It's been a great summer for auroral displays, and especially from space. Here's a time-lapse video showing the International Space Station's passage over the southern lights on Sept. 11. The tour begins with the station arcing southeast over eastern Australia, passing over New Zealand and then heading northeast in its inclined orbit. There's a dense cloud cover over Earth's surface, but that just makes the ripples of green light stand out even more.

The 26-second video was compiled from about 16 minutes' worth of photo-snapping by the space station's crew, from their vantage point in the orbiting outpost's Cupola observation deck. (Make sure you're watching the PhotoBlog wide-screen version.)

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North or south, auroral lights are sparked when electrically charged ions from the solar wind interact with atoms in the upper atmosphere. In an advisory about the video, NASA notes that green is the most common auroral shade, coming from the light emitted from emitted oxygen atoms. Flashes of red show up here and there. You can also see a golden glow visible along the rim of the atmosphere, just above the curving horizon. That airglow is caused by the excitation of atoms by ultraviolet radiation.

For a big assortment of Earth views from NASA, check out the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, and for auroral views feast your eyes on SpaceWeather.com's Aurora Gallery. Here are a few more must-see examples of our Earth at night, as seen from the International Space Station:

• See the world from outer space ... in 60 seconds
• Atlantis' descent witnessed from the space station
• Solar storms spark beautiful blasts over Earth
• India-Pakistan border shines out into space
• Egypt's river of light snakes through the night
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

The way David Attenborough sees it, pterosaurs and 3-D documentaries were made for each other, even though they're separated by 65 million years.

"You want to have something that moves not just in 2-D across the ground, but goes up as well," he said. That makes the flying reptiles an "obvious subject" for a 3-D movie, Attenborough added.

He should know: The 85-year-old British broadcaster and naturalist has been doing nature documentaries for the BBC for more than 50 years — and what's more, he's the brother of Richard Attenborough, the actor who welcomed scientists to "Jurassic Park" in that classic 1993 dino-flick.

So it's hard to think of anyone better-suited to be the writer and narrator of "Flying Monsters 3D," a big-screen documentary due for its North American opening on Oct. 7.

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The movie, which had its British theatrical release earlier this year, blends computer-generated graphics with field trips to fossil beds and laboratories. In the process, a wide variety of pterosaur breeds are virtually resurrected.

Paleontologists say the creatures came to dominate the skies of the Cretaceous era, just as dinosaurs dominated the land below. "The story of how that came about, and why eventually they died out, is what the film is about," David Attenborough told journalists during a Monday teleconference.

The 3-D special effects in "Flying Monsters" take their cue from "Avatar," but there's much more mixing of the Cretaceous and the modern world. At one point, pterosaur bones laid out on a table assemble themselves and take off. And during one of the movie's concluding scenes, a Quetzalcoatlus with a 40-foot wingspan pulls alongside Attenborough as he's sitting in the cockpit of a glider.

"I originally thought I might do that in a hang glider. ... Unfortunately, the insurers wouldn't let me do that, so I had to do it in the glider," he quipped.

Attenborough said one of the challenges of the project was to make sure the movie stuck to the scientific story instead of turning into a 3-D monster chiller horrorfest. "It's no good just doing a film to say, 'Oh, yes, it's wonderful in 3-D,' but have no story behind it," he said.

The scientific story
Pterosaurs have been the subject of scientific debate for decades: Paleontologists have argued over whether they were cold-blooded or warm-blooded, whether they bore feathers or fur, whether they could take off from a runway or had to jump off a cliff in order to take flight. (One of the places Attenborough visited during the making of the movie was the famed "pterosaur landing strip" in southern France, which he compared to "a prehistoric Heathrow" airport.)

The creatures shown in "Flying Dinosaurs 3D" aren't your father's pterosaurs: They use their folded wings as forelimbs when they walk around on all fours — or when they launch into the air. Some have a coat of fine hairs known as pycnofibers, which serve as evidence that they were warm-blooded. And most of them sport colorful crests, which Attenborough considers a "reasonable" hypothesis.

"They were almost certainly colored, and they had structures on their heads which can best be explained as being like the crest of a bird, and were used in courtship," he said.

Were pterosaurs actually birds? Pterosaurs had wings. (Check, although their wings could spread wider than bird wings.) They laid eggs. (Check, although their eggs were more like those of reptiles than modern-day birds.) They tended to group in colonies, as many species of birds do today. Pterosaurs and early birds co-existed during the Cretaceous ... but the mainstream view is that they came from different lines of the evolutionary tree.

Why did birds survive while pterosaurs die out? That's the 65 million-year question.

"Birds had feathers, stiff quills, but pterosaurs didn't have feathers," Attenborough said. "They didn't evolve feathers."

