NASA approves Hubble Space revival plan

Photography by Tomitheos©


Updated 4:44 p.m. ET, Wed., Oct. 15, 2008:
Circuit switchover could get data flowing again by Friday, managers say...

NASA is going ahead with a plan to restart the flow of science data from the Hubble Space Telescope by routing around circuitry that failed a little more than two weeks ago, officials said Tuesday.

The unprecedented switchover is due to begin early Wednesday, and if all goes well, the telescope should be beaming imagery back down to Earth by Friday, said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Last month's glitch forced the postponement of the shuttle Atlantis' servicing mission to the world's best-known space observatory. That mission had been due for launch on Tuesday, but it's now been put off until next February at the earliest. Whipple said the plan for that orbital service call was "still being hashed out."

The operation planned for this week will be done entirely by remote control, from Hubble's operations center on the Goddard campus in Maryland. Controllers will switch Hubble's command and data handling system from the channel it was using, known as Side A, to a backup channel called Side B.

Whipple said NASA's experts were confident that Side A was the source of the glitch that cut off the flow of science data. "As far as we can tell, nothing else was affected," he told journalists during a teleconference Tuesday.

Over the past couple of weeks, teams at Goddard have been testing a spare data-handling unit and checking diagnostics from the telescope to make sure the plan for the switchover was solid. The electronic components on Side B have never been used before during Hubble's 18 years of operation, and it's not certain that they will work this time.

"It is a complicated procedure, and it's one that we have not done end to end before," Whipple said. But he said experts determined that even under the worst-case scenario — for example, if there were a hidden flaw in the Side B electronics — the telescope would not be left in worse shape than it is now.

In order to do the switchover, controllers at Goddard will have to put the telescope into safe mode, issue commands to reroute circuitry through Side B rather than Side A, then return the telescope to its operating condition.

"This is something that is a little out of the norm of what you would do around the house, but it's probably not unlike what an IT professional might do with an office network," Whipple said.

"The difference is, on the ground, you tend to power things on and off and reconfigure by pushing buttons and swapping cables," he said. "Since we can't do that, of course, with something in space, there are ... switches that do the functional equivalent of swapping cables, and remotely commanded relays that allow us to send a command and power something on or off."


MSNBC Science editor Alan Boyle said that In all, 40 to 50 people will be involved in the operation. "People will be working 24/7 for the total time here," said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division in NASA Headquarters' Science Mission Directorate.

The most critical time in the switchover will last from about 8:30 to 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, Whipple said. If the recovery is successful, the first data should be received from one science instrument late Thursday, with full operation restored on Friday, he said.

The very first image is due to show an internal lamp that is part of the apparatus for Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is currently inoperative due to an earlier glitch.

"Nothing could be aesthetically less pleasing," Whipple said, "but it will be a great relief to everyone when we see that flat field illuminated by that internal lamp."

Hubble's managers expect that the first science instrument to be revived would be the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which has produced some of the telescope's most famous images in the visible-light spectrum. Another imaging device, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, could come back into service later.

The big upgrade for the telescope, involving the installation of two new instruments and the hoped-for repair of two others, will have to wait until Atlantis gets off the ground. NASA would also send up the spare command and data-handling unit for installation as a replacement part, assuming that the unit passes its ground testing. The telescope would continue to use Side B on the replacement unit, Whipple said.

He said experts may not know exactly why Side A on the current unit suddenly went bad until the apparatus is brought back down to Earth for analysis. But he wouldn't rule out a diagnosis that the normal wear and tear experienced during 18 years of use led to the breakdown.

Whippie closed by saying: "Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever."

Life as we know it..

Photo Creation by Tomitheos©






A team of micro-biologists and chemists are closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.

Harvard biologists may be creating a new form of life by a Frankensteinian resurrection of non-living matter, reanimating it back to life.

The laboratory led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Ironically this real life tale parallels to the horror movie DEADGIRL that I reviewed when it exclusively hit the film festival last month:
( DEADGIRL at the Toronto Film Festival )

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Lifein Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

"We've made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide," Szostak said in a phone interview. "What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple [genetic] sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful."

By doing "something useful" for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.

"Once we can get a replicating environment, we're hoping to experimentally determine what can evolve under those conditions," said Sheref Mansy, a former member of Szostak's lab and now a chemist at Denver University.

Protocellular work is even more radical than the other field trying to create artifical life: synthetic biology. Even J. Craig Venter's work to build an artificial bacterium with the smallest number of genes necessary to live takes current life forms as a template. Protocell researchers are trying to design a completely novel form of life that humans have never seen and that may never have existed.

