It's prime time once again for e-mails that claim the planet Mars will loom as large as the full moon. Should you believe the claims? This year in particular, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Great Mars Hoax tends to turn up every August, sparking questions like this one from Moe Rickett:

"I read recently that a planet will be orbiting the earth that hasn't been this close in over 2,500 years and would be very visible to the naked eye. Could you provide me a little insight as to which planet this will be and about what time of the year to expect a good view of this event? ... I seem to think it was to be in a very close orbit to earth and it would be the first time in thousands of years it has passed this close, and will not do so again for another several thousand years. Can you please help me with this information so my family and I can view this phenomenon?"

The bad news is that none of the planets is due to have a history-making close encounter this year (although it's a notable year for Neptune). The good news is that Mars and other planets such as Venus, Jupiter and Saturn are just as visible to the naked eye as they usually are.

Moe is most likely referring to the classic Mars Hoax claim, suggesting that the Red Planet will make the closest approach to Earth ever seen in recorded history. Some accounts say the approach will be so close that it will look as if there are two moons in the night sky on Aug. 27.

This is actually a garbled report referring to Mars' close encounter in 2003.

It's true that the planet came closer than ever before in human history on Aug. 27 of that year. But even then, Mars' disk was 75 times smaller than the moon's. That means the apparent size of the full moon as seen with the naked eye was roughly equal to Mars' size when seen through a telescope at 75x magnification. This graphic shows the true size comparison that existed seven years ago.

It will be a long time before Mars comes so close again. Aug. 29, 2287, to be exact.

This August, Mars is almost as far and as faint as it gets. The next relatively close encounter won't come until March 2012. But even now, the Red Planet can be seen with the naked eye if you look in western skies just after sunset. It's part of a celestial triangle also including Saturn and the bright planet Venus. Here's a graphic from the Jodrell Bank Observatory that puts the planetary trio in perspective.

If you have your heart set on seeing a Mars as big as the moon, check out this animation from the European Space Agency, based on time-lapse imagery captured by the Mars Express orbiter as it made a full orbital circuit. You can feast your eyes on thousands of closer views from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And for more on the Great Mars Hoax, review this report from 2008 (and 2006 ... and 2005).

Clarification for 8 p.m. ET: I've rewritten the passage about the moon (as seen with the naked eye) vs. Mars (as seen through a telescope). Martin Kuttner pointed out that what I had originally written could have been misread. Thanks for setting me straight, Martin!

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Millions of years ago, the most fearsome predator in South America wasn't Tyrannosaurus rex or a raging mammoth - but a flightless bird with an enormous beak. The creatures known as "terror birds" held sway starting about 60 million years ago, and dominated the continent until only about 2 million years ago. But it wasn't clear exactly how the terror birds killed their prey. Until now.

Paleontologists can now say with confidence that the terror birds, known formally as phorusrhacids, wielded their beaks like hatchets. They repeatedly hacked at their foes, rather than chomping at them and shaking them from side to side as T. rex might have done.

These birds weren't built to wade into the fray like a feathered version of former boxing champ Joe Frazier. Instead, they took after Muhammad Ali, who famously defeated Frazier by floating like a butterfly and stinging like a ... well, like a terror bird.

Paleontologists can say all this thanks to a detailed analysis of three-dimensional X-ray scans, documenting the structure of a terror bird's 6 million-year-old skull. The results were reported today in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

"One of the things that was surprising about this study is that we were actually able to find out quite a bit," one of the study's co-authors, Lawrence Witmer of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, told me in advance of today's publication.

Witmer has been studying the fossilized skulls of terror birds and other ancient creatures for some time now, trying to figure out how their brains worked. When he heard that other researchers were also looking into how terror birds did their thing, he linked up with them and providing the CT scans of a skull from a phorusrhacid species known as Andalgalornis. The scans allowed researchers to create a computer model suggesting what the skull was capable of doing ... as well as what it couldn't do.

The skulls of modern-day birds have lots of light, mobile joints. Not so for the terror bird: "They evolutionarily transformed many of these joints into rigid, dense beams and struts," Witmer explained.

The structure was optimized for a downward hacking motion of the beak. The bird could also conceivably bite down and crush its prey. But there was no way it could hang on and shake its victim from side to side. "It actually looked like that would cause catastrophic failure [of the skull], which is about as dramatic as it sounds," Witmer said.

"A lot of animals just wade into battle, wrestle and battle to subdue their prey," he said. "That's pretty tough. What we found is that weakness from side to side really prevented these animals from doing that going into battle. Instead, it would attack and retreat, attack and retreat, making these almost surgical precision strikes."

Once the terror bird felled its victim, it could tear the critter (most likely some sort of mammal) into bite-size pieces, or just swallow it whole.

Other researchers behind the study - including the lead author, Federico Degrange of the Museo de la Plata/CONICET in Argentina - worked with zookeepers to study the bite strength of an eagle as well as a seriema, a bird thought to be the closest living relative of the terror bird. All the findings were consistent with the Muhammad Ali strategy.

Degrange said the study provides the best explanation yet for why the terror bird was so terrible. "We need to figure out the ecological role that these amazing birds played if we really want to understand how the unusual ecosystems of South America evolved over the past 60 million years," he said in a news release about the research.

Ohio University

The fossil skull of the terror bird Andalgalornis is significantly larger than the skull of a modern-day golden eagle and a human skull. Andalgalornis lived 6 million years ago.

Terror birds had few equals in their ecosystem. Witmer said its closest rival may well have been a saber-toothed marsupial known as Thylacosmilus. The bird that was analyzed for the PLoS ONE study stood about 4.5 feet (1.4 meters tall), but other terror birds are thought to have stood as tall as 7 feet (2.1 meters), dwarfing modern-day eagles. Most of them ranged over South America when it was an island continent, before its tectonic linkup with North America. At least one species, Titanis walleri, invaded North America millions of years ago in the Great American Interchange.