Instead, pterosaurs got their lift from membranes that were attached to their limbs and spread out during flight. Those membranes made it "very difficult to move around on the ground in a nimble sort of way," while birds "were able to run on the ground very well," Attenborough said. The way he sees it, that was a "crucial element" in the fight for survival when the era of the dinosaurs ended.

The rest of the story
Is that the way paleontologists see it? Mark Witton, a pterosaur expert at the University of Portsmouth, was one of the scientists who served as consultants for the film — and he was invited to a screening when the British version was ready for its release. "My hopes were high that everyone's favourite leathery-winged beasties were about to get their moment in the media sun," he wrote on the Pterosaur.net blog.

He came away impressed by the film's technical fireworks, but not so much impressed by the scientific claims. "Take, for instance, the way that we're explicitly told that pterosaurs were out-competed by birds and their ability to adapt to new ecologies, thus sealing the extinction of the more evolutionary-stagnant pterosaurs," he wrote. "Detailed analyses of bird and pterosaur diversity have either proved inconclusive on this issue ... or categorically stated that there's no evidence for bird-driven pterosaur extinction. ..."

Witton catalogs the movie's other scientific sins with the rigor that only a dedicated specialist could muster. "It really seems that, with a bit more care, this could've been as much of an achievement for effective scientific communication as it has been for 3-D technology, but it's really an enormous missed opportunity," he wrote.

Other pterosaur experts have provided more positive reviews. The University of Leicester's David Unwin, who was also a consultant for the film, praised the results in a video clip. "Films like this do a tremendous job of actually communicating in a really exciting way, and one that grabs your attention, the kinds of things that we've found out about pterosaurs," he said. "And what I really love is being able to see the animation and being involved in the process of trying to produce the best possible and most accurate animations."

What's a pterosaur fan to do? If you go see "Flying Monsters 3D," you'll want to sit back and enjoy the 3-D effects ... and then get the rest of the story from online resources such Pterosaur.net, or Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings, or John Conway's Palaeontography, or Pterosauria at the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

More about pterosaurs:

• Pterosaurs were 10 times heavier than biggest birds
• Flying reptile's big bill drags down feeding myth
• Pterodactyls in Japan hung out with birds
• How did flying reptiles rise?
• Search for pterosaurs on msnbc.com 

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.    

XCOR Aerospace and Space Expedition Curacao announced today that they're going forward with a deal worth more than $10 million to start offering rocket plane rides beyond the edge of space from the Caribbean island starting in 2014.

The wet-lease arrangement follows up on an agreement in principle reached a year ago. Under this type of contract, the Curacao venture would have XCOR's Lynx rocket plane available for its use, but XCOR would be in charge of the ground operations and provide the pilot.

California-based XCOR's development plan calls for beginning flight testing about a year from now, using a prototype version of the Lynx that's built for flights up to an altitude of 38.5 miles (62 kilometers). By the time the Curacao deal kicks in, XCOR aims to have one or two "Mark II" production models ready to fly to altitudes in excess of 62.5 miles (100 kilometers), which is the internationally recognized boundary of outer space.

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The rocket-powered Lynx is designed to seat a pilot and a single passenger side-by-side, with windows all around the front and top to provide a panoramic view of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space. The fliers would get a feeling of weightness for four minutes or so, and feel a maximum acceleration of 4 G's.

The Lynx is being offered as a tourist plane as well as a platform for suborbital space experiments. 

Space Expedition Curacao's deal would involve the use of XCOR's second Mark II model, with the option to use XCOR's first Mark II for up to three months a year. That  provision covers the possibility that XCOR's production schedule encounters delays, as well as the possibility that Curacao will need more flight capacity or need to start tourist flights early, said Andrew Nelson, XCOR Aerospace's chief operating officer.

The deal is still dependent on federal approval for XCOR's export licensing arrangements, but the Curacao venture has already made an initial payment to XCOR. “Now that the ink is dry and the check has cleared we can proceed at full pace to begin operations in Curacao in 2014,” XCOR's chief executive officer, Jeff Greason, said today in a news release.

The news release characterized the deal as an "eight-figure" contract, meaning it's worth at least $10 million, but the precise value was not disclosed.

The going rate for rides on the Lynx is $95,000. Space Expedition Curacao co-founder Michiel Mol said his venture "has signed up 35 spaceflight participants since the beginning of April, with a goal to sell 50 before the holiday season." Mol said the customers included Victoria's Secret model Doutzen Kroes; San Francisco Giants batting coach (and Curacao native) Hensley Muelens; and Armin van Buuren, host of an internationally broadcast radio show titled "A State of Trance."

Other flights are to be purchased by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines for frequent-flier awards, educational incentives and vacation packages. The flight operation would be based at Curacao International Airport.

