NASA plans to award $50 million in stimulus funds in November to support private-sector development of new spaceships capable of carrying crew members to the international space station. Details about the program, known as Commercial Crew Development or CCDev, came out on Tuesday via the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

CCDev follows up on the $500 million Commercial Orbital Transportation System program, or COTS, which backs the development of cargo-carrying capability by private-sector spacecraft. California-based SpaceX and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. are currently benefiting from that program and have been awarded $3.5 billion in contracts for space station deliveries.

When the COTS program was set up, there were suggestions that it could be extended to cover crew flights as well as cargo flights - the so-called Option D, or COTS-D. At one point, NASA had planned to offer $150 million for commercial crew development, but that figure was scaled back last month when Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., protested. The move left some observers grumbling that Shelby was flexing his political muscle to get more money for NASA's multibillion-dollar Constellation program.

Here's Tuesday's release from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, written by executive director John Gedmark, with a Web link to the NASA solicitation announcement:

"Today NASA released information regarding its intention to invest $50 million of American Reinvestment and Recovery Act stimulus funding in multiple competitively awarded, funded agreements for commercial crew concepts. This new program, known as the Commercial Crew Development or 'CCDev,' represents a new milestone in the development of an orbital commercial human spaceflight sector. By maturing 'the design and development of commercial crew spaceflight concepts and associated enabling technologies and capabilities,' the program will allow several companies to move a few steps forward towards the ultimate goal of full demonstration of commercial human spaceflight to orbit.

"According to the solicitation, 'NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program is applying Recovery Act funds to stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate human spaceflight capabilities. These efforts are intended to foster entrepreneurial activity leading to job growth in engineering, analysis, design, and research, and to economic growth as capabilities for new markets are created. By developing commercial crew service providers, NASA may be able to reduce the gap in U.S. human spaceflight capability.'

"Full details from today's NASA release can be found by clicking here.

"NASA has also established a website for the new CCDev procurement, accessible at: http://procurement.jsc.nasa.gov/ccdev/.

"Proposals are due September 22, 2009 and a pre-proposal 'Industry Day' will occur at the NASA Johnson Space Center on August 13, 2009. Pursuant to the requirements of the 2009 Recovery Act, the funds will need to be fully spent by September 30, 2010."

NASA's program synopsis says Space Act Agreements for the funds will be awarded in November.

IAU

Dancers perform during opening ceremonies for the International Astronomical Union's General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro Tuesday. Pictures of Pluto and other dwarf planets are displayed on the screen above the stage, in the most visible reference to the controversy that raged during the IAU's last assembly in 2006.

Pluto and its pals loomed over the stage when the International Astronomical Union kicked off its general assembly this week in Rio de Janeiro, three years after its controversial decision to reclassify the icy world as a dwarf-planet non-planet. But that's as close as the issue will get to the spotlight this time around.

Neither the pro-Pluto nor the anti-Pluto adherents have any interest in reviving the debate over planethood in Rio - and it'll likely be a long time before the IAU gets back into planetary politics.

"There's no discussion of dwarf planets. That has subsided," said Lars Lindberg Christensen, who served as the IAU's spokesman during the 2006 assembly in Prague and is filling the same role in Rio.

Like others among the thousands of attendees in Rio, Christensen noticed that depictions of the dwarf planets known as Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake were projected above the stage during Tuesday's opening ceremonies. "I was sort of snickering about that," he admitted. But Christensen insisted that the display had no connection to the IAU's business this year.

"That issue was dealt with," he told me. "There will always remain some people who are skeptics, particularly in the North American part of the world, but people are returning to the science."

Among the anticipated headlines are fresh findings about the similarities between surface features on Earth and on Titan, Saturn's smog-shrouded moon, as well as new questions about the habitability of Earthlike planets around sunlike stars, Christensen said. However, there'll be no controversies that bring tears to the eyes of third-graders (unless there are some kids out there who really hate the Second Realization of the International Celestial Reference Frame).

