination of low altitude and the bright evening twilight will team up to effectively hide it from our view until it reappears in the morning sky early in July.

As for Venus, it will slowly become easier to see in the western evening sky, but the operative word is slowly." Not until early September will Venus set until after the end of twilight and it’s saving it best showing for late November and early December when it will be more than twice as bright as it is now and will be setting three hours after the sun.

Editor's note: If you snap an amazing picture of the three planets or any other night sky view that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send photos, comments and your name and location to Managing Editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

3-D printer going to space station in 2014

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:35:01 +0000

Made in Space

Made in Space team members with their 3-D printer hang on during a Zero-G test flight.

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com

A 3-D printer is slated to arrive at the International Space Station next year, where it will crank out the first parts ever manufactured off planet Earth.

The company Made in Space is partnering with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center on the 3-D Printing in Zero G Experiment (or 3-D Print for short), which aims to jump-start an off-planet manufacturing capability that could aid humanity's push out into the solar system.

"The 3-D Print experiment with NASA is a step towards the future. The ability to 3-D-print parts and tools on demand greatly increases the reliability and safety of space missions while also dropping the cost by orders of magnitude," Made in Space CEO Aaron Kemmer said in a statement. [10 Amazing 3-D-Printed Objects]

"The first printers will start by building test coupons, and will then build a broad range of parts, such as tools and science equipment," he added.

The 3-D printer is slated to blast off in August 2014, tagging along with a cargo mission private spaceflight company SpaceX is launching to the orbiting lab for NASA.

The device will build objects layer by layer out of polymers and other materials, using a technique called extrusion additive manufacturing. The blueprints for these objects will be pre-loaded onto a computer bound for the orbiting lab or uplinked from Earth, Made in Space officials said.

Advocates say 3-D printing can help make living in space easier and cheaper. For example, more than 30 percent of the spare parts currently aboard the International Space Station can be manufactured by Made in Space's machine, company co-founder and chief technologist Jason Dunn told NASA chief Charles Bolden and congressman Mike Honda (D-Calif.) during a presentation Friday at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

"3-D printing is an exciting technology," Niki Werkheiser, 3-D Print project manager at NASA Marshall’s Technology Development and Transfer Office, said in a statement. "It will allow us to live and work in space with the same efficiency and productivity that we do on Earth, with the ultimate objective being to eliminate reliance on materials and parts launched from the ground."

While off-Earth manufacturing will get its start at the International Space Station, NASA officials say the technology's potential goes beyond low-Earth orbit. Werkheiser described 3-D printing as "absolutely a critical enabler for NASA’s exploration missions."

Indeed, NASA recently funded the development of a prototype 3-D printer designed to make space food products out of cheap raw materials that have a long shelf life. This "3-D pizza printer" could help feed astronauts on long space journeys, such as the 500-day trek to Mars, agency officials say.

California-based Made in Space was awarded a Phase 3 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from Marshall for this mission, and the two organizations will work together to make it happen.

3-D Print won't be Made in Space's first foray into microgravity printing. The company tested out various 3-D printing technologies in 2011 on parabolic airplane flights that produced short periods of weightlessness.

While 3-D Print is primarily a demonstration mission, Made in Space is also developing a more permanent space-printing capability called the Additive Manufacturing Facility that's expected to arrive at the orbiting lab in 2016.

The Additive Manufacturing Facility will likely be used to build components for ongoing off-Earth experiments, Made in Space officials said.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.

Big earthquakes create global-scale GPS errors

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:10:40 +0000

Paul Tregoning, Journal of Geophysical Research

Deformation from earthquakes bigger than magnitude 8.0 since 2000. The blue squares are GPS reference sites, and the red arrows are deformation from big earthquakes.

By Becky Oskin, LiveScience

Thirteen years of supersized earthquakes, such as Friday's magnitude-8.3 in Russia, have contaminated GPS sites around the world, a new study finds.

The Global Positioning System is a network of satellites and ground stations that provide location information anywhere on Earth. Except for spots in Australia, western Europe and the eastern tip of Canada, every GPS site on the ground underwent small but important shifts since 2000 because of big earthquakes, according to a study published May 6 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

The research confirms that great earthquakes, those bigger than magnitude 8.0, can have far-reaching effects on the Earth's crust. And because GPS is critical for everything from calculating satellite orbits to sea level rise to earthquake hazards, scientists can't ignore these tiny zigs and zags, the researchers conclude.

"We have to find a way to deal with it," said Paul Tregoning, lead study author and a geophysicist at Australia National University in Canberra. "The community needs to work out how to find all the offsets, estimate them accurately and get everyone to agree on how to correct them," he told LiveScience.

Tregoning and his colleagues modeled the sudden jolts in Earth's crust from each of the 15 biggest earthquakes since 2000. They discovered that crust thousands of miles away from the faults had moved horizontally by as much as a tenth of an inch (a few millimeters). The model was checked against a few spots around the planet. On average, the earthquakes deformed the crust by a hundredth of an inch every year (0.4 millimeters a year) — about the width of the lead in a mechanical pencil. [7 Craziest Ways Japan's Earthquake Affected Earth]

"It's quite amazing to us that we can see this and detect this," Tregoning said.

These tiny effects won't make a difference to the GPS in cars or phones, or the tough little units carried by hikers and mountaineers. But scientists who need precise measurements to calculate sea level rise or satellite orbits should be concerned, Tregoning said.

The changing Earth
Here's why these seemingly small changes matter. Scientists who rely on GPS need to compare one place to another. There are a handful of stable spots around the world, usually in the interior of continents, called the terrestrial reference frame. For example, a geologist measuring the speed of the Pacific plate would compare it with the North American reference frame. But Tregoning's study shows these stable spots were shifted by the massive earthquakes.

Disturbing the reference frame will introduce errors into GPS measurements, Tregoning said. It could also throw off calculations of satellite orbits. "If the coordinates of the tracking stations are wrong, then the orbit isn't right either," he said.

"I think he's identified a good problem," said Don Argus, a principal research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., who was not involved in the study. Argus is part of a group that uses GPS to calculate satellite orbits and conduct research on the changing Earth.

"It's difficult to find a stable frame with these post-seismic transients," Argus said. "The earthquakes are making things a little hard for the people on our floor."

While Argus and his colleagues already account for the deformation caused by earthquakes, it takes computers at JPL 24 hours to churn through the calculations, Argus said. "I've got the best plate motion model out there," he told LiveScience.

Tregoning hopes that the next update to the International Terrestrial Reference Frame System, the internationally agreed upon reference for GPS research, will consider the wide-ranging effects of big earthquakes.

"We have to agree on how to improve the reference frame," he said. "People doing regional studies will find that they potentially get a different answer, and it will potentially be a more accurate answer."

Editor's note: This story was updated May 24 to include information about the May 24 Okhotsk earthquake.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Cold-loving bacteria offer clues for life on Mars

Tanya Lewis, LiveScience — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:43:06 +0000

Joel Barker, courtesy of Ohio State University

Ellesmere Island, Canada, is home to cold-loving bacteria that live in permafrost.

By Tanya Lewis, LiveScience

A microbe discovered in the Canadian high Arctic thrives at the coldest temperature known for bacterial growth.

Researchers found the newly discovered bacterium, Planococcus halocryophilus OR₁, in permafrost — permanently frozen ground — on Ellesmere Island. The organism thrives at 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees Celsius), and holds clues to adaptations that might be necessary for life on Mars or Saturn's moon Enceladus, where temperatures are well below freezing.

The microbe lives inside veins of salty water, and can survive because the salt prevents the water in the veins from freezing, study leader Lyle Whyte of McGill University in Montreal said in a statement. The bacterium can remain active and breathing at temperatures down to at least minus 13 degrees F (minus 25 degrees C) in permafrost, Whyte said.

Whyte and his team studied the bacterium's genome sequence and found that P. halocryophilus OR₁ withstands the cold and salt thanks to modifications in its cell structure, cell function and an abundance of cold-adapted proteins. Changes in the cell membrane that protects the bacterium are one example of such modifications.