Over the summer, Szostak's team published major papers in the journals Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that go a long way towards showing that this isn't just an idea and that his lab will be the first to create artificial life -- and that it will happen soon.

"His hope is that he'll have a complete self-replicating system in his lab in the near future," said Jeffrey Bada, a University of California San Diego chemist who helped organize the Origin of Life conference.
Modern life is far more complex than the simple systems that Szostak and others are working on, so the protocells don't look anything like the cells that we have in our bodies or Venter's genetically-modified E. coli.

"What we're looking at is the origin of life in one aspect, and the other aspect is life as a small nanomachine on a single cell level," said Hans Ziock, a protocellular researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Life's function, as a simple nanomachine, is just to use energy to marshal chemicals into making more copies of itself.

"You need to organize yourself in a specific way to be useful," Ziock said. "You take energy from one place and move it to a place where it usually doesn't want to go, so you can actually organize things."

Modern cells accomplish this feat with an immense amount of molecular machinery. In fact, some of the chemical syntheses that simple plants and algae can accomplish far outstrip human technologies. Even the most primitive forms of life possess protein machines that allow them to import nutrients across their complex cell membranes and build the molecules that then carry out the cell's bidding.

Those specialized components would have taken many, many generations to evolve, said Ziock, so the first life would have been much simpler.

What form that simplicity would have taken has been a subject of intense debate among origin of life scientists stretching back to the pioneering work of David Deamer, a professor emeritus at UC-Santa Cruz.

What most researchers agree on is that the very first functioning life would have had three basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and an information carrier like RNA or another nucleic acid.

Szostak's earlier work has shown that the container probably took the form of a layer of fatty acids that could self-assemble based on their reaction to water (see video). One tip of the acid is hydrophilic, meaning it's attracted to water, while the other tip is hydrophobic.

When researchers put a lot of these molecules together, they circle the wagons against the water and create a closed loop.
These membranes, with the right mix of chemicals, can allow nucleic acids in under some conditions and keep them trapped inside in others.

Our theories on our Universe may be full of holes..

Photo Credit / Graphics by Tomitheos©


Astronomers have claimed to have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen "dark matter." Which has become a questionable presence, while earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this relatively new discovery dwarfs them all.

"Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. Rudnick, along with Shea Brown and Liliya R. Williams, also of the University of Minnesota, reported their findings in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers have known for years that, on large scales, the Universe has voids largely empty of matter. However, most of these voids are much smaller than the one found by Rudnick and his colleagues. In addition, the number of discovered voids decreases as the size increases.

"What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe," Williams said.

The astronomers drew their conclusion by studying data from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS), a project that imaged the entire sky visible to the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, part of the National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Their careful study of the NVSS data showed a remarkable drop in the number of galaxies in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus.

"We already knew there was something different about this spot in the sky," Rudnick said. The region had been dubbed the "WMAP Cold Spot," because it stood out in a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched by NASA in 2001. The CMB, faint radio waves that are the remnant radiation from the Big Bang, is the earliest "baby picture" available of the Universe. Irregularities in the CMB show structures that existed only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

The WMAP satellite measured temperature differences in the CMB that are only millionths of a degree. The cold region in Eridanus was discovered in 2004.

Astronomers wondered if the cold spot was intrinsic to the CMB, and thus indicated some structure in the very early Universe, or whether it could be caused by something more nearby through which the CMB had to pass on its way to Earth. Finding the dearth of galaxies in that region by studying NVSS data resolved that question.

"Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6-10 billion light-years from Earth," Rudnick said.

How does a lack of matter cause a cooler temperature in the Big Bang's remnant radiation as seen from Earth?

Photons of the CMB gain a small amount of energy when they pass through a region of space populated by matter. This effect is caused by the enigmatic "dark energy" that is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. This gain in photon energy makes the CMB appear slightly warmer in that direction. When the photons pass through an empty void, they lose a small amount of energy from this effect, and so the CMB radiation passing through such a region appears cooler.

The acceleration of the Universe's expansion, and thus dark energy, were discovered less than a decade ago. The physical properties of dark energy are unknown, though it is by far the most abundant form of energy in the Universe today. Learning its nature is one of the most fundamental current problems in astrophysics.

Mathematician Claims Black Holes are the Result of Bad Math..

............... Image Credit: Max Camenzindand ....................

Mathematician Stephen J. Crothers seems to be spoiling all my astrophysics solutions! Crothers claims that the equations used to justify the existence of "black holes" are themselves either incorrect (with 3D versus 4D space inconsistencies and inapplicable radius curvatures) thus meaningless, in error and just plain 'wrong' ..