No more pokes at Pluto
That's likely the way the IAU will play things for the foreseeable future, said Gettysburg College astronomer Laurence Marschall, a co-author of the recently published book "Pluto Confidential: An Insider Account of the Ongoing Battles over the Status of Pluto."

"Nowhere in the next 500 years are they going to deal with the definition of scientific terms," Marschall told me. "Maybe operational terms, like the definition of a dynamical second. But when it comes to scientific terms, they will probably wisely leave them to common usage."

Marschall belongs to a select group: the 400 or so astronomers who were actually in the room to vote on the IAU's planethood definition in Prague. He voted in favor of the final wording, even though the process was as ugly as an eruption on Io. "Given the course of action that the IAU took, the results were inevitable," Marschall said. "I would have voted for anything that recognized Pluto as being part of a new class of objects."

His co-author, astronomer/writer Stephen Maran, noted that one of the IAU's main reasons for pushing ahead with the planet definition was to set up a procedure for naming newfound objects like Pluto - relatively small, roundish objects such as Eris (a.k.a. Xena), which is actually bigger than the one-time ninth planet.

The procedure was indeed established: Names for dwarf planets are now approved jointly by the IAU's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature (which deals with asteroids and comets) and its Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (which deals with the moons and surface features of planets). However, that procedure could have been put into effect without ruling on the broader planet-or-not definition.

"Now it appears that everybody in the United States is an opponent of the IAU definition," Maran said, with just a bit of hyperbole. "Everybody pretty much agrees that the definition is not scientifically useful. It solves that administrative issue, but it has inflamed passions and raised the point that you don't normally adjudicate scientific questions in a court of law or a legislature."

No pitchforks for Pluto
So why aren't the definition's detractors descending on Rio with firebrands and pitchforks? According to those who put down Pluto, it's because they know they're in the wrong.

"I suspect no one will press the fight about Pluto because even the partisans are reluctantly admitting to themselves that the fight is over, and planets have won," Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, who was in on the discovery of Eris and two other dwarf planets, wrote in a blog entry from Rio. (His Twitter username, Plutokiller, lets you know where he stands.)

Speaking as one who's been in touch with Pluto's partisans, however, I'd have to say the reason is because they've moved beyond the IAU, just as the IAU has moved beyond Pluto. After three years of claiming that scientific questions can't be settled by a vote, why would the dissenters force yet another vote they see as meaningless? It'd be like Martin Luther pleading for a recount in the College of Cardinals.

"The IAU is not Holy Mother Church, speaking ex cathedra," Mark Sykes, director of the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute and an advocate for Pluto's planethood, said in an e-mail sent as I was writing up "The Case for Pluto."

"The issue continues to be debated," Sykes observed. "Scientists continue to write papers where Pluto and other such objects are referred to and treated as planets, because the science being discussed (e.g., atmospheric processes, mantle convection, differentiation) are shared with objects like the Earth."

Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Colorado-based Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, turned down an invitation to speak at the IAU's Rio meeting. "I'm not there because the IAU seems to have become irrelevant," he told me today via e-mail.

Pluto in perspective
In their book, Marschall and Maran detail many other decades-long planetary debates - over the status of Ceres and other asteroids, for example, or the search for the planet Vulcan (fascinating!), or the arguments over who really discovered Neptune.

The IAU's actions back in 2006 will no doubt be incorporated similarly into the broader sweep of scientific history. (And humor as well. One of Marschall's favorite quips was something he saw on a bumper sticker: "They got Pluto, Uranus is next.")

So what kind of verdict will history render on the dwarf planets?

Marschall thinks that Pluto and its pals will be put in their proper perspective as scientists learn more about how solar systems are constructed.

"In our own solar system, the debate is over how we're going to group these various objects that circle the sun," he told me. "Eventually, we're going to think that there are these eight large bodies, and then there are all these little bodies between Mars and Jupiter and scattered out in that region, and then you've got these trans-Neptunian objects and the Oort Cloud out there. People aren't going to worry too much about what a planet is. You're just going to think about these things that are part of the retinue of the sun.