The fall of the terror birds appears to have been as dramatic as its reign, but it's not yet clear exactly what caused them to go extinct. Paleontologists are pretty sure about one thing: Humans didn't kill them off. The birds may have been done in by big cats coming down into South America. Climate change may have played a role as well. "The extinction of successful animals is very rarely due to one factor, but a combination of events," zoologist Ross Piper observed in a posting on Scrubmuncher's Blog.

Witmer said the study published today is a great example showing how paleontologists are "teasing everything we can out of these dusty bones."

"Making these comparisons really starts to give us a broader view of what predators were like," he told me. "We're talking about a different world, a whole different dynamic. It's really a different window on the past, and terror birds wind up providing a pretty exciting view through that window."

Watch a computer animation of the terror bird's bite. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter with @b0yle. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

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The latest batch of pictures from the Cassini orbiter provides provocative new views of Saturn's moons - including some fresh looks at Enceladus, a moon that has geysers of frost spouting up from cracks in its icy shell.

The raw images come from a flyby on Friday the 13th that brought the bus-sized spacecraft close to Enceladus as well as sister moons Tethys and Dione. Cassini has been circling the ringed planet for more than six years, and the pictures it has sent back have opened scientists' eyes to the wonders of Saturnian satellites.

One of the latest pictures provides a backlit view of Enceladus' geysers in action. You can easily pinpoint the fissures, which are known as "tiger stripes" because they stand out on the surface like markings on a big cat's fur. Another raw image shows the spray from farther back (61,000 miles or 98,000 kilometers away).

Yet another image provides a close-up of one of the best-known tiger stripes, Damascus Sulcus, from a distance of 1,670 miles (2,673 kilometers). Damascus Sulcus was also subjected to a heat scan by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported today.

I wondered about the haze of light-colored material surrounding the fissure in the close-up view. Does that picture actually show a tiger stripe in action? "We're not sure ... could be just ice deposits," the head of the Cassini imaging team, Carolyn Porco of the Colorado-based Space Science Institute, told me in an e-mail today. The analysis continues.

Enceladus' tigers may be the current headliner at the Cassini circus, but there's lots more to see at this show: The spacecraft's camera captured one of the best views yet of 90-mile-wide (150-mile-wide) Penelope Crater on Tethys, as well as a nice profile of many-cratered Dione.

The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla brings the show to life by animating some of the image sequences. Don't miss seeing Enceladus cross the edge of Saturn's disk, or watching Cassini zoom in toward Enceladus' tiger stripes. And if you haven't seen them yet, don't miss clicking through our own slideshow of Cassini's greatest hits.

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter with @b0yle. If you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Today there's a whole menu of options for going beyond the petroleum era, from biofuels and next-generation nuclear power to solar-powered syngas production. But which option will be the "magic bullet" for America's next energy era? It turns out that every energy alternative has its pluses and its minuses, just as oil, coal and natural gas do.

The current renewable-energy debate focuses on how to strike the right balance using all those alternatives - and avoid getting burned in the process.

Some of the emerging solutions for the world's energy woes are outlined in a series of reports appearing in the current issue of the journal Science. Usually, Science's articles are available only by purchasing the magazine, or looking it up at the library. But Science's editors at the American Association for the Advancement of Science believe the energy issue rates so highly in the public interest that they're making the reports in their special section freely accessible for the next two weeks. (Free registration is required to access some of the reports.)

Science's editor emeritus, Donald Kennedy, observes in an editorial that future energy solutions won't be as simple as buying a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, or putting biofuel in your tank, or buying a woodstove. He says the 21st century's fossil-fuel crisis will be nothing like the oil crisis of the 1970s.

"The contemporary challenge is not that there isn't enough oil; there is far too much of it," Kennedy writes. "Oil has produced environmental devastation on Gulf shores, more of the same in Amazonian forests, emissions from transportation systems that endanger public health, and supplies managed by nation-states that threaten global security. The abuses that result from an overdependence on oil amount to a national crisis, and its resolution will depend on cooperative actions taken by government, industry and the public."

Here are some of the intriguing possibilities outlined in the Science special report:

• Huge solar-power farms are being built to feed gigawatts of electrical power into the global grid - but how do you get the power from sunny climes to places where the sun doesn't shine? As outlined in Daniel Clery's report for Science, one of the world's most ambitious projects in this field is the multibillion-dollar Desertech venture, which aims to build solar farms in Africa and the Middle East, and transmit much of that power to Europe. The project has been compared to the Apollo space program, but it's not without precedent. Concentrated-solar-power (CSP) facilities are also operating in California and Spain. But such facilities have sparked debate over their impact on the environment.

• German researchers report that electricity isn't necessarily the only payoff from concentrated solar power. CSP systems can also be used to desalinate seawater, or drive chemical reactions that can turn water and carbon dioxide into hydrogen fuel. If the temperatures are high enough, the H2O-CO2 mix can be turned into hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide (which would go through further chemical conversion). Tests of such technologies are being conducted at the Plataforma Solar de Almeria facility in Spain. But much more research and development will be needed before you can put solar synfuel in your tank.

• Five years ago, cellulosic ethanol - produced from humble grasses and wood waste - looked as if it could be a "simple solution to pain at the pump." But in Science's special report, Robert F. Service says the federal government's plan for ramping up cellulosic-ethanol production is in "deep trouble" because the economics of ethanol don't make as much sense as folks thought they would back then. Technically, it's still tougher than expected to convert cellulosic feedstock into fuel than it is to use American corn or Brazilian sugar cane. The market for ethanol is limited because most automobiles can use only a 10 percent ethanol blend. That situation could change, however, if automakers give an extra push to cars that can take in 85 percent ethanol (known as E85). In other reports, researchers note little attention has been paid to determining which crops make for the best biofuels ... or how America's energy infrastructure will have to change to accommodate those biofuels.