The bacterium also appears to contain high levels of a compound that works as molecular antifreeze, as well as protecting the cell from the salty fluid in its environment.

These microbes might be bad news for global warming, which is melting permafrost in Arctic regions. Permafrost contains dead organic matter that bacteria can break down, releasing carbon dioxide and venting the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. More of these microbes mean more greenhouse gas gets released.

Still, Whyte calls the bacterium "our cold temperature champion," adding "what we can learn from this microbe may tell us a lot about how similar microbial life may exist elsewhere in the solar system."

It's not the first time life has been found in permafrost conditions. Cold-loving extremophiles, called psychrophiles, are most often bacteria, fungi or algae. These hardy microbes have been found living beneath sheets of ice in Siberia and Antarctica, where temperatures range from 23 to 68 degrees F (minus 5 to 20 degrees C).

A 2006 review article in the journal EMBO Reports describes some of the adaptations organisms have developed for surviving the challenges of life at these frigid temperatures. These challenges include slowed rates of biochemical reactions and more viscous fluid environments.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Private spaceflight study aims for the moon while NASA goes deep

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:26:54 +0000

NASA

Pit stop, the moon! Lunar extraction of minerals and ice are envisioned as near-term objectives for space mining advocates

By Mike Wall
Space.com

Human exploration of deep space is looking more and more like a tag-team affair, with NASA jetting off to asteroids and Mars while the private sector sets up shop on the moon.

While NASA has no plans to return humans to the lunar surface anytime soon, private industry is eyeing Earth's nearest neighbor intently, said Robert Bigelow, the founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace.

"The brass ring for us is having a lunar base — as a company and in conjunction with other companies, and even other, possibly, foreign entities as well," Bigelow said during a teleconference with reporters Thursday. "That is an appetite and a desire that we've had for a long, long time." [3-D-Printing a Future Moon Base (Gallery)]

Two months ago, NASA tapped Bigelow Aerospace to sound out the private sector's interest and intent in going beyond low-Earth orbit, in an attempt to help map out possible public-private partnerships in deep space.

The Space Act agreement set out a two-phase study approach. Bigelow delivered a draft report of the Phase 1 findings Thursday to NASA human exploration chief Bill Gerstenmaier, who also participated in the teleconference.

Bigelow Aerospace

Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow (left) discusses layout plans of the company's lunar base with Eric Haakonstad, one of Bigelow Aerospace's lead engineers.

Bigelow Aerospace makes expandable habitat modules designed to house astronauts in space or on the surface of the moon and other bodies. The company has long been an advocate of setting up manned lunar bases, and Bigelow said other firms see the appeal of commercial lunar operations as well.

Golden Spike, for example, aims to begin launching two-person missions to the lunar surface and back by 2020. And several different firms, such as Shackleton Energy Co. and Moon Express, plan to mine the moon's resources.

NASA had been planning on sending astronauts back to the moon until 2010, when President Barack Obama directed the space agency to work instead toward getting to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.

Gerstenmaier said NASA welcomes private industry's interest in the moon, viewing it as a complement to the agency's plans in deeper space.

"NASA and the government, we focus on maybe deep space, we focus on asteroids. The private sector picks up the lunar activity, and then we'll combine and share with them to see what makes sense," Gerstenmaier said.

"Transportation to the same region is common between us," he added. "Other aspects — life-support — are common between us. We can do lots of co-development between these that actually share what the private sector needs and what the government needs."

Cosmic Log: To the moon? Private exploration studied

Bigelow said he talked to about 20 private companies during the course of the study, including major players such as SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp.

"You would recognize most of the names," he said.

Gerstenmaier said NASA would release the Phase 1 report to the public after the agency receives the final draft. The Phase 2 portion of the study, meanwhile, is slated to last four months.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Battle-bruised King Richard III hastily buried

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:03:22 +0000

University of Leicester

The remains of King Richard III showed a curved spine and signs of battle trauma. He apparently was hastily buried -- the grave was irregularly shaped, with sloping sides, and too small for the 5-foot-8-inch skeleton. That may have been because he had already spent days dead in the summer heat. .

By Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience

The body of King Richard III was buried in great haste, a new study finds — perhaps because the medieval monarch's corpse had been out for three days in the summer sun.

The new research is the first academic paper published on the discovery of Richard III, which was publicly announced in February 2013. A team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester found the body beneath a parking lot in Leicester that was once the site of a medieval church. The full study will be available online on Friday evening.

The archaeological analysis contains details only alluded to in the initial announcement of the findings. In particular, the archaeologists found that Richard III's grave was dug poorly and probably hastily, a sharp contrast to the neat rectangular graves otherwise found in the church where the king was laid to rest. [Gallery: The Discovery of Richard III]

Richard III's journey to Leicester
Richard III ruled England from 1483 to 1485, when he was killed during the Battle of Bosworth Field, the definitive fight in the War of the Roses.

University of Leicester

The skull of the skeleton found at the Grey Friars excavation in Leicester, identified as that of King Richard III.

Historical records reveal that after the battle, Richard's body was stripped and brought to Leicester, where it remained on public display for three days until burial on Aug. 25, 1485. The church where the body was interred, a Franciscan friary called Grey Friars, was eventually demolished around 1538. A former mayor of Leicester built a mansion on the site, but by the 1700s, the land had been subdivided and sold off, the location of the church lost.

With it went all memory of where one of England's most famous kings was buried. Richard III was immortalized by a Shakespeare play of the same name and made out to be a villain by the Tudor dynasty that followed his rule. Today, however, there are societies of Richard III enthusiasts called Richardians who defend the dead king's honor. One of these Richardians, a screenwriter named Philippa Langley, spearheaded the excavation that discovered Richard III's body.

Digging for Richard
The new paper, published in the journal Antiquity, outlines how archaeologists dug three trenches in a city government parking lot, hoping to hit church buildings they knew had once stood in the area. They soon found evidence of the friary they were looking for: first, a chapter house with stone benches and diamond-pattern floor tiles. This chapter house would have been used for daily monastery meetings.

South of the chapter houses, the excavation revealed a well-worn cloister walk, or covered walkway. Finally, the researchers found the church building itself. The church was about 34 feet (10.4 meters) wide. It had been demolished, but the floors (and the graves in the floor) were left intact. Among the rubble were decorated tiles and copper alloy letters that likely once marked the graves.

Brick dust suggested the outer church walls may have been covered with a brick façade, which would have created a striking red-and-white look with the church's limestone-framed windows, the researchers wrote.

A hasty grave
Most of the graves in the Grey Friars church floor are neat and orderly, with squared-off rectangle sides. Richard III's is an exception. The grave is irregularly shaped, with sloping sides. It was also too small for the 5-foot-8-inch (1.7 m) skeleton interred within: Richard's torso is twisted and his head propped up rather than laid flat. The body was also crammed against the north wall of the grave, perhaps because someone stood against the south wall to guide the body into its resting place. Whoever it was did not spend time afterward rearranging the body into a more symmetrical position.

"The haste may partially be explained by the fact that Richard’s damaged body had already been on public display for several days in the height of summer, and was thus in poor condition," the researchers wrote.

There was no coffin in the grave, and likely no shroud, judging by the loose position of the skeleton's limbs. However, the corpse's hands were crossed and perhaps tied in front of him.

The study also delineates the 10 injuries on the corpse's skeleton. Most are likely battle wounds, including two fatal blows to the back of the head. Two wounds on the face, one to the ribs and one to the buttock were likely delivered post-mortem, after Richard III was stripped of his armor, the researchers wrote. These "humiliation wounds" may have been designed to disrespect the king in death.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

NASA unveils winners in space apps contest

Thu, 23 May 2013 23:17:21 +0000

NASA

Officials collected 770 entries between April 20-21 from more than 9,000 people in 83 cities around the world for this year's International Space Apps Challenge.

By Clara Moskowitz
Space.com

An interplanetary weather app, a spot-the-space-station tool, and a Mars greenhouse concept are among the winners of the 2013 International Space Apps Challenge. The contest solicited mobile apps and technologies that aid space exploration and enrich life here on Earth.