"We've been working hard on the infrastructure end of things as well," said Ben Droste, president and co-founder of Space Expedition Curacao. "Our relationship with Curacao Airport Holdings continues to be strong as they ready the facilities necessary to make this vision a reality. Things are now moving at an accelerated pace."

The commercial space industry is also advancing on other fronts, in Washington and California:

• NASA today unveiled its plan for the next step toward procuring commercial space transport services to carry astronauts to the International Space Station sometime around the middle of the decade. The draft request for proposals outlines a contract that would be awarded to multiple companies, to provide a complete end-to-end design for transportation services. The space agency would award an Integrated Design Contract valued at up to $1.61 billion and running from July 2012 through April 2014.

In a news release, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the newly released acquisition strategy serves as "further evidence we are committed to fully implementing our plan — as laid out in the Authorization Act — to outsource our space station transportation so NASA can focus its energy and resources on deep space exploration." 

The exact amount of money available for commercial crew development would be dependent on congressional appropriations, which are still in flux for fiscal 2012 and beyond.

NASA also said it was amending its existing agreements with two companies to fund optional milestones for the development of crew-capable vehicles. Sierra Nevada Corp. would be eligible for an additional $25.6 million if four optional milestones are reached, bringing the potential payout to $105.6 million. The Boeing Co., which was awarded up to $92.3 million this spring for design work on its CST-100 crew vehicle, could get another $20.6 million if it meets three optional milestones.

• The Spaceship Company, a joint venture involving Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, today announced the opening of a 68,000-square-foot facility in Mojave, Calif., for  producing SpaceShipTwo rocket planes and WhiteKnightTwo carrier planes. The facility — known as the Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar, or FAITH — will be where the vehicles are completed and tested prior to delivery to customers. The first customer is Virgin Galactic itself. Virgin Galactic is working its way toward powered SpaceShipTwo tests that would eventually cross the 100-kilometer space fontier. Virgin's billionaire founder, Richard Branson, said last week that the effort "on track for a launch within 12 months."

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Lab scientists are pitching a new high-tech laser that is able to detect roadside bombs before they explode, potentially thwarting the deadliest weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs, account for 60 percent of coalition soldiers' deaths, according to NATO figures. Finding a way to improve on — or at least replace — bomb sniffing dogs is therefore a priority abroad and at home. 

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Using lasers to do the dirty work is an ongoing effort. This latest approach combines short and long pulses of light to excite and "listen" to the fingerprint of individual molecules, allowing soldiers to pick out explosives in a crowded urban environment.

"We are using an ultrashort pulse that whenever it gets to the molecule at the target, it gives it a kick in a very, very short timescale," Marcos Dantus, who is leading the research at Michigan State University, explained to me on Monday. "The molecule starts vibrating." 

Dantus likened this vibration to an individual ring tone people might put on their cellphones. The longer laser pulse "listens" to this ring tone, allowing soldiers to know if the target is a bomb. 

The technique is so sensitive, he added, that it can distinguish between molecules that have the same chemical formula but a slight different arrangement of atoms. What's more, a laser no more powerful than the ones used during PowerPoint presentations is required for the technique to work. 

This differs from an approach Princeton University engineers unveiled this March that bounces ultraviolet pulses off chemicals in the air, carrying the fingerprint of the molecules.

"Our approach uses 100 times less energy per pulse, can detect much lower concentrations," Dantus noted in a follow-up email exchange. "Our method was designed for solid targets with approximately one -billionth of a gram of an explosive mixed with other compounds." 

The laser bomb sniffing technology is currently undergoing development in the laboratory. It has been shown to work at distances up to about 40 feet, though should be possible at distances of 330 feet. "Beyond that, we need engineers who know how to handle longer distances," Dantus said.

His team is currently seeking funding to bring the technology from the lab out into the field. If secured, Dantus said, it would take about a year to deploy a system that can function, for example, in a mobile unit. 

More stories on military technology:

• New laser detects bombs right out of thin air
• Bomb sniffing robots put to test in Iraq
• Military faces info overload from robot swarms
• Military plans hummingbird-sized spies
• Navy gets fix for speed need

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A paper on the laser technology appears in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters and is available here. The research is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

This must-see video condenses the International Space Station's night flight over Earth into 60 seconds, courtesy of science educator James Drake. He downloaded a series of 600 pictures from the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth — a voluminous archive of a half-century's worth of imagery from the space station and NASA's manned spacecraft. Then he assembled them into the clip you see here using VirtualDub software.