• Experts say the "most promising" sources for biofuels include some of the world's smallest organisms: microscopic algae. We've talked about algae power previously, but in the journal Science, Dutch researchers provide a progress report on advances in the field. They also say more work will be needed to harness all that (literally) green power - including genetic engineering to maximize the organisms' production of fatty acids, and systems engineering to maximize the extraction of fuel from those super-algae. They say "10 to 15 years is a reasonable projection for the development of a sustainable and economically viable process for the commercial production of biofuels from algal biomass."

• Wind power is the renewable-energy technology that's closest to prime time as a significant contributor to the electric grid. Right now, about 2 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by wind turbines, but energy planners want that figure to rise to 20 percent in the next 20 years. Science's Eli Kintisch, author of "Hack the Planet," says the biggest obstacle to that is a "not in my backyard" syndrome, fueled by environmental and aesthetic concerns. The siting problem applies to other renewable-energy technologies as well, ranging from solar to geothermal.

• Some experts see nuclear power as the only realistic near-term alternative to fossil fuels for large-scale energy generation. It's not "renewable power," as that term is usually defined, but British engineers Robin Grimes and William Nuttall foresee a "two-stage nuclear renaissance" that eventually includes safer techniques for reusing spent nuclear fuel. One of the ventures taking this approach is TerraPower, which has generated buy-ins from venture capitalists and buzz from green-power pundits. Will nuclear power eventually be seen as a green-power option?

The bottom line from the Science special report is that the transition to the next energy era will be more complex and take longer than many of the proponents of renewable energy probably think. It will take decades, even if you subscribe to futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil's view that solar power will bail us out by the 2030s. The long lead time shouldn't be surprising, though. Science's Richard A. Kerr points out that it took more than half a century for humanity to make the transition from wood power to petroleum power.

What are your favorite green-power possibilities? Which options just don't make sense? Check out Science's podcast and PDF graphic on energy tradeoffs — and feel free to weigh in with your comments below. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter with @b0yle. If you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

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Three teams brought lengths of string to the Strong Tether Challenge today in hopes of winning as much as $2 million of NASA's money. But they all went away empty-handed ... except for the shreds of carbon nanotubes and glass fiber they had to pick up off the floor.

This year's challenge, organized by the California-based Spaceward Foundation, was conducted in conjunction with the 2010 Space Elevator Conference on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.) The aim of the contest is to promote the development of lightweight materials that can outperform the strongest fibers available today.

Eventually, such materials could be used in the construction of space elevators, "railways" that reach tens of thousands of miles into the sky. But there are more immediate applications for ultra-strong, ultra-light materials: to make stronger ropes, better bulletproof vests and body armor, lighter and hence more fuel-efficient cars and airplanes, and hardier spacecraft.

NASA has been putting up the prize money for the Strong Tether Challenge since 2005. Five other NASA-backed Centennial Challenges - for prototype lunar landers, moondirt-digging robots, astronaut gloves, innovations in aviation and beam-power systems - have all produced winners. But no one in the tether contest has won a dime yet.

"This is probably the hardest challenge of all the challenges out there, because it's so fundamental to materials science," Spaceward's Ben Shelef, who has run the contest from its inception, told the 30 onlookers who assembled to watch the competition.

The Strong Tether Challenge is structured as a tug-of-war, matching lengths of experimental fiber against a heavier woven loop of Zylon fiber on what's known as a "tether torture rack," If the Zylon breaks first, then the challenging team wins a prize. But that's easier said than done. A single strand of Zylon looks like dental floss - but when I tried to wrench it apart with my hands, it ended up cutting my finger instead.

"If any one of these tethers beats this [Zylon] tether, we can pack up and go home, because we're starting to build a space elevator," Shelef said.

The standard to beat is quantified in terms of gigapascals per gram per cubic centimeter, or GPa/(g/cc), a measure that wraps the lightweight factor and the strength factor into one scale. This unit of measure, which is also equivalent to one N/Tex, is so useful when it comes to judging material strength that Shelef has proposed a new standard measure called the "yuri," in honor of space-elevator theorist Yuri Artsutanov. One GPa/(g/cc) or N/Tex is equal to a megayuri, and it takes 5 megayuris to win a prize.

The $2 million purse is structured with a sliding scale, based on the tether's length and mass. One of the teams entered in today's competition, the Tether Addicts from Florida (Gilberto Brambilla and Bruce Klappauf) theoretically could have won the whole shebang. The other two entrants, Bryan Laubscher and Christopher Cooper, could have won $300,000 to $600,000, depending on the combination of winning outcomes.

Calculating the potential permutations would have been an empty exercise, however, because none of the challengers came close to hitting the 5-megayuri mark. All of the fibers broke after just a few strokes of the hydraulic hand pump on the tether torture rack. The most spectacular sproing came during the final test, when pressure was put on the Tether Addicts' meter-long entry, woven from glass fibers that were coated with carbon nanotubes.

Brambilla told me that he and Klappauf had a length of fiber in their lab that could have won the prize - but that a cleaning crew accidentally threw that fiber in the trash. "It ended up in the vacuum cleaner," he said ruefully. The replacement fiber had to be made in a rush, and Brambilla wasn't all that happy with the result.

The Tether Addicts took time off from their day jobs at an optics lab to work on this year's entry, and Brambilla wasn't sure whether he could keep feeding the addiction. "You can't really justify working on this subject if you don't have the money," he told me. But Shelef was betting that at least one or two of this year's contestants would be back for the next tug-of-war in 2011.

"That wraps it up this year," Shelef declared after the last tether was torn. "Better luck next year."