On Wednesday, a panel of judges from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and partners announced the winners of the contest, which collected 770 entries between April 20-21. More than 9,000 people from 83 cities around the world contributed to the apps submitted, according to NASA.

"The International Space Apps Challenge was the culmination of months of planning, years of experimentation and thousands and thousands of hours of hard work from people across the globe who share in the excitement of building our collective future," Nick Skytland, NASA Open Innovation Program Manager, wrote in a blog post on open.NASA. "It is a shining example that transparency, participation and collaboration are alive and well at NASA." [10 Best Space Apps in the Universe]

Many of the contestants in the challenge, which is in its second year, used free cloud storage and services provided to all participants in the challenge by the company CloudSigma. "It's amazing to see the innovation coming out of this event, and we feel honored to have been a part of it,"CloudSigma Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Robert Jenkins said in a statement.

The teams behind the six winning apps receive invitations to the November launch of NASA's robotic Maven (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) Mars probe from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and a Spaceflight Training course at the National Aerospace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center in Pennsylvania.

The six "best in class" winners of the challenge are:

Best Use of Data: Sol
This Kansas-produced app integrates weather data collected by the Curiosity rover on Mars with live weather conditions on Earth to give users a forecast for both planets at once.

Best Use of Hardware: ISS Base Station
A combination hardware-software entry, ISS Base Station, made in Philadelphia, includes an app that tracks the position of the International Space Station (ISS) over Earth, with a physical device that can point to the current location of the space station and alert users when it's in view.

Best Mission Concept: Popeye on Mars
This concept, submitted by a team from Athens, Greece, proposes a reusable Martian greenhouse that would use aeroponics to grow spinach on the Red Planet. The idea includes resources, sensors and technology to stabilize the greenhouse environment over the 45 days it would require to harvest spinach.

Galactic Impact: Greener Cities
This project, invented in Gothenburg, Sweden, proposes a system for integrating climate data from NASA satellites with crowd-sourced data collected from people on the ground via garden sensors and other inputs to improve the overall picture of the environment.

Most Inspiring: T-10
This London-based submission is a prototype app designed for astronauts living on the International Space Station who aim to photograph certain spots on Earth. The program would integrate weather data to alert spaceflyers when the orbiting laboratory was passing over those areas, if conditions permit photography at the time.

People's Choice Award: ChicksBook
This app, developed in Sofia, Bulgaria, won the votes of social media users around the world for its use in managing a backyard farm and tools to learn how to raise chickens.

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Scientists identify the mystery killer behind Ireland's potato famine

Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:48:17 +0000

Illustrated London News

Starving people searching for potatoes in a stubble field during the Great Famine (1845-1852) which was caused by the failure of the Irish potato crop and British government inaction.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Scientists have finally figured out exactly what strain of potato blight led to the deaths of more than a million people in Ireland during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century — and it's not the usual suspect.

For decades, researchers assumed that a particular strain of Phytophthora infestans, known as US-1, made the leap from the Americas to mainland Europe, and then to Ireland in the 1840s. Selective breeding and fungicides have made US-1 less of a threat than it was a century and a half ago, but it and other strains of blight continue to pose a threat to potato crops around the world. Blight can still turn seemingly healthy potatoes into black, stinking balls of mush, just as it did in 19th-century Ireland.

An international team of scientists took on the task of tracing the roots of late blight through genetics, and to flesh out the story, they deciphered the genomes for 11 strains of blight preserved in Germany's Bavarian State Collection for Botany and London's Kew Gardens. The dried potato plants containing the blight pathogens were saved in herbaria — that is, collections of preserved plants — by 19th-century scientists who had no idea they could yield that kind of scientific data.

What the researchers found surprised them: The genetic signature of the blight that was extracted from the Irish potato plants did not match up exactly with US-1. Instead, the blight represented a closely related but previously unknown strain that has now been designated HERB-1.

The study of blight evolution is to be published in the open-access journal eLife.

Roots of the blight
By mapping the genetic differences between the 19th-century samples and 15 modern-day strains of blight, the scientists could reconstruct the pathogen's evolution over the centuries. They determined that the blight originated in Mexico's Toluca Valley. The species' genetic diversity increased markedly in the 16th century, around the time that Spanish explorers settled the New World. That era marked the wider spread of potato varieties, and probably hastened the evolution of Phytophthora infestans as well.

Kew Gardens

This potato specimen from the Kew Gardens' herbarium was collected in 1847, during the height of the Irish famine. The legend reads "Botrytis infestans" because it was not known yet that Phytophthora does not belong to the mildew-causing Botrytis fungi.

The similarities between US-1 and HERB-1 suggest that they both made their appearance in the early 19th century, not long before the first major outbreak of the blight in Europe. "Probably they both came out of the United States," said one of the study's authors, Sophien Kamoun, a researcher at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Britain.

HERB-1 spread to Europe first, and soon made its way to Ireland, where potatoes were the staple crop for millions of poor farmers. "The potatoes at the time were very susceptible to blight," Kamoun told NBC News. More than a million people died between 1845 and 1852, and at least that many emigrated to friendlier locales. Even today, Ireland's population level has not returned to the pre-famine high of 8 million.

US-1's rise came in the 20th century, after the introduction of new potato varieties that were resistant to HERB-1. Eventually, US-1 became the dominant blight strain, and HERB-1 faded away. "We think HERB-1 is most likely extinct," Kamoun said.

Delving into DNA
The research illustrates how useful herbaria can be for resolving decades-old questions about centuries-old plants. "The degree of DNA preservation in the herbarium samples really surprised us," Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen said in a news release about the study. It also illustrates how quickly evolution can produce new strains of pathogens, Kamoun said.

"The molecular clock turned out to be shorter than perhaps we expected," he said.

The study's lead author, Kentaro Yoshida of the Sainsbury Lab, said the study suggests that crop breeding methods play a role in the molecular evolution of pathogens.

"Perhaps this strain became extinct when the first resistant potato varieties were bred at the beginning of the 20th century," Yoshida said. "What is for certain is that these findings will greatly help us to understand the dynamics of emerging pathogens."

Follow @CosmicLog

More about plant problems:

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor, and the great-grandson of Michael Boyle, who migrated from Ireland to America at the height of the Irish potato famine in 1847.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Cockroaches cut sweets — thus baits — out of their diets

Thu, 23 May 2013 22:45:07 +0000

Ayako Wada-Kutsumta and Andrew Ernst

The head of a male German cockroach with antennae extending upward. Long maxillary palps and short labial palps extend downward toward a tasty droplet (blue). The antennae and palps all contain sensory hairs, some of which convey information about taste to the insect's central nervous system.

By Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience

In the ongoing battle between humans and cockroaches, the insects have a leg up. A new study finds that roaches evolved their taste buds to make sweet insecticide baits taste bitter. As a result, the roaches avoid the baits and thrive, to the frustration of homeowners everywhere.

Plenty of insects evolve resistance to pesticides; they gain the ability to break down poisons without dying. German cockroaches, on the other hand, evolved what's known as a behavioral resistance to baits. They simply stopped eating them.

"Our paper is the first to show the sensory mechanism that underlies that behavioral resistance," said study researcher Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University.

The answer, Schal and his colleagues found, is in the taste buds.

Evolving cockroaches
German cockroaches are the small, scuttling roaches frequently seen in human habitats, including homes and restaurants. They grow to be about a half-inch (1.27 centimeters) long and are omnivorous, scavenging everything from grease to starch.

"They'll eat pretty much anything in the kitchen, but they are incredibly good at eating things that are adaptive to them," Schal told LiveScience. "They are really amazingly good at learning to associate smells with specific tastes."

Beginning in the 1980s, many pest control companies switched from using spray insecticides to control cockroaches to using baits. The baits combine sugars with insecticide so that roaches eat them, thinking they are sugary snacks, return to their nests and die. Ideally, the other cockroaches in the nest then cannibalize their dead relative, getting a dose of the poison, too.

This worked beautifully — for a while. But in 1993, NC State entomologist Jules Silverman noticed that several populations of German cockroaches around the world were thriving in spite of the baits. The roaches were refusing to eat the glucose, or sugar, that was supposed to make the bait appealing.