"But it's way too early to start thinking about that with extrasolar planets," he added. "It's going to take a long time before the pictures of those systems are fleshed out."

Maran thinks Pluto will eventually be accepted as a kind of planet once again, although he doubts that will come about as the result of a vote.

"What's going to happen is that scientists will continue to define planets as they see them," he told me. "The people left holding the bag are above all the schoolteachers, and to some extent the publishers and the journalists, who are not supposed to put themselves up as experts. They're supposed to apply some official usage, and there is nothing official except for the IAU. ... The one political body I can think of that could have a political impact on this would be the Texas school board. If they decide that there are nine planets for the schoolbooks, that's going to have a big impact."

But even the Texas school board would probably figure out that it's better to keep quiet on the subject, unless it's to make a joke.

"If you want to think of a project that can consume endless amounts of people's time and create unbelievable degrees of bad feeling, it's for any scientific body to begin a project to create an official dictionary of scientific terms," Maran said. "No one fights over the commercial dictionaries, but let it be an official dictionary of a body of scientists, and people who could be out there discovering new worlds will be indoors arm-wrestling over the definition of one term or another."

Then Maran had another thought: "It actually might be a good way to get professors in the current environment to retire and make their slots open for younger people - just appoint them to one of these commissions."

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET Aug. 6: I've updated my reference to Titan by linking to the IAU's news release about the research. The release notes that "wind, rain, volcanoes, tectonics and other Earthlike processes all sculpt features on Titan's complex and varied surface in an environment more than 100 degrees Celsius colder on average than Antarctica." That's too cold for water to work the way it does on Earth - but Titanian methane takes the place of water in the atmosphere and as precipitation, cutting channels in the surface terrain.

The Saturnian moon's volcanoes, meanwhile, appear to spew out slurries of water ice and ammonia.

"It has not escaped our attention that ammonia, in association with methane and nitrogen, the principal species of Titan's atmosphere, closely replicates the environment at the time that life first emerged on Earth," Robert Nelson, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is quoted as saying.

More from the IAU General Assembly:

• Home page for the IAU
• Home page for the Rio meeting
• Daily newspaper: Estrela D'Alva (The Morning Star) 
• Orbiting Frog: IAU bloggers and Twitterers

• NASA: First 'warm' images from Spitzer Space Telescope
• arXiv Blog: Statistics hint at hidden asteroids near Earth 
• ESO: Double engine powers a blazing nebula 
• Wired: 10 space-rocking astronaut songs

Maximilien Brice / CERN

A worker closes off an interconnection between magnets in the Large Hadron Collider's underground tunnel. Some of the interconnections may need fixing later.

Europe's Large Hadron Collider was built to re-create the energies present in the universe just after the big bang, but now it looks as if the bangs at the $10 billion machine won't get as big as quickly as physicists had hoped.

That's a sore point for some of the researchers who have been waiting more than a decade to delve into a host of cosmic questions: Why do some subatomic particles have mass while others don't? What is mysterious dark matter made of? Are there exotic particles and dimensions we can't see? How did the universe work at its birth?

For example, Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., expects experiments at the Large Hadron Collider to help solve puzzles that involve hidden dimensions and the nature of gravity.

"I've waited 15 years," he told The New York Times in a report about the LHC's problems published today. "I want it to get up running. We can't tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now."

James Gillies, chief spokesman for Europe's CERN particle-physics center, sympathized with Arkani-Hamed's angst. "Everybody's disappointed that we didn't get it running," he told me today. "But the mood here is pretty optimistic."

The LHC began shooting beams of protons through 17 miles (27 kilometers) of underground tunnels on the French-Swiss border last September, amid great fanfare. Only days after the startup, an electrical fault caused a magnet breakdown that forced more than a year's worth of repairs. (This PDF presentation includes pictures of the damage.)

CERN now says the collider will start up again in mid-November, and on Thursday the organization is due to announce how operations will ramp up over the coming year.