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When Soviet engineer Yuri Artsutanov came up with his concept for an "electric train to the cosmos" in 1960, he thought it'd take 200 years to turn it into a reality. Fifty years later, the 81-year-old is more optimistic: Now he thinks the first space elevator will rise into the heavens 30 years from now.

"It's happening very quickly," he told me through an interpreter today.

Artsutanov is among the optimists who have come to the Microsoft corporate campus in Redmond, Wash., for the 2010 Space Elevator Conference this weekend. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.) The annual gathering brings together researchers and entrepreneurs who specialize in the technologies that could come into play if anyone ever builds Artsutanov's train to the cosmos.

The basic idea is that payloads and people could someday ride vehicles attached to ribbons of super-strong material, reaching orbits as high as 100,000 kilometers (62,500 miles). Similar, shorter railroads in the sky could be constructed on the moon and Mars, creating the outer-space analogs of commuter rail systems. The concept's proponents say the cost of access to outer space could fall to as little as 1 percent of the current cost - if and when such elevators are built.

One of the themes of the conference is that space-elevator technologies could yield payoffs long before the construction of those elevators:

• Next-generation materials incorporating carbon nanotubes are thought to be a requirement for those space elevator ribbons, and could also be used in earthly products ranging from bulletproof vests to aircraft and spacecraft. In fact, up to $2 million in prizes could be won today at the conference as part of the NASA-backed Strong Tether Challenge.
• The elevators would have to be powered by laser-based energy transfer systems - gizmos that could be used by NASA and the military as well. Last year, Seattle-based LaserMotive won $900,000 in another NASA-backed challenge aimed at encouraging the development of lightning-fast robots powered only by light beams.
• Experts are trying to figure out how tethers interact with Earth's magnetic field and orbital debris, in order to make way for a space elevator in the long term. But such expertise can be applied to making space operations safer in the near term as well. Next year, the Naval Research Laboratory is scheduled to launch a tether experiment known as TEPCE to see how small satellites can navigate through the magnetosphere using "propellantless propulsion."

Jerome Pearson, an American engineer who independently laid out his ideas for a space elevator in 1975 and is considered in some circles as the concept's co-inventor, is currently fleshing out plans for a tether-equipped mini-satellite known as ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator, or EDDE. He envisions a fleet of EDDE satellites that can use tethers rather than thrusters to travel up and down, gathering tons of space junk in giant nets, possibly to be incinerated in the lower atmosphere. That scrap metal from space could also be recycled into new space stations - or space elevators, for that matter.

If the EDDEs work as Pearson and his colleagues hope, Earth's magnetic field could become an outer-space ocean for whole fleets of small craft flying up and down, back and forth. That would pose huge regulatory challenges, and arguably diplomatic challenges as well. "We would have to do flight plans, miss other objects and make sure we're operating safely," Pearson told about 40 attendees at a morning session today.

Is the elevator moving?
Pearson and Artsutanov, who is visiting from St. Petersburg, Russia, are clearly the stars of the show due to their status as creators of the space elevator dream. "This is a time when the two inventors of the space elevator are together," Pearson observed. But there's a big question hanging over the event: When will everything come together to make the concept look less like a dream and more like a reality?

Bryan Laubscher, an astrophysicist who is the conference chair as well as president of Odysseus Technologies, is sticking with his standard answer that it will take 15 years to build the first space elevator. "And next year we'll probably be saying 15 years again, unless we see some breakthroughs in carbon nanotube development," he said.

The way he sees it, materials science is the key missing piece in the space elevator equation. "We have one big problem on the space elevator," he said. "Everything else pales in comparison to that, and that is: materials."

Others might say money is the big problem. Laubscher says it would be far less expensive to operate multiple space elevators than to continue with the chemical-rocket technology that provides the world's only current means to get to outer space. "If that's the only game in town, I predict we're not going to get very far," he said.

But Laubscher's figures also suggest it would take $19.5 billion to design and build the world's first space elevator. That's more than NASA's total annual budget. The space agency may be willing to invest in elevator-related technologies, but the actual job of building the elevator will have to be up to the private sector. And so far, the investment interest just doesn't seem to be there.

Going up?
Some of the folks at the Space Elevator Conference insist that interest is perking up: Michael Laine, who went through a gloomy round of financial and legal tribulations as founder of the Liftport Group, told me he's involved in setting up a substantial venture-capital fund for projects that could be seen as spin-offs of the space elevator concept. By the time the 2011 Space Elevator Conference rolls around, there just might be a light at the end of the carbon nanotube tunnel.

Artsutanov's translator, Eugene Schlusser, said half-jokingly that there was an easy way to solve the money problem. "What you need to do is find a military application, and the money will follow," he told me.

Meanwhile, Artsutanov is still hoping that someday, astronauts will ride his electric train to destinations beyond Earth. He told me he hoped space elevators would be used in the 2040s "to colonize Mars - and maybe the moon."

The late science-fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke once said that the space elevator would be built "about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." At the 50-year mark, does Artsutanov think the laughing has finally stopped?

"He was thinking only about the less educated people," Artsutanov said of Clarke's comment. "But in this case, the teachers are only one page ahead of the students. We all need to be educated."

To learn more about the conference, which continues through the weekend, check out Ted Semon's Space Elevator Blog. This afternoon you can watch three teams go after the prizes in the Strong Tether Competition via a UStream video channel. And you can bet I'll be tweeting from the contest as well.

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter with @b0yle. If you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

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Rocket refueling stations and new kinds of engines for deep-space travel are high up on NASA's wish list for new technologies. So is a heavy-lift launch vehicle, which happens on Congress' wish list as well. But exactly what kind of next-generation rocket will NASA get? As far as Bobby Braun is concerned, the answer to that question is best left to engineers rather than lawmakers.