Bitter or sweet?
Pest control companies switched up the sugars in their baits to keep them working, and for years, no one knew how the roaches had developed their glucose aversion. Now, Schal, Silverman and NC State postdoctoral researcher Ayako Wada-Katsumata have the answer.

The first question, Schal said, was whether there was a change in the brains or the sensory systems of the glucose-averse roaches. To find out, Wada-Katsumata conducted a delicate procedure in which she sedated roaches with ice, immobilized them and attached electrodes to the taste hairs on the cockroach mouthparts. These taste hairs act like taste buds on the human tongue, detecting chemical signals and sending them to the insect's central nervous system. [See Video of the Cockroach Experiments]

In normal roaches, some of the cells in the taste hairs respond to bitter tastes and others to sweet tastes. In roaches that avoided glucose, however, there was one change.

"The system was perfectly normal, except for the fact that glucose was being recognized not only by the sweet-responding cell, but also by the bitter-responding cell," Schal said.

In other words, the glucose-averse roaches tasted sweet things as bitter and thus avoided them. (Even cockroaches have standards, it seems.)

Roaches could have evolved this response simply because people started poisoning them with sweet baits, Schal said. It's also possible that the trait goes way back in cockroaches' 350-million-year history. Some plants produce toxic bittersweet compounds that roaches would have needed to avoid before humans came around. Once humans started building dwellings and roaches moved in, they may have lost this sugar-avoidance ability in order to snack on humans' leftovers. When people started developing sugary baits, the preadapted anti-sugar trait may have re-emerged, Schal said.

Either way, Schal said, the finding has implications for pest control. The industry has replaced glucose in baits with another sugar, fructose, but evidence already suggests that roaches are evolving to avoid fructose, too, he said. The industry needs to vary baits frequently and make multiple types at once to stay a step ahead of the roaches, he said.

"If you put out a little dab of bait and see that the cockroach bounces back from it, there's no point of using that bait," Schal said.

The researchers are to report their findings Friday in the journal Science.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Twin stars closer to Earth than thought

Thu, 23 May 2013 22:18:53 +0000

Bill Saxton, NRAO / AUI / NSF

An artist's conception of SS Cygni double-star system, which includes a red-dwarf star (left) and a compact white-dwarf star, right. The binary stars are actually 372 light-years from Earth, much closer than the 520 light-years previously thought.

By Clara Moskowitz
Space.com

A strange pair of stars is much closer to Earth than scientists ever thought, a discovery that finally helps explain a puzzling mystery behind the stellar twins, scientists say.

The binary star system is made up of a normal star and a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf. According to the new measurement, the star system is 372 light-years from Earth, not 520 light-years as previously thought. Known as SS Cygni, the star pair is one of the variable star systems most often observed in the sky, but until now, astronomers couldn't figure out why it behaves the way it does.

SS Cygni erupts in regular outbursts about once every 49 days, when it brightens to release significantly more light than normal. Such outbursts are considered normal for most star pairs of this type, called dwarf novas, but if SS Cygni was as far away as astronomers thought, this explanation didn't make sense. [Star Quiz: Test Your Stellar Smarts]

White dwarfs are known to pull mass off companion stars with their strong gravity. This stolen mass then swirls around the white dwarf in a rotating disk that feeds material directly onto the dense star. When the flow of mass onto the white dwarf slows down, though, the disk can become unstable and release a flare of light.

This should not have been the case for SS Cygni, however, if it truly was as far away as 520 light-years.

Bill Saxton, NRAO / AUI / NSF

The Trigonometric Parallax method determines distance to a star by measuring its slight shift in apparent position as seen from opposite ends of Earth's orbit.

"That was a problem," astronomer James Miller-Jones of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said in a statement. "At that distance, SS Cygni would have been the brightest dwarf nova in the sky, and should have had enough mass moving through its disk to remain stable without any outbursts."

Miller-Jones led the research team that made the new distance measurement, which in turn refines astronomers' understanding of the twin stars' intrinsic brightness. At the new distance, SS Cygni finally makes sense. "Our new distance measurement has solved the puzzle of SS Cygni's brightness; it fits our theories after all," Miller-Jones said.

While the previous distance measurement came from Hubble Space Telescope observations, Miller-Jones and his team used radio telescopes — in particular, the Very Long Baseline Array spread across the United States and the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network in Europe and South Africa.

The scientists employed a method called parallax to pinpoint SS Cygni's location more accurately than ever before. Essentially, this method compares the apparent wobble of a foreground object — in this case, the double star system — against the relatively stable positions of background objects such as distant galaxies.

"If you hold your finger out at arm's length and move your head from side to side, you should see your finger appear to wobble against the background," Miller-Jones explained. "If you move your finger closer to your head, you'll see it starts to wobble more. We did the exact same thing with SS Cygni — we measured how far it moved against some very distant galaxies as the Earth moved around the sun."

The measurements could be made only during one of SS Cygni's outbursts, when it releases enough light in the radio frequency range to be seen clearly. The scientists collaborated with amateur astronomers from the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) to know when to make their observations.

"The system only emits radio waves for a short period of time," said astronomer Matthew Templeton of the AAVSO, who is a co-author of the findings. "Without the cooperation of our many amateur observers who looked at SS Cygni night after night, we wouldn't have known when to look — their contribution was invaluable."

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

How the white tiger got its distinctive coat

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:45:38 +0000

Chimelong Safari Park

The coat of white tigers, such as these ones at Chimelong Safari Park in China, results from a change in a pigment gene.

By Tanya Lewis
LiveScience

The strikingly beautiful, milky coats of white tigers are caused by a single change in a known pigment gene, a new study finds.

Since their discovery in the Indian jungle centuries ago, white tigers, a variant of Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris), have had a certain mystique. Captive white tigers have been inbred to preserve the recessive white coat trait, leading some to speculate the trait is a genetic defect. But the genetic basis of tiger whiteness was not known. (A recessive trait will only show up if the individual gets two genes for that trait, one each from mom and dad.)

White tigers have now disappeared from the wild. "The white tiger represents part of the natural genetic diversity of the tiger that is worth conserving, but is now seen only in captivity," study author Shu-Jin Luo of China's Peking University said in a statement. [Iconic Cats: All 9 Subspecies of Tiger]

Luo and colleagues are calling for a captive management program to maintain both white and orange Bengal tigers, and possibly to reintroduce the cats back into the wild.

To find out the genetics responsible for white tigers' creamy hue, Luo's team mapped the genomes of a family of 16 tigers — both white and orange — in China's Chimelong Safari Park. The researchers also sequenced the full genomes of the three parent tigers. They validated their findings in 130 unrelated tigers.

The team focused on a pigment gene called SLC45A2, which is linked to light coloration in modern Europeans as well as horses, chickens and fish. The white tigers carried a variant of this gene that inhibits the production of red and yellow pigments without affecting black pigments, results showed.

The gene variant explains why the majestic cats lack the rich orange shade of their feline cousins but still have their famous dark stripes. The findings were detailed Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Now that the researchers have identified the white color gene, they want to investigate how these two color varieties, white and orange, have survived through evolution.

Records of white tigers in India date back to the 1500s, Luo and colleagues say. They appear able to survive in the wild, as their primary prey, such as deer, are probably colorblind. The animals were widely hunted, and the last known free-ranging white tiger was shot in 1958. Habitat destruction probably contributed to the cats' decline.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Alaska volcano's plume as seen from space station

Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:44:33 +0000

NASA

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station photographed this striking view of Pavlof Volcano on May 18. The oblique perspective from the ISS reveals the three dimensional structure of the ash plume, which is often obscured by the top-down view of most remote sensing satellites.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured this stunning view of an ash plume streaming from Pavlof Volcano on May 18. The volcano began erupting 10 days ago in Alaska's chain of Aleutian Islands, about 625 miles (1,000 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.

LiveScience reports that "the volcano's ash cloud has reached as high as 22,000 feet" — which is still at least 200 miles (320 kilometers) below the space station. Feast your eyes on additional orbital views of the volcano from NASA's Earth Observatory and the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. And if you think Pavlof looks impressive from outer space, check out the amazing perspectives from the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

The volcano, which erupted in the Aleutian Islands, began spewing ash on May 13, and the photo was taken five days later. NBC's Ann Curry reports.