At the time of last year's startup, CERN's managers had hoped that beam collisions would begin by the end of 2008, and that the proton-smashing energies would reach their full strength of 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) per beam sometime this year. Now the best guess is that engineers will start out with the beam at 450 billion electron volts and dial it up to only 4 or 5 TeV by the end of 2010.

Two factors behind slow restart
If that's what's decided, it will be due to two factors, Gillies said. First, engineers say the LHC's powerful magnets aren't ready to carry the huge levels of current required to bend high-energy protons around the collider ring at full power. The magnets will have to go through a period of commissioning at gradually higher levels - a process known as "training."

In pre-startup tests, individual magnets were able to handle more than 7 TeV. However, when they were put together in a larger test assembly, they could be trained only to the level of 6.8 TeV, Gillies said. Since then, the magnets have lost some of their load-carrying capacity. They've been "detrained," Gillies said, and now there's some "retraining that needs to be done." 

The second factor involves nagging glitches in the copper-sheathed interconnections between magnets. The interconnections are designed to carry energy away from the ring when the helium-cooled magnet system becomes overloaded.

Last September's magnet breakdown came about because an electrical splice didn't work correctly. Since then, engineers have installed new equipment to take care of the splice problem, but they have also discovered that some of the interconnections aren't ready for prime time because their resistance levels are too high. "That limits the energy of the machine," Gillies said. The current safety limit is estimated at 4 to 5 TeV.

CERN's managers may decide to rework the design for the interconnections, as detailed in a report published by Science last week.

Full power in 2011?
All this suggests a scenario in which the LHC beams begin circulating again no earlier than mid-November, with operations continuing through the winter. CERN's collider is traditionally shut down during that season to cut down on power bills, but this year the winter break may last only a few days, Gillies said.

The ramp-up period would continue until 2010's winter shutdown, reaching the safety maximum of 4 to 5 TeV. That would give the scientists time to do experiments at unprecedented (albeit lower than expected) energy levels, while giving the engineers time to figure out exactly how many additional repairs will be needed. Those repairs will be done during the shutdown period in late 2010 and early 2011, and the ramp-up would resume that spring.

So, for the time being, Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator in Illinois is still the world's most powerful particle collider, with beams circulating at 1 TeV. The electrical snags in Europe could give Fermilab a bigger opening to scoop the LHC and detect the first firm evidence for, say, the existence of the Higgs particle, also known as the "God Particle." The Times' report indicates that some scientists are turning their attention from the LHC to the Tevatron - which is only natural, given that many physicists are involved in experiments at both machines.

Strangely enough, the LHC's relatively slow restart is precisely the course advocated by some of the folks worried about the collider's safety. They'd like to see an extended period of operations at the 4 to 5 TeV level, just to see if any unforeseen problems crop up. Now it looks as if they'll get their wish, though not for the reasons they've cited.

Will the LHC always fall short of its intended strength? Are the magnets and interconnections built in such a way that 7 TeV per beam is unattainable? Some think that may turn out to be the case, but not Gillies. "We haven't gotten any indication of that," he told me.

One thing is virtually certain: This won't be the last twist in the long tale of the LHC and the the frontiers of physics. To get a sense of the saga's full sweep, check out our special report.

Update for 1 p.m. ET Aug. 6: CERN says it will run the LHC at energies of 3.5 TeV per proton beam when it's restarted in November. Tests have shown that "no more repairs are necessary for safe running this year and next," according to today's announcement.

Once the LHC's operations team has gained experience in running the machine, and once enough of a data sample has been collected to assess how the machine is working, those energies will be ramped up to 5 TeV by late 2010. There'll be a run with lead ions rather than protons at the end of that year (to give researchers using the ALICE detector a chance to study quark-gluon plasma).

"After that, the LHC will shut down and work will begin on moving the machine towards 7 TeV per beam," CERN says.