Braun, who is the space agency's chief technologist, discussed heavy-lifters and more today in a teleconference conducted during his visit to NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Braun's main task is to get NASA's high-tech mojo working again, decades after the space agency made Tang, Teflon and Velcro famous.

NASA didn't actually invent Velcro fasteners, Teflon coating or Tang powdered drink mix - instead, it took those commercial innovations and adapted them for high-profile applications in outer space. Those applications, in turn, heightened public awareness and acceptance of new technologies. Something similar could happen again if NASA pushes through a new burst of technological innovation.

Today, NASA does spaceflight using a space transportation system that's been updated through the years, but really isn't dramatically different from what it was nearly 30 years ago. With the impending retirement of the space shuttle fleet, Braun and his fellow technology planners at NASA have an opportunity to do things in a radically different fashion.

During today's telecon, Braun said the new NASA will be spreading out its technological bets a lot more. "If we're going after grand challenges, which we are in the space technology program. ... For us to do that, we're going to have to take a little bit of risk," he said.

That means taking a risk-balancing "portfolio approach" to high-tech development. Some of the technologies NASA is betting on will result in new, even revolutionary, solutions to space challenges. "But frankly, we have to admit up front that some will not, and that has to be OK," he said.

The latest NASA-backed Centennial Challenge competitions, announced last month, focus on the kinds of technologies the space agency is looking for. The Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge, for instance, would award $2 million to folks who can demonstrate new ways to launch small satellites into orbit quickly and reliably. "Small sat is an important part of space technology," Braun said. "We actually called it out as a separate program, because in the formulation of space technology, I was worried, frankly, that if we didn't ... it would get lost in the larger technology pieces."

Other prize programs are aimed at producing more efficient solar-powered rovers as well as interplanetary robots capable of collecting soil samples without human intervention. Such technologies would be needed for more ambitious Mars missions ... and would surely be put to good use on Earth as well.

Braun's office is also reviving the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, or NIAC, under a new name (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts). He said NASA is refocusing the program on research that could produce real-world technologies in less than a 40-year time frame.

"One of the problems that NIAC had previously, because it was so revolutionary, is that there were no technology programs to carry on that NIAC innovator's idea," he said. "There was no place for that idea to go."

Finally, there's human spaceflight: Although Braun isn't in charge of how astronauts get into space and back, he said he serves as NASA Administrator Charles Bolden's "primary advocate" for technology matters throughout NASA. And he has some definite ideas about how spaceflight technology should be done:

• Rocket refueling in orbit: Last year's review by an independent panel highlighted on-orbit fuel depots as a new approach for facilitating trips beyond Earth orbit, and it sounds as if Braun is totally on board with the idea. "When we send a human mission to Mars one day, we already know that about 80 percent of the mass in low Earth orbit for that mission is propellant," he told me. "So if we had technologies for propellant transfer and storage, you can imagine a lot of ways to get that propellant to low Earth orbit. Maybe it goes on one heavy-lift launch. Maybe it goes on many smaller-vehicle launches and is stored and transferred about in low-Earth orbit for the ultimate vehicle."

• New in-space propulsion systems: Braun noted that rocketeers have been talking about a wide range of architectures for future spaceships, ranging from shuttle-derived launch systems to kerosene-fueled approaches to experimental plasma propulsion systems such as VASIMR. Heck, you could even talk about solar sails or ion drives. "We need an in-space propulsion system, and you could imagine a number of advanced technologies, whether they be low-thrust or medium-thrust or high-thrust systems, to enable us to travel out beyond low Earth orbit. Now, the more efficient those systems are, the less mass we need to lift on the heavy-lift vehicle."

• In-situ resource utilization: "When we get to our destinations," Braun told me, "are we going to bring everything with us to an asteroid or to Mars? Or are we going to use the resources available on those bodies ... perhaps for consumables like life support, perhaps for propellant for the return journey home. Perhaps for materials, to manufacture a variety of devices at these destinations. Answers to these technology questions inform our beyond-low-Earth-orbit exploration architecture ... and greatly impact the requirements for the heavy-lift vehicle."

• Heavy-lift launch vehicles: That leads up to the multibillion-dollar question ... what kind of heavy-lifter should be designed and built? Legislation now making its way through Congress would provide NASA with an answer: Build a new rocket capable of putting 70 to 100 metric tons of payload into orbit by 2016. That's more than twice the weight of the space shuttle's biggest payload, but significantly less than the capacity of the Saturn 5 moon rocket.

Braun indicated that he didn't care for the idea of setting a legislative requirement for future rockets, because so much was dependent upon the other elements of a next-generation space transportation system:

"NASA is filled with technically strong people who could study the heavy-lift problem and relatively quickly determine the way forward. The agency is in the middle of doing that. In fact, we had a heavy-lift and propulsion technology broad agency announcement that was released by the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. We're in the process of reviewing the industry inputs to inform our decision process. To make the most efficient and best use of taxpayer dollars ... I think that's NASA's job to think about these things, and to make the proper technical decisions on the proper time scale."

When it comes to revolutionary propulsion technologies, Braun said "there are some approaches out there that appear to show some promise." He declined to provide details, however, because NASA is in the midst of a competitive industry cycle.

"On top of that, I would like to look at it from a systems perspective," he said. "It's not all about the rocket. It's about getting beyond low Earth orbit."

Will Braun and NASA get it done? And on what time frame? A lot of questions about that will be hanging in the air over the weeks and months (and years?) to come ... but you don't have to wait until 2016. Feel free to weigh in with your own suggestions and observations in the comment space below.

Update for 9:25 p.m. ET: The San Jose Mercury News mentions a couple of technology programs that NASA Ames Research Center will be working on: a spacecraft that can fly off a runway like an aircraft and carry up to 20 metric tons (44,000 pounds) into orbit, and an inflatable system that can shield spacecraft from the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry.