Old Mars rover finds more proof of possible life

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:20:32 +0000

NASA / JPL-.Caltech / Cornell / Arizona State University

The pale rock in the upper center of this image, about the size of a human forearm, includes a target called "Esperance," which was inspected by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. This image is a composite of three exposures taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera during the 3,262nd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (March 28, 2013).

By Megan Gannon
Space.com

The venerable Mars rover Opportunity, the older and smaller cousin of Curiosity, has discovered another water-weathered rock hinting that the Red Planet could have supported life in its ancient past, NASA officials said.

In its last days exploring "Cape York," a site on the rim of the giant Endeavour crater, the Opportunity rover examined a fractured rock unlike any it has seen during its nine years on Mars, researchers say.

With data from a camera and spectrometer on the rover's robotic arm, researchers found that the rock, dubbed "Esperance," is a relic of a wetter time on Mars when life may have been possible. [Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)]

"Water that moved through fractures during this rock's history would have provided more favorable conditions for biology than any other wet environment recorded in rocks Opportunity has seen," Opportunity principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University said in a statement.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / USGS

This mosaic of four frames shot by the microscopic imager on the robotic arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows a rock target called "Esperance" after some of the rock's surface had been removed by Opportunity's rock abrasion tool.

Compared with the composition of rocks previously probed by Opportunity, Esperance is higher in aluminum and silica and lower in calcium and iron, researchers said. And it has other unique characteristics as well.

"What's so special about Esperance is that there was enough water not only for reactions that produced clay minerals, but also enough to flush out ions set loose by those reactions, so that Opportunity can clearly see the alteration," said Scott McLennan of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a long-term planner for Opportunity's science team.

Earlier this year, NASA's Curiosity rover found that the Red Planet could have supported microbial life in the ancient past, based on a sample the 1-ton robot drilled out of a Martian rock.

Opportunity did not have such luck in its early days, finding evidence for ancient wet environments that were very acidic and thus unlikely to have supported life. The older rover was guided toward Endeavour crater after NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected evidence there of clay minerals, which form in relatively neutral-pH wet environments.

"Esperance was so important, we committed several weeks to getting this one measurement of it, even though we knew the clock was ticking," Squyres said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona

This map of a portion of the western rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars shows the area where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity worked for 20 months, "Cape York," in relation to the area where the rover team plans for Opportunity to spend its sixth Martian winter, "Solander Point."

Opportunity had a deadline to meet last week to end its 20-month exploration of Cape York and set out for Solander Point, another site at the edge of the impact crater Endeavour, which measures 14 miles (22 kilometers) across. The Opportunity team plans to keep the golf cart-sized rover working there during its next Martian winter.

Opportunity is poised to break the international record for distance traveled on another world during its 1.4-mile (2.2-km) drive to Solander Point. That mark is held by the Soviet Union's remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 23 miles (37 km) on the moon in 1973.

The six-wheeled Opportunity broke the U.S. record last week when its total odometry hit 22.22 miles (35.76 kilometers) on May 15, NASA officials said. The previous U.S. mark was set in December 1972 when astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt drove 22.21 miles (35.74 km) across the lunar surface on the Apollo 17 moon rover.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Telescope celebrates birthday with 'strawberry cocktail' nebula

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:46:00 +0000

ESO

This stellar nursery shines 6,500 light-years from Earth in this photo released Thursday..

By Miriam Kramer
Space.com

An amazing photo of a stellar nursery located 6,500 light-years away from Earth marks the 15-year cosmic anniversary of a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Very Large Telescope — located in Chile's Atacama Desert and operated by the European Southern Observatory — captured this incredible image of the nebula IC 2944 as it shines in the southern constellation Centaurus.

"These opaque blobs resemble drops of ink floating in a strawberry cocktail, their whimsical shapes sculpted by powerful radiation coming from the nearby brilliant young stars," ESO officials said. [Greatest Hits from ESO's Very Large Telescope (Video)]

The newly released image is the sharpest shot of IC 2944 ever taken from the ground, ESO officials said, and it makes sense that the VLT would be responsible for capturing it. The VLT is the "world's most advanced optical instrument," ESO officials added.

"Emission nebulae like IC 2944 are composed mostly of hydrogen gas that glows in a distinctive shade of red, due to the intense radiation from the many brilliant newborn stars," officials from ESO wrote in a release. "Clearly revealed against this bright backdrop are mysterious dark clots of opaque dust, cold clouds known as Bok globules."

ESO officials also created a flyby video tour through the nebula using the images collected by the telescope.

ESO/ P.D. Barthel / M. McCaughrean / M. Andersen / S. Gillessen et al. / Y. Beletsky / R. Chini / T. Preibisch

The Very Large Telescope saw first light on May 25, 1989. This image was released Thursday.

The Bok globules (the dark splotches in a sea of red) in new ESO photo are being bombarded by ultraviolet radiation given off by brightly shining hot stars close by. Like lumps of butter in a hot frying pan the globules are "both being eroded away and also fragmenting," ESO officials said.

The globules depicted in this photo will likely not create new stars before they are obliterated.

The Hubble Space Telescope has also imaged this part of the sky for NASA and the European Space Agency, but the new image from the Very Large Telescope reveals a wider swath of sky with more star formation than the space telescope's views, ESO officials said.

The VLT was originally a combination of four giant telescopes, but now four smaller telescopes have joined the originals to create the VLT Interferometer. The first telescope in the instrument saw first light on May 25, 1998.

"The VLT is one of the most powerful and productive ground-based astronomical facilities in existence," ESO officials said. "In 2012 more than 600 refereed scientific papers based on data from the VLT and VLTI were published."

The ESO is run by 15 different countries and is considered the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter and Google+. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Satellite's failure on eve of hurricane season ruffles meteorologist

John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:25:11 +0000

NASA

This artist conception shows the GOES-East satellite. The weather satellite malfunction for the second time in less than a year on Tuesday.

By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

For the second time in less than a year, the main satellite that keeps an eye on severe weather systems in the eastern half of the United States has malfunctioned, according to government officials. The failure is indicative of the overall aging of the nation's weather satellite network that could lead to gaps in coverage as the fleet is replaced, an expert said.

Although a backup satellite began operating Thursday, the failure of GOES-East, also known as GOES-13, is "really bad timing because of the upcoming hurricane season, and also we are smack dab in the middle of severe weather season," Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society, told NBC News.

Hurricane season officially starts on June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an outlook Thursday calling for a "possibly extremely active" season with 13 to 20 named storms, including three to six major hurricanes with winds of 111 miles per hour (179 kilometers per hour) or higher.

The satellite that failed on Tuesday is one of NOAA's three geostationary satellites. GOES-East hovers above the equator at 75 degrees longitude, providing a steady stream of image data for the eastern U.S. and Atlantic Ocean. The second satellite is GOES-West, which focuses on the western U.S. and the Pacific.

The backup satellite, GOES-14, is in geostationary orbit at 105 degrees longitude. This 30-degree difference between GOES-East and GOES-14 means "you can't see as far east," Thomas Renkevens, deputy division chief with NOAA's satellite products and services division, explained to NBC News.

"You can still see the United States, you still see the Caribbean, and a good part of the Atlantic Ocean," he added. NOAA cooperates with European weather agencies to ensure coverage over the entire ocean basin. "We are not blind in any area."

Should the backup satellite also fail, NOAA would have to lean more heavily on its European partners, and would probably have to put GOES-West into full-disk mode, he explained. In that mode, it takes an image of Earth's entire disk every half hour. "From that, you can see the full United States, and a little bit of the Atlantic Ocean, really the coastal areas, at a very slant angle," Renkevens said. "It is not ideal … but it is better than nothing."

NOAA put GOES-West in full-disk mode on Wednesday as a stopgap while GOES-14 was being activated.

The loss of GOES-13 on Tuesday marks the second time the satellite had malfunctioned in less than a year — it last blinked out in September prior to Hurricane Sandy, and took several weeks to repair. Engineers are still studying Tuesday's failure to determine the cause and whether the satellite can be fixed, Renkevens noted.