Crothers claims to have mathematically, meticulously and rigorously demonstrated that the math behind black holes has been incorrectly applied and in some cases incorrectly attributed (meaning that the wrong scientists have been given credit for particular valid or invalid mathematical contributions).

Referral: cyber-friend Michael Gmirkin (University of Oregon Graduate) - Plasma Cosmology and the Electric Universe -

Needless to say, Crothers' assertions are rubbing astronomers and astrophysicists the wrong way. However, if Crothers' assertions are accurate, then a vast portion of current astronomy may be predicated upon a patently false concept.

To briefly summarize some of Stephen J. Crothers' research regarding the history of black hole theory, you can review his papers below:


www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com

www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/article-1-1.pdf

www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/papers.html

Science solved the mystery of Levitation

Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.

In earlier work a team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible..

..now according to a parallel study, levitation has been proven possible.

A Scotland based University of St-Andrews team of physicists has created incredible levitation effects by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr. Thomas Philbin have worked out a way of reversing this phenomenon known as the casimir force, so that it can repel instead of attract.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate but they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.

The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the baffling world of atoms and subatomic particles.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity. The fluctuations in energy fields within the intervening empty space between the objects is one reason atoms stick together much like what enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.

Because the Casimir force causes problems for nanotechnologists, who are trying to build electrical circuits and tiny mechanical devices on silicon chips, the team believes the feat could initially be used to stop tiny objects from sticking to each other.

Professor Leonhardt explained that the Casimir force is the particular cause of friction in some microelectromechanical systems and the ultimate cause of friction in the nano-world thus concluding that the micro or nano machines could run smoother and with less or no friction at all if one can manipulate that force.

Although it is now possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are still a long way off from developing a precise anti-gravity technology.

Human Spaceflights - Space tourism and time travel is a reality

XCOR Aerospace began test firing a fairly new jet design concept, this Methane Rocket Engine is to overcome some of the engineering challenges. This XCOR spacecraft named Lynx is a rocket ship type plane capable of sub-orbital flight to altitudes more than 60 kilometers above the ground.

By definition this rocket engine is to lift the sub-orbital craft to a spaceflight altitude higher than 100 kilometers above sea level.

Sub-orbital tourist flights will initially focus on attaining the altitude required to qualify as 'reaching space.' The take-off flight will be a highly juiced g-force ride, either vertical or very steep and landing very much like a plane or shuttle. The spacecraft will probably shut off its engines well before reaching maximum altitude and then coasting up to its highest point. Those few minutes from where the engines shut off to the point where the atmosphere begins to slow down the downward acceleration, the passengers will experience true 'weightlessness.'

The XCOR Lynx being launched in Mojave California today; the spacecraft is expected to be scheduling regular flights by 2010.

read the full Tomitheos story:

www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/human-spaceflights-space-tourism-and-time-travel-reality

Astronauts test handyman robot

Photo Credit / Graphics by Tomitheos© International space station's giant new handyman robot got its first checkup this past Sunday, with astronauts and flight controllers testing its electronics, joints and brakes.
The Canadian-built robot, named Dextre, passed all but one of the tests. One of the wrist joint brakes in Dextre's left arm slipped a tiny bit more than engineers wanted, but Canada's acting space station program manager said he wasn't too concerned. The brakes help hold the arm steady.

"In the long term it's not going to affect the operation of Dextre in any significant way," Pierre Jean said.

Astronauts and flight controllers planned to test the brake a couple more times in hopes that it slips less as it gets more worn in, Jean said.

Two astronauts plan to take a spacewalk Monday night to add a tool holster and other accouterments for Dextre. When the robot is fully assembled, it will stand 12 feet and have a mass of 3,400 pounds.

Dextre — short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter — is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and possibly someday take over some of the tougher chores, like lugging around big replacement parts.

Two astronauts installed Dextre's two 11-foot arms during an overnight spacewalk that lasted into the wee hours of Sunday.

Dextre has seven joints per arm and can pivot at the waist. Its hands, or grippers, have built-in socket wrenches, cameras and lights. Only one arm is designed to move at a time to keep the robot stable and avoid a two-arm collision. The robot has no face or legs.

Space station astronauts will be able to control Dextre, as will flight controllers on the ground. The robot will be attached at times to the end of the space station arm. It is also able to ride by itself along the space station arm's railway.

A total of five spacewalks are planned for Endeavour's nearly two-week visit to the space station, the most ever performed during a joint shuttle-station flight.

While some of the astronauts prepared for Monday night's outing, other crew members stowed equipment that was brought to the station aboard the storage compartment segment of Japan's Kibo lab. That will pave the way for the shuttle Discovery to deliver the $1 billion lab in May.

Photography by Tomitheos

www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/astronauts-test-handyman-robot