There's also a project to be conducted jointly with the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, looking into beam-powered space propulsion. That follows up on NASA's Power Beaming Challenge, which paid out $900,000 to the Seattle-based LaserMotive team during last year's Space Elevator Games.

We may hear more about beamed power systems at the 2010 Space Elevator Conference, which takes place this week on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., just down the street from my msnbc.com newsroom. Stay tuned ...

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Just days after a wave of geomagnetic activity sparked amazing displays of northern lights as far south as Iowa, another space storm is on its way from the sun - and could hit us as early as Tuesday.

The wave of electrically charged particles, also known as a coronal mass ejection, was sent out over the weekend. At the time, astronomers thought the ejection would miss Earth completely, but imagery from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory now suggests that part of the storm was blown out in our direction.

Like the last storm, this blast doesn't look as if it's strong enough to create significant problems for electricity grids, satellites or navigation devices. But SpaceWeather.com says "high-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras when the cloud arrives, probably on August 10."

If the storm does spark auroras, that would provide just one more reason for folks in northern latitudes to look up at the night sky after midnight. The Perseid meteor shower is nearing its expected peak on Thursday, and the reports so far suggest that the light show will at least live up to expectations. There's also a nice planetary triangle (Mars, Venus and Saturn) hanging in western skies after sunset.

Here's a recap of resources for aurora watchers:

• Day-by-day aurora forecasts from GEDDS at University of Alaska
• Space Weather Prediction Center's aurora-viewing tips
• Map of current auroral activity from prediction center
• Soft Serve News: Aurora borealis activity forecast
• SpaceWeather.com coverage of auroral activity

It's not a sure bet that anyone in the United States will see the aurora this time around, but it is a sure bet that if pictures of the northern lights are taken - say, in Scandinavia or Canada - some of them will show up in SpaceWeather.com's aurora gallery. Stay tuned for updates on the space storm as well as the meteor shower later this week.

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We may have just 100 to 200 years to figure out how to get off this rock and give our species a cosmic insurance policy, physicist Stephen Hawking says in a fresh interview with BigThink. Hawking has said this sort of thing several times before - but every time he mentions the time frame, it adds an extra bit of urgency to the warning.

This time, Hawking's views are given a stark spin: "Abandon Earth - or Face Extinction." But Hawking isn't really suggesting we should just give up on our planet. It's just that right now we have all our eggs in one planetary basket. Here's the key passage:

"If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space. That is why I'm in favor of manned, or should I say, 'personed' spaceflight."

Hawking said that "if we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space."

The threats that Hawking is worried about break down into two categories: First, there are the doomsdays we could bring down upon ourselves - such as biological or nuclear attacks, or human-caused climate change that has such sudden effects that we can't adjust. The other category would be catastrophes that we don't cause: for example, a direct hit by a huge space rock or a supernova blast; or a bizarre, world-changing eruption of super-volcanoes; or the emergence of a novel pathogen that our species can't fight.

The first category encompasses issues that we can do something about, and Hawking of course favors taking whatever action is necessary to save the environment and human society. The second category, however, takes in plausible extinction scenarios that humans couldn't do much about. Either category of catastrophe would require the human species to have an off-planet Plan B.

I've said for years that extinction avoidance is one of the five E's that explain why we have to spend our time and effort on space science and exploration. And I'm not by any means the first person to figure that out:

"The earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever" - Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1895

"Earth is too small a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in." - science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein

"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring - not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive." - astronomer-author Carl Sagan, 1994

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" - science-fiction writer Larry Niven, as quoted by Arthur C. Clarke in 2001

Mars would offer the best nearby second home for humanity and our allied species - and on that score, Hawking's view has been echoed by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who says his ultimate aim is to make Homo sapiens a multiplanet species. In the longer term, our distant descendants will have to leave Earth entirely before the sun goes all red-giant on us. Humans would have to move outward to the solar system's rim - or perhaps eventually to other star systems, on a voyage that would most likely take many generations.

How can humans do that? Hawking doesn't put forward any detailed answers, but in recent months he has outlined three way-out ideas for time travel, including wormholes, black-hole encounters and super-fast acceleration. In the "Star Trek: First Contact" time line, humans came up with warp drive - and were visited by friendly Vulcans - in the year 2063. Will humans get that lucky in real life? Maybe there's an astronomically remote chance. But Hawking has another warning about that: We'd better be careful about the aliens we come across.

So what do you think? Considering all the trouble that NASA has been having with human spaceflight lately, how much do you think we can get done by 2110? Will it make a difference for our species' survival? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comment space below.

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• New Scientist: Is Einstein's space-time just a mirage?
• Astrobiology: Building an armored tank for Jupiter
• The Gish Bar Times: Carnival of Space 166
• Spaceflight Now: This Week in Space

Conservationists are putting out an all points bulletin for dozens of possibly extinct species of frogs, toads and salamanders, including the world's "Ten Most Wanted" amphibians.

The search, led by Conservation International and the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group, is aimed at rediscovering as many as 40 species in 18 countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Conservation International characterizes it as the "first-ever coordinated effort" to find so many lost creatures.

The point of the exercise is not merely to build up somebody's collection of museum specimens, but to document the horrific decline of amphibian species and figure out what to do about it. It's thought that more than 30 percent of all amphibian species are threatened with extinction. In a before-and-after survey of a Panamanian national park, researchers found that nearly 40 percent of the amphibian species in one little area had disappeared between 2004 and 2008.

"Amphibians are particularly sensitive to changes in the environment, so they are often an indicator of damage that is being done to ecosystems," Conservation International's Robin Moore said today in a news release announcing the quest. "But this role as the global 'canary in a coal mine' means that the rapid and profound change to the global environment that has taken place over the last 50 years or so - in particular, climate change and habitat loss - has had a devastating impact on these incredible creatures."