The failures are "indicative of the creeping problem that we are all worried about with our overall weather satellite infrastructure," said Shepherd, who is also a professor and research meteorologist at the University of Georgia.

The satellite fleets that meteorologists use to monitor severe weather and generate forecasts are aging. Replacements are scheduled to launch beginning in 2015, but between now and then there is growing concern "that we are going to end up with gaps in our coverage," Shepherd said.

Renkevens said the agency is "doing the best we can with what we have, trying to make it last as long as we can, not only for more data for the users, but of course the benefit of the taxpayer."

More about satellites:

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website.

Europe opens new asteroid-hunting center

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:07:39 +0000

ESA / P. Carril

An artist's illustration of asteroids, or near-Earth objects, that highlight the need for a complete Space Situational Awareness system.

By Mike Wall
Space.com

Europe has a new hub that will help coordinate scientists' efforts to detect and track potentially dangerous asteroids.

The European Space Agency inaugurated its Near-Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Center on Wednesday, cutting the ribbon on a facility that officials said will strengthen Europe's contribution to the hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids and comets.

The new facility, located at the ESA Center for Earth Observation in Frascati, Italy, will support asteroidhunters, serve as the main access point for European NEO data networks and provide data in near real time to scientific institutions, international organizations and policymakers, ESA officials said.

Earth has been pummeled by space rocks repeatedly throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, and the planet will continue to be hit into the future, as the dramatic events of Feb. 15 show.

On that day, a powerful fireball exploded without warning over Russia just hours before the 130-foot (40 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 cruised within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth, coming closer than the planet's ring of geosynchronous satellites.

There are literally millions of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) zipping through the depths of space, and scientists have discovered just 10,000 of them to date.

The good news is that they've spotted 95 percent of the 980 or so mountain-size NEAs — rocks at least 0.6 miles (1 km) wide, which could end human civilization if they hit us — thought to be cruising through our planet's neighborhood. None of them poses any threat for the foreseeable future.

But the numbers get worse as the asteroids get smaller. For example, about 4,700 asteroids at least 330 feet (100 m) wide are thought to come uncomfortably close to Earth at some point in their orbits. To date, astronomers have detected less than 30 percent of these objects, which could destroy an area the size of a state if they slammed into Earth.

And researchers have spotted less than 1 percent of asteroids at least 130 feet (40 m) wide, according to officials with the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to predicting and preventing catastrophic asteroid strikes.

The United States, led by NASA, spearheads the global effort to identify and track potentially hazardous asteroids. To date, U.S. assets have discovered more than 98 percent of known near-Earth objects, NASA officials have said.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

After months in space, gravity can be a real drag for returning astronauts

Megan Gannon, Space.com — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:57:31 +0000

Astronauts who recently returned from the International Space Station discuss their experience during a Google+ Hangout.

By Megan Gannon, Space.com

Three astronauts who recently spent months together aboard the International Space Station reunited on Earth on Thursday during a Google+ Hangout to talk about their experiences aboard the orbiting lab and the challenge of readapting to life with gravity.

"It's great to all be back together," said NASA astronaut Kevin Ford from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Ford, who returned to Earth on March 15 after a five-month mission, joined up with two of his Expedition 34 crewmates, Canada's Chris Hadfield and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, for the live video conference.

Hadfield and Marshburn came home just last week, and they talked about how it was difficult at first to their Earth legs back after spending five months floating. [Chris Hadfield's Most Memorable Moments in Orbit]

"There's this gigantic magnet that's sucking you and every part of your body into the ground," Marshburn said of the feeling he had when he touched down aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on May 13.

"When we get to space, your body immediately starts to adapt to weightlessness," Hadfield added. "It starts turning you from an Earthling into a 'spaceling' … But then when you come home, gravity just feels so unfair."

Sentimental about a sandwich
Hadfield's social-media following skyrocketed while he was at the orbiting lab, thanks to his Twitter updates, photos and home movies that included David Bowie covers and cooking lessons. Though Hadfield once showed how to make a peanut butter and honey sandwich in microgravity, he said a real sandwich was one of the things he savored most upon his return.

"Living on the space station, the food is really good, but there's no way to preserve the texture," Hadfield said. "It's sort of like eating the world's best baby food. It's nothing like a big, messy, crunchy sandwich."

Sandwiches aside, Hadfield takes his online presence seriously.

"I've been trying for 20 years to share the experience that we're trusted with of flying in space," the astronaut said. "This is an enrichment of the overall human experience … and we now have a way to make it interactive."

The same three astronauts held the first-ever Google+ Hangout in space back in February. This time around, Ford, Marshburn and Hadfield all highlighted the astounding range of research going on in the hundreds of experiments on the space station. Some of the experiments track climate change on Earth, while others are aimed at making discoveries about the makeup of the universe.

The astronauts' own bodies are often testing grounds for experiments. With longer missions to other planets in mind, scientists and mission planners are very interested in knowing about the physiological effects of space. Hadfield pointed out that data from the space station astronauts could help scientists figure out what it will take for humans to acclimate to the gravity of Mars after spending months in weightless conditions.

International perspective
They also discussed the international politics involved in the orbiting lab, as a handful of groups from the Model United Nations were participating in the hangout.

"I don’t think there's any turning back at this point in terms of international cooperation," Ford said. "Future major endeavors like this are going to be international endeavors … That will be a good legacy for the space station."

Hadfield highlighted the cooperation of the international crew during the emergency spacewalk on May 11 to try to fix a leak of ammonia, which cools down the orbiting lab's power systems. "To me it was just a lovely little microcosm of how we all can be when we decide for whatever reasons to work together in a common direction," Hadfield said.

The International Space Station has been permanently staffed with rotating crews since 2000, when the first three-person team took up residence. Construction of the $100 billion orbiting laboratory began in 1998, with five different space agencies and 15 countries participating in its assembly.

As Hadfield and Marshburn acclimate to life on Earth, another NASA astronaut, Karen Nyberg, is counting down to her May 28 launch. She will head to the orbiting lab with European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin next week. They will join NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin as the crew of Expedition 36.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

This story was originally published on Thu May 23, 2013 2:57 PM EDT

3-D printers may speed robot 'natural selection'

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:41:39 +0000

Cornell Creative Machines Lab

Nick Cheney at Cornell has developed a way for robots to evolve within days.

By Marshall Honorof
TechNewsDaily

NEW YORK — Robots are simply more efficient than humans at certain tasks. They already excel at building cars, exploring distant planets and hunting for explosives, but it turns out that robots might also evolve much faster than their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

Nick Cheney, a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, presented his research at an Inside Cornell lecture on May 21. Cheney has developed a method by which complex computer simulations in a specific virtual environment — robots, by his definition — can evolve from selective pressures, just like animals in nature, but on a timescale of days instead of countless generations.

To demonstrate the technology, Cheney showed how a series of diverse but effective robots spontaneously evolved from a single, inefficient ancestor. He programmed a virtual environment with only one parameter: robots that moved faster would be able to produce more offspring. Therefore, the only selective pressure was speed (in the wild, Cheney compared this behavior to running from predators).

"Nature is amazing in how it designs things," Cheney said. "We want robots to interact with their environments as naturally as animals do." Cheney considers natural selection — the process by which biological organisms survive, reproduce and change over time to better suit their environments — to be a natural algorithm, extremely similar to what engineers use to optimize robots over time.

Cheney's initial robot, a shambling, cubic progenitor, was not much to look at. It barely stumbled along a straight line in no particular hurry. However, small mutations occurred in its offspring, and the fastest specimens bred with each other. As subsequent generations evolved, reproduced and died, the robots took on much more diverse appearances and began to speed across the screen.

The robots did not resemble traditional animals in any meaningful sense. Although they had come a long way since their initial boxy shape, they were still collections of small squares rather than sleek, curved specimens.