• Planetary Society: Retiring the shuttle will set us free 
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• NASA: Moon mapper sees our home planet
• X Prize: Hey, kids! Build your own MoonBot
• NASA: Moon robot mining competition set
• Cheap Astronomy: Carnival of Space 114

• Space for All: Jetpack project makes progress
• Scientific American: The Neanderthals' mysterious fall
• ScienceDaily: Microbes make more electricity - and faster, too
• News.com.au: Evolution produces more 'beautiful' women 

I. de Pater (Berkeley) / H. Hammel (SSI) / T. Rector (U. of AK-Anchorage) / Gemini Obs.

This mid-infrared image of the impact site on Jupiter was captured by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. The yellow arrow points to the color-coded "bruise."

Astronomers are continuing to watch the Great Black Spot on Jupiter to figure out how it was made and what the aftermath tells us about Jupiter's makeup. Over the next month, you can expect big telescopes to gather data on the chemical composition of the spot. Those observations may tell scientists whether the "black eye" was caused by a comet like Shoemaker-Levy 9, which bruised Jupiter 15 years ago, or an asteroid, or perhaps some weird internal process.

In the meantime, experts are working out the implications of Jupiter's smackdown for our own planet. Former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart says last month's event could help re-energize his international campaign to keep a closer watch on potential cosmic threats.

Scientists say there's little chance that a comet will zoom in from the solar system's far reaches and smack Earth, as was the case for Shoemaker-Levy 9's encounter with Jupiter. However, the chances of a catastrophic asteroid impact are significantly greater: That kind of thing likely happens roughly every 1 million years, astronomers say.

An asteroid strike on the scale of the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago - say, bigger than a kilometer (half a mile) wide - would set off a deep wave of extinction. So far, astronomers have cataloged about 800 of such near-Earth objects, none of which appear to pose a serious threat. Schweickart points out that even a smaller blast could stir up a "cosmic Katrina" of hurricane proportions, however. We're just starting to tally the somewhat larger number of somewhat smaller cosmic killers. 

For years, Schweickart and his colleagues at the B612 Foundation and the Association of Space Explorers have been urging the United Nations to take a more formal approach to assessing cosmic threats. Because the effects of an impact could be global, the deliberations about what to do in case an impact should have an international scope as well.

The first step is to identify potential threats: Just in the past week, Schweickart and others sent a letter urging the Australian government to restart funding for a near-Earth object search in the Southern Hemisphere. The government cut support to Spaceguard Australia in 1996, and since then asteroid-watchers have worried about the huge "blind spot" in their coverage area. (Fortunately, Australian amateur astronomers such as Anthony Wesley, who first spotted the Jupiter impact, have helped fill the gap.)

"Australia is arguably the most advanced country in the hemisphere," Philip Chapman, NASA's first Australian-born astronaut, was quoted as saying in The Australian. "Failure to contribute to the international effort is grotesquely irresponsible."

Schweickart told me in a follow-up e-mail that the jury is still out on the precise cause of the latest Jupiter impact:

"I think that the comet claim is simply a default position and perhaps a carryover from the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact.  Since no one saw it prior to impact, who knows whether it was a comet or asteroid.  In my view, it's very much more likely to be an asteroid impact, simply due to the much higher population.

"As to why no one saw it prior to impact or knew it was going to impact… that's pretty easy.  Any asteroids that don't come near Earth are difficult to see.  The likelihood of spotting a 1-kilometer (this was probably not larger than that… most likely smaller) asteroid which circulates from the main belt out to halfway between Jupiter and Saturn is vanishingly small. The only way we'd have to know about this ahead is if it happened to be a near-Earth asteroid with an aphelion [maximum distance from the sun] greater than Jupiter's distance. That's a very small percentage of the near-Earth asteroid population.

"Still… any evidence of current impacts on any other body help to emphasize that it's only a matter of time till it's our turn. So the more the merrier!"

To keep up with the status of the Jupiter impact investigation, check in with this Web page at the University of Central Florida. And to weigh in on the wider question of Earth's vulnerability to cosmic impacts, just leave a comment below.

Update for 5:38 p.m. ET Aug. 4: SpaceWeather.com passes along a fresh picture of the Great Black Spot from Australian discoverer Anthony Wesley, indicating that Jupiter's wind shear has already stretched the spot into a not-quite-as-great black line.