A pathogenic fungus ranks as the deadliest threat to amphibians: The microscopic critters cause a disease called chytridiomycosis, which has wiped out whole species in the Americas. Some frogs have been airlifted to other habitats or relocated to zoo "arks," just to buy time while scientists figure out how to fight the fungus.

To call attention to the search, Conservation International and the IUCN (which issues an annual list of threatened and endangered species) came up with a top-ten list of amphibians they're looking for. The list is based on the scientific as well as aesthetic significance of the species. No. 1 on the list is Costa Rica's golden toad, which was apparently pushed into extinction within just a year or two in the late 1980s. It's not known exactly what caused the die-off, but researchers assume that warming temperatures may have encouraged a fatal fungal outbreak.

Other species are so exotic that they've been spotted only fleetingly and haven't been seen again. Take the case of the Turkestanian salamander, No. 7 on the top-ten list. Several specimens were collected in Central Asia back in 1909, but even those specimens have disappeared. All that survives are the drawings and descriptions.

Check out this slideshow to learn more about the top-ten list.

Searching for seemingly extinct amphibians may sound like a grim task, but recent successes in species conservation have given scientists hope that even "lost" species can be rediscovered and saved.

"The search for these lost animals may well yield vital information in our attempts to stop the amphibian extinction crisis, and information that helps humanity to better understand the impact that we are having on the planet," said Claude Gascon, co-chair of the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group and executive vide president of Conservation International.

Protecting amphibians isn't just a good idea for the amphibians: Frogs, toads and salamanders play an important part in keeping insects at bay and recycling nutrients. They may even turn out to be a source of next-generation painkillers and other medicines. (In fact, the amphibian-killing fungus may have been transported around the world by a frog that was once exported for use in pregnancy tests.)

Conservation International has set up a Web portal that points to updates in the search for lost amphibians, which leads up to October's global Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan. In addition to the updates and the top-ten list, you'll find a downloadable "Wanted Alive" poster suitable for posting on a classrooms or a youngster's bulletin board.

More about species lost and found:

• Deep-sea creatures of the Coral Sea
• The top 10 new species from 2009
• Beautiful biodiversity in Brazil
• New Guinea's 'Lost World' revisited
• Indonesia's 'Garden of Eden'
• Papua New Guinea's new species
• Marine marvels from Papua New Guinea
• Biological treasures from Borneo
• Celebrities of the Celebes Sea
• 12 froggy finds from India
• Fantastic frogs from Colombia
• Aliens lurk in Antarctic depths
• The strange species of Suriname
• Vulnerable new species in Brazil
• Discoveries from Vietnam's 'Green Corridor'
• Endangered species of the Mekong Delta
• New species from Australia's coral reefs
• Thousands of new species in ocean's depths
• Hundreds of new species amid the Himalayas
• New species found Down Under .. underground
• Eight 'extinct' species found alive and kicking

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This year's Perseid meteor shower is shaping up as a beaut. Thursday is the big night - not only to see shooting stars, but to see the planets as well.

The Perseids are among the year's best-known meteor showers, especially for mid-northern latitudes. Here's why: The show begins ramping up in late July and hits its peak around Aug. 12-13, when it's usually pleasant to hang around outdoors in the northern hemisphere. Perseid meteors appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, which is high up in the sky at about 3:30 a.m. in northern latitudes - prime time for meteor watching.

But the big attraction comes down to how many shooting stars you can see: During this time of year, Earth plows through the trails of space grit that have been laid down by Comet Swift-Tuttle as it makes its 130-year orbit around the sun. When those particles of grit zip through the upper atmosphere, they heat up to incandescence and create those bright streaks we all know and love.

Fortunately for meteor-watchers, there's a lot of grit out there.

"The whole shower, we think, is about 160,000 years old," Peter Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute, told me. "The bulk of the shower you see is 5,000 years old."

Skywatchers have tracked the Perseids for centuries. In some circles, the meteors are known as "the Tears of St. Lawrence," because the show reaches its peak around Aug. 10 - the feast day of St. Lawrence, a third-century Christian martyr. It wasn't until 1867 that scientists figured out that a comet was behind the meteoric display.

The sky conditions are nearly ideal for this year's show, because the moon is just a few days past its new phase. When the moon is full, its glare overwhelms the meteor flashes in the night sky, making viewing problematic. But this year's crescent moon will be far below the horizon by midnight, when the meteor show enters prime time.

You'll be good to go as long as you can get away from cloudy skies and the glare of city lights. Find an open area that gives you as wide a view of the sky as possible. Lie back on a blanket or chaise lounge, and give your eyes time to get accustomed to the darkness. You might want to bring along something warm to drink, to help you stay awake. It's a lot more fun if you go out with a group. If you're on your own, you can plug in to some tunes or an audiobook as you gaze into the night. But you may want to take in the silence instead: Some people swear they can hear the sounds of meteors zooming past.

NASA

Perseid meteors appear to emanate from a point in the constellation Perseus, as shown in this graphic depicting the northeastern sky at around midnight. Although the meteors can appear in any part of the sky, their tails can be traced back to that point..

If viewing conditions are absolutely perfect, you could see a meteor every minute at the height of the shower, which generally comes around 3:30 to 5:30 a.m., depending on your latitude. Is that past your bedtime? Don't sweat it; there's actually a lot to be said for watching the skies in the evening. During that time frame, the Perseid meteors streak at a narrow angle through the atmosphere. "You don't get as many meteors, but you get these long streaks - very nice!" Jenniskens said.

Starry Night Software via Space.com

A planetary triangle in western skies after sunset..