One robot resembled an accordion, constricting and stretching out as it made its way across the screen. Another, which looked like a wave about to crash, walked on three small points, almost falling over itself before finding its balance every few steps. Others walked on two distant legs, or maintained balance through rotating, top-mounted appendages. [See also: 10 Incredible 3-D Printed Products]

"These robots walk in ways we would never have thought of," Cheney said. Letting robots evolve without human oversight eliminates many of the preconceived ideas and biases that humans bring to the table by default. "We start from randomness, which is the way life started for us. Most of the random ones are pretty bad, but every once in a while you get lucky, and one will be better than the others."

Although these robots are confined to virtual space for the moment, that won't be the case forever. Thanks to the advent of 3-D printing, Cheney envisions a future where his robots could be powered by air, pressure-sensitive materials, electricity or even muscle, tissue and bone like real animals. Recent developments in 3-D printing have produced biologically viable heart cells, liver cells and even skull pieces.

"What we could explore with this is virtually limitless, which is what excites me most about it," Cheney said. Rapidly evolving robots with specific parameters could create everything from a better vacuum cleaner to complex search-and-rescue robots, but Cheney stresses that this is not the beginning of an adversarial relationship between humanity and its creation.

"In the future, we'll have more of a collaboration than a competition," he said. "Working together will be more fruitful than trying to take over the world."

Follow Marshall Honorof @marshallhonorof. Follow us @TechNewsDaily, on Facebook or on Google+.

Cicada bugfest closes in on the East Coast's cities: How loud will it get?

Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:31:21 +0000

If you've noticed holes suddenly appearing in the ground, get ready – warmer weather means cicadas have begun to come out of a 17-year hibernation along the mid-Atlantic, from North Carolina to New York. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Follow @b0yle

Hordes of winged cicadas are coming out and turning up the music for their biggest party in 17 years, stretching from North Carolina through Virginia to New York — but experts aren't yet sure just how big the party will get.

Billions of the bugs are climbing out from the ground as the spring weather warms up and soil temperatures reach the magic turning point of 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius). The warm-up has just reached the proper level in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., according to Sutron's closely watched temperature tracker.

That assessment is confirmed by on-the-ground eyewitness reports registered on Magicicada.org and Radiolab's Cicada Tracker. John Cooley, an expert on cicadas at the University of Connecticut, took in the full cicada buzz this week during a field trip to Lynchburg, Va. "We've had some good, rip-roaring choruses," he told NBC News.

These Brood II cicadas spend most of their 17-year life cycle underground, patiently nourishing themselves on fluids from plant roots, and then arise for a frantic weeks-long cycle of crawling, flying, mating, egg-laying and dying. When the mating party really gets going, the thrum of the cicadas' call can get as loud as 90 decibels.

"It'll be as loud as a rock concert," University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp told NBC News, "but hey, these are teenagers. they've been underground for 17 years. They're going to get in trees, they're going to sing."

Throngs of the inch-long insects have been sighted as far north as New Jersey and New York's Staten Island — and eventually, the wave will make its way up to Cooley's neck of the woods in Connecticut. But for now, the prime territory for the party is still in Virginia, and not so much in New York.

"It's really not quite the real thing up there, but it's starting," Cooley said.

Scientists believe that periodical cicadas (sometimes erroneously labeled as "locusts") took up their pattern of long-term dormancy, followed by a brief blast of above-ground mayhem, as an evolutionary survival strategy. The masses of bugs can overwhelm their predators with sheer numbers, ensuring that they can lay enough eggs for the next generation before they end up as a crunchy carpet underfoot.

The big question for Cooley and other entomologists is whether environmental changes over the past 17 years — ranging from climate change to ground pollution and urban sprawl — will affect the breadth and scale of this year's emergence. "We're interested in those situations where these emergencies are not as extensive or as dense as they were 17 years ago," Cooley said.

Regardless of how big it gets, this party won't get too out of hand — if you're willing to endure the noise and the bother. Cicadas are mostly harmless to humans and other species. And in fact, they can be rather tasty. The cooked bugs have been compared to shrimp, or asparagus, or popcorn, or even peanut butter, depending on how they're prepared. The Washington Post's Kevin Ambrose recently conducted his own gastronomical experiment, and concluded that cicadas taste mostly like small tidbits of "mushy, squishy asparagus."

"It wasn't bad, but I don't want to try it again," he wrote.

Have you had cicadas? Have you heard cicadas? Feel free to add your own field reports as comments below — and sample these video tributes to the cicadas:

Time-lapse video shows a cicada hatching
From Virginia: Sights and sounds of the cicadas
Cicada-cam and cicada show on Science Channel
Cicada serenades at World Science Festival
'Sicka Cicadas,' a song by Kathy Ashworth

Slideshow: Return of the cicada

Take a closer look at the curious 17-year life of the flying bug as the East Coast prepares for an invasion.

Launch slideshow

Follow @CosmicLog

Previously, on 'Swarmageddon' watch:

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

How a computer model could help fight terrorism

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:01:32 +0000

By Jillian Scharr
TechNewsDaily

When Justin Bieber tweets, 39,361,876 people (and counting) immediately jump to attention. But when one of those nearly 40 million people tweet, does the Beebs see it? Does he react at all?

Communication among terrorist cells works much in the same way as Justin Bieber's Twitter account, according to mathematicians from Ryerson University in Toronto who have built a mathematical model of the way information spreads through these hierarchical networks. Their approach may give counterterrorism agents insight into terrorism hierarchies and allow them to predict terrorist attacks and sabotage networks before the attack plans can be carried out.

Terrorist networks are often arranged hierarchically, meaning information flows in one direction: top down, from one leader to many followers. This model is called a "directed network without cycles," or a "directed acyclic graph." [See also: Google Search Algorithm Models Cancer Spread]

The limited and one-way nature of the contact among parties in these types of networks helps preserve anonymity, and makes it easy for terrorist leaders to blast messages out to a large audience. What these "directed networks without cycles" lack in teamwork they make up for in sheer numbers — leaders can assume that within their huge networks, at least one person will act on their commands.

But these hierarchical social networks have serious flaws, which counterterrorism agencies could use to detect and even sabotage terrorist networks before they succeed in carrying out an attack.

In a paper describing their mathematical model, the researchers compare the way information flows top-down to the way lava flows down a volcano's side. There's no practical way to contain the lava from every possible point — but you can minimize the damage by blocking the lava's flow at a handful of strategic points.

The key advantage of this model is its flexibility: It's able to account for the slow spread of information over time, and also gives counterterrorism agents — the ones blocking the lava's flow — the ability to respond dynamically as new pathways present themselves.

Granted, the model does operate on a number of assumptions, including that the hierarchical social structure is consistent throughout the terrorist network.

And there will always be rogue actors who act in unpredictable ways.

"The Boston bombers are a good example of how little we know about such terrorist networks," acknowledged Anthony Bonato, a mathematics professor at Ryerson and a co-author of the paper. "Did the Tsarneav brothers act alone, or as part of a more extensive network? Further, the structure and organization of these networks are not well understood."

Email jscharr@technewsdaily.com or follow her @JillScharr. Follow us @TechNewsDaily, on Facebook or on Google+.

Check out that glow-in-the-dark cockroach!

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:38:03 +0000

Peter Vrsansky & Dusan Chorvat

A new, light-mimicking cockroach Lucihormetica luckae is shown in daylight and under fluorescent light. Notable are two luminescent lanterns and one minor asymmetrical lantern on the right side.

By Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience

A glowing cockroach, a monkey with a blue behind and a meat-eating sponge snagged spots on a list of top 10 new species named in 2012, scientists announced Thursday.

In its sixth year, the Top 10 New Species list is compiled by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and is announced on the anniversary of the birth of Carolus Linnaeus. An 18th-century botanist, Linnaeus created the modern system for naming and classifying species.

The panel plucked the top 10 new species from more than 140 nominations; to be considered, the species had to have been officially named in 2012 and described with the appropriate code of nomenclature. [See Images of the Top 10 New Species]

"We look for organisms with unexpected features or size and those found in rare or difficult to reach habitats," Antonio Valdecasas, a biologist and research zoologist with Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain, said in a statement. "We also look for organisms that are especially significant to humans — those that play a certain role in human habitat or that are considered a close relative," added Valdecasas, who is committee chair for the top 10 species list.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

This is the recently discovered carnivorous harp sponge, Chondrocladia lyra. The photo was taken in Monterey Canyon, off the coast of California, at a depth of about 11,500 feet (3,500 meters).