This year, early evening is also prime time for seeing a pretty grouping of planets: Venus, Mars and Saturn can be identified as the sparkling points of a triangle in western skies between sunset and about 10 p.m. local time. Around midnight, bright Jupiter rises in the east and starts making its way toward the zenith. And in the wee hours of the morning, North Americans can spot the International Space Station's stately procession across the sky. (Check out Heavens-Above for planetary positions and NASA's satellite sighting website for the space station's schedule.)

Jenniskens said Earth is due to pass directly through a grit trail that was laid down by Swift-Tuttle in the year 1479, at 16:49 GMT on Thursday. That timing doesn't do North American observers any good, because it's daylight at that time. But it does mean observers in, say, Hawaii or Japan could see twice as many meteors as they would under normal conditions. And the meteor rate should still be pretty good hours later when it's North America's turn to see the show.

If Thursday night doesn't work for you, that's OK. The Perseids are known for having a gradual ramp-up and fade-out, so there's the potential for seeing a good show anytime through, say, Aug. 20. Way back on Aug. 10, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center reported that a dramatic Perseid fireball, six times as bright as Venus, was sighted over Arkansas.

"It's a very good start to this year's Perseid meteor shower," NASA's Janet Anderson writes. Amen to that!

Here are additional online resources that help you make the most of this prime skywatching season:

• The International Meteor Organization, which keeps track of shooting-star sightings, reports that some observers are seeing more than 20 meteors an hour in advance of Thursday's peak.
• Meteorobs, an e-mail discussion forum for skywatchers, is buzzing with Perseid news. Don't miss Robert Lunsford's outlook for the week.
• The American Meteor Society has a meaty guide to the Perseids. Other viewing guides are available from Space.com, Sky & Telescope, Astronomy magazine, Universe Today, StarDate Online and EarthSky.
• NASA's Fluxtimator gets Jennisken's vote as the most useful Java-based tool for figuring out how many meteors you can see on which day. Be sure to fill out the form completely with the meteor shower ("7 Perseids"), your location, viewing conditions, date (make sure to select "2010") and time zone (DST or not?).
• The Clear Sky Chart shows you where the darkest, clearest skies can be found nearby.
• SpaceWeather.com and NASA Science News are providing updated information about the buildup to the Perseids, plus a Web page that lets you "listen" to the radio echoes created by passing meteors.
• MeteorWatch is a year-old website that lets you share Perseid sighting reports via Twitter.
• Top 10 tips for meteor watchers, written by yours truly during the 2007 Perseids.
• The science behind the meteor show: Interactive graphic explains the genesis of meteor showers.

Update for 8:46 p.m. ET Aug. 11: Now that we're into the Perseids' peak viewing time, here's a fresher guide to the meteor shower.

Feel free to add your meteor sighting reports as comments below. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

The U.S. Senate quietly and efficiently put its stamp of approval on a compromise vision for future spaceflight that would keep the space shuttle program going for another year, fund efforts to put astronauts on private-sector spaceships and start work on a big new rocket for trips beyond Earth orbit.

Two big questions are still up in the air: Will the House go along with the Senate's plan? And is $19 billion a year enough for NASA to do what Congress wants it to do?

The Senate version of the authorization bill would let NASA fly an additional shuttle mission beyond the two currently left on the launch schedule, in order to help close the gap between the shuttle fleet's retirement and the deployment of whatever type of spaceship comes afterward. The extra mission, which would have to be cleared by a safety review, would likely send the shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station in mid-2011.

The bill also sets aside $1.3 billion over three years to boost commercial development of space vehicles capable of sending astronauts to the space station. That's on top of the billions of dollars already committed for commercial cargo deliveries.

The money for commercial crew development, or CCDev, is significantly less than the $3.3 billion sought by the Obama administration for that time frame as part of a $6 billion package over five years. But it's significantly more than the $150 million called for in the House version of the bill. For that reason, the White House as well as prospective spaceship-builders favor the Senate bill, in line with the adage that "half a loaf (or in this case, a third) is better than none."

Both the House and the Senate version would shift some of NASA's money over to the accelerated development of a heavy-lift rocket, but the House would keep more of NASA's Constellation rocket program alive (even though the White House wants it canceled).

House leaders had been gearing up to get the full chamber's approval of their version a week ago, but the plug was pulled on the vote after an outcry from California members as well as the backers of space commercialization. Critics of the House version are now hoping that the Senate version will win acceptance once Congress returns from its August recess.

That was the sentiment expressed by senators from both sides of the aisle after the Senate approved its bill late Thursday.

"This bill offers a blueprint to move America's civilian space program forward in a smart, fiscally responsible way. ... I'm proud the Senate has moved it one step closer to becoming law," Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in a statement.

Here's how the Commerce Committee's ranking GOP member, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, put it: "Senate passage of this comprehensive legislation is a critical milestone that will boost America's human spaceflight program. By embracing this bipartisan vision for the future of NASA, the Senate has spoken with a unified voice. I encourage my colleagues in the House to take up this crucial bill in order to get NASA on track to continue its proud heritage of innovation and exploration."

In addition to the authorization bill, a parallel appropriations bill will have to be passed by both houses to support the plan with actual money.

The space agency's total budget would be set at $19 billion, in line with the White House's request. But some folks are worried about the fact that the Senate version cuts back the up-front money for private-sector spaceship development ... while calling for the development of a heavy-lifter on a budget that's even leaner than the one provided for Constellation.

Does that mean NASA will have two underfunded spaceship development programs on its hands? After all, this whole controversy over NASA's future plans for human spaceflight began last year when an independent panel found that the Constellation effort couldn't be done at the specified spending levels. Last week, space analyst (and rocket engineer) Rand Simberg wondered whether NASA was "being set up to fail (again)."

What do you think? Check out Space Politics and RLV and Space Transport News for more on the legislative action, and feel free to chime in with your comments below.

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