Quirky species
One such creature with an odd feature is the glow-in-the-dark cockroach, named Lucihormetica luckae, whose luminescence may help the creepy-crawly mimic toxic click beetles and thereby avoid predators. In addition, a carnivorous sponge shaped like a harp also made the list. The sponge (Chondrocladia lyra), which lives nearly 2 miles (more than 3 kilometers) beneath the Pacific Ocean, sports 20 barbed vanes that resemble a harp's strings. Once it captures meaty prey, the sponge envelops it in a thin membrane and slowly begins to digest the animal.

And then there's the monkey with the blue butt. Discovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cercopithecus lomamiensis is more easily heard than seen. Apparently the Old World monkey performs a booming song at dawn. Even so, it does sport some striking features, including bare blue patches of skin on its buttocks, testicles and perineum, along with humanlike eyes.

Other quirky creatures that made it to the top-10 list include a nocturnal snail-eating snake (Sibon noalamina) found in a mountain range in Panama, and a teensy frog (Paedophryne amanuensis) as small as 7 millimeters (0.3 inches) long and now considered the world's smallest vertebrate (an animal with a backbone).

Filling out the list is a black-hued fungus that threatens Paleolithic cave paintings, a tiny violet from the high Andes of Peru, an endangered shrub with emerald-green leaves and magenta flowers, and a new fossil species of hanging fly that mimics the leaves of a gingko-like tree.

Identifying biodiversity
The committee says identifying Earth's species is critical, especially since many are threatened.

"For decades, we have averaged 18,000 species discoveries per year, which seemed reasonable before the biodiversity crisis. Now, knowing that millions of species may not survive the 21st century, it is time to pick up the pace," Quentin Wheeler, founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU, said in a statement.

"We are calling for a NASA-like mission to discover 10 million species in the next 50 years," Wheeler added.

Follow Jeanna Bryner on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Mars is no place for children -- yet

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:38:33 +0000

Rod Pyle / Space.com

Mars One founder Bas Lansdorp discusses pressure suit technology with an MIT professor attending his talk at the Space Technology Expo.

By Rod Pyle
Space.com

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The leader of a private effort to colonize Mars hopes the Red Planet's first few pioneers don't bring children into the world there.

Having kids on Mars would be irresponsible at this point, said Bas Lansdorp, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which aims to land four astronauts on the Red Planet in 2023.

"We are not in the business of telling people what to do, but astronauts are very responsible people," Lansdorp said here Tuesday at the Space Tech Expo 2013 conference. "When they realize they are living in a dangerous place, they will know what to do, that it’s not right." [Mars One's Red Planet Colony Project (Gallery)]

Doctors have said they don't know if humans can even get pregnant and give birth in the lesser gravity of Mars (which is 38 percent that of Earth), or how fetuses and babies would fare when exposed to the Red Planet's higher radiation levels.

Last month, Mars One officials said they would see how pregnant animals fare before considering encouraging human pregnancy on Mars.

Mars One / Bryan Versteeg

An artist's depiction of Mars One astronauts and their colony on the Red Planet.

Colonizing Mars
Lansdorp gave an update about Mars One's plans and progress during his presentation at the conference.

The organization plans to land a rover on the Red Planet in 2018 to scout out a good location for the colony. Unmanned modules would follow in 2020 to begin processing Martian soil. These robotic refineries would extract various volatiles, primarily water, for life support and agriculture, making settlement possible.

"Once we know it is all working, the first crew of four will go up in 2023," Lansdorp said.

Mars One wants to keep sending more crews every two years after that, gradually building up a permanent settlement on the Red Planet. There are no plans to bring any of these pioneers back to Earth.

The organization officially opened its astronaut selection process last month, receiving nearly 80,000 applications in less than two weeks. Mars One has also engaged its first contractors, including Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp., which has begun preliminary work on life-support systems and pressure suits.

“We’re very excited to have engaged our first partners in this venture,” Lansdorp said.

Can it be done?
Mars One estimates that it will cost about $6 billion to send the first four astronauts to Mars and $4 billion to launch each subsequent crew. It plans to foot the bill primarily by staging a global media event around the entire process, from astronaut selection to the settlers' life on the Red Planet.

Some people have voiced skepticism about the project, but Lansdorp remains confident that it can work.

"This mission is based on existing technology," he said. "Almost nothing new is needed. And each step is proved before risking lives on the next one."

“It’s doable," Lansdorp continued. "But the people I talk to about the money worry about the technology, and the engineers worry about the money," he added with a laugh.

While establishing a human presence on Mars will be challenging, Lansdorp said the Red Planet is a natural target for our wandering, adventurous species.

"Humans have always explored. We did so for about 10,000 years, then (exploration) slowed down," he said. "The next place to do this is Mars."

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Submerged structure stumps Israeli archaeologists

Tia Goldenberg, Associated Press — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:12:20 +0000

Bernat Armangue / AP

In this April 14, 2011 file photo, a boat is by the jetty of the Capernaum National Park in the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel.

By Tia Goldenberg, Associated Press

The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologists dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated.

It's thousands of years old — a conical, man-made behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored.

The problem is — it's at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below.

The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet), emerged from a routine sonar scan in 2003. Now archaeologists are trying to raise money to allow them access to the submerged stones.

"It's very enigmatic, it's very interesting, but the bottom line is we don't know when it's from, we don't know what it's connected to, we don't know its function," said Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who is one of several researchers studying the discovery. "We only know it is there, it is huge and it is unusual."

Archaeologists said the only way they can properly assess the structure is through an underwater excavation, a painstakingly slow process that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if an excavation were to take place, archaeologists said they believed it would be the first in the Sea of Galilee, an ancient lake that boasts historical remnants spanning thousands of years and is the setting of many Bible scenes.

In contrast, Israeli researchers have carried out many excavations in the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

Much of the researchers' limited knowledge about this structure comes from the sonar scan a decade ago.

Initial dives shortly after that revealed a few details. In an article in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology published earlier this year, Nadel and fellow researchers disclosed it was asymmetrical, made of basalt boulders and that "fish teem around the structure and between its blocks."

The cone-shaped structure is found at a depth of between three and 12 meters (nine and 40 feet) beneath the surface, about half a kilometer (1,600 feet) from the sea's southwestern shore. Its base is buried under sediment.

The authors conclude the structure is man-made, made of stones that originated nearby, and it weighs about 60,000 tons. The authors write it "is indicative of a complex, well-organized society, with planning skills and economic ability."

The rest is a mystery.

Yitzhak Paz, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority who is involved in the project, said that based on sediment buildup, it is between 2,000 and 12,000 years old, a vast range that tells little about it. Based on other sites and artifacts found in the region, Paz places the site's origin some time during the 3rd millennium B.C., or about 5,000 years ago, although he admits the timeframe is just a guess.

"The period is hard for us to determine. No scientific work was carried out there, no excavations, no surveys. We have no artifacts from the structure," Paz said.

Archaeologists were also cautious about guessing the structure's purpose. They said possibilities include a burial site, a place of worship or even a fish nursery, which were common in the area, but they said they wanted to avoid speculation because they have so little information.

It's not even clear if the structure was built on shore when the sea stood at a low level, or if it was constructed underwater. Paz reckons it was built on land, an indication of the sea's low level at the time.

In order to fill in the blanks, archaeologists hope to inspect the site underwater, despite the expense and the complexities.

Nadel noted that working underwater demands not only a skill such as scuba diving, but also labor-intensive excavations that are particularly difficult in the Sea of Galilee, which already has low visibility and where any digging can unleash a cloud of sediment and bury what's just been uncovered.

Also, divers can remain under water only for a limited amount of time every day and must choose the best season that can provide optimal conditions for excavating.

"Until we do more research, we don't have much more to add," Nadel said. "It's a mystery, and every mystery is interesting."

___

Follow Tia Goldenberg on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tgoldenberg