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The flight to the sunrise begins over the Pacific Ocean and zooms at an altitude of about 220 miles (350 kilometers) past Vancouver Island and Victoria, the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, Texas and Mexico, Central and South America. The highlights to watch for include constellations of city lights, lightning flashes in the clouds, the stars whirling in the night sky above, the faint brown-yellow atmospheric airglow that rims the eastern horizon, and the glorious dawn at the end.

For more of Drake's work, check out his Infinity Imagined website.

More amazing imagery from orbit:

• Atlantis' descent witnessed from the space station
• Solar storms spark beautiful blasts over Earth
• India-Pakistan border shines out into space
• Egypt's river of light snakes through the night
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures

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Tip o' the Log to Fraser Cain at Universe Today.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Last updated 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20:

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.

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"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."

Unraveling a retrovirus
For more than a decade, an international team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Such enzymes, known as retroviral proteases, play a key role in the virus' spread — and if medical researchers can figure out their structure, they could conceivably design drugs to stop the virus in its tracks. The strategy has been compared to designing a key to fit one of Mother Nature's locks.

The problem is that enzymes are far tougher to crack than your typical lock. There are millions of ways that the bonds between the atoms in the enzyme's molecules could twist and turn. To design the right chemical key, you have to figure out the most efficient, llowest-energy configuration for the molecule — the one that Mother Nature herself came up with.

That's where Foldit plays a role. The game is designed so that players can manipulate virtual molecular structures that look like multicolored, curled-up Tinkertoy sets. The virtual molecules follow the same chemical rules that are obeyed by real molecules. When someone playing the game comes up with a more elegant structure that reflects a lower energy state for the molecule, his or her score goes up. If the structure requires more energy to maintain, or if it doesn't reflect real-life chemistry, then the score is lower.

More than 236,000 players have registered for the game since its debut in 2008.

The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib's at the university, Frank DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. "This was one of the cases where his method wasn't able to solve it," Khatib said.

Fortunately, the challenge fit the current capabilities of the Foldit game, so Khatib and his colleagues put the puzzle out there for Foldit's teams to work on. "This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"

They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days," Khatib said.

One floppy loop of the molecule, visible on the left side of this image, was particularly tricky to figure out. But players belonging to the Foldit Contenders Group worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, low-energy model for the monkey-virus enzyme.

"Standard autobuilding and structure refinement methods showed within hours that the solution was almost certainly correct," the researchers reported in the paper published today. "Using the Foldit solution, the final refined structure was completed a few days later."

Khatib said the Seattle team's collaborators in Poland were in such a celebratory mood that they insisted on organizing a simultaneous champagne toast, shared over a Skype video teleconference.

"Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem," Khatib and his colleagues wrote.

The parts of the molecule that formed the floppy loop turned out to be of particular interest. "These features provide exciting opportunities for the design of retroviral drugs, including AIDS drugs," the researchers said.

Looking for new problems to solve
The monkey-virus puzzle solution demonstrates that Foldit and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of other scientific challenges — ranging from drug development to genetic engineering for future biofuels. "My hope is that scientists will see this research and give us more of those cases," Khatib said.

He's not alone in that hope. "Foldit shows that a game can turn novices into domain experts capable of producing first-class scientific discoveries," Zoran Popovic, director of University of Washington's Center for Game Science, said in today's news release. "We are currently applying the same approach to change the way math and science are taught in school."

That's something that Carter Kimsey, program director for the National Science Foundation's Division of Biological Infrastructure, would love to see happen. "After this discovery, young people might not mind doing their science homework," she quipped.

One caveat, though: Playing Foldit isn't exactly like playing Bejeweled. "Let's be honest, proteins aren't the sexiest video game out there," Khatib told me. Give the game a whirl, and let me know whether it's addictive or a drag.

Tale of a Contender
The final decisive move in the Foldit Contender Group's solution to the monkey-virus puzzle involved twisting around that floppy loop, or "flap," in the structure of the enzyme. The paper published today notes that one of the Contenders, nicknamed "mimi," built upon the work done by other gamers to make that move. I got in touch with mimi via email, and here's the wonderfully detailed response she sent back today from Britain:

"I have been playing Foldit for nearly three years, and I have been in the Contenders team for two and a half years.

"Although there are 35 names on the members list on the website, when you take off duplicate names and non-active players, it comes down to about 12 to 15 people.

"The team members come from a wide range of backgrounds, chiefly scientific or IT [information technology], although our best player is from neither.

"One of the main features of Foldit is the ability to communicate via chat within the game. There is both global chat, which everyone can access, and individual group chat, which allows team members to talk easily to one another. The Contenders are spread out between Canada, USA, UK, Europe and New Zealand, so this is essential.

"Each player can work on a solo solution to a puzzle, but we can also exchange solutions between the team and add our own improvements to achieve a better result. Often the evolved solution for a team scores higher than the top solo score.

"The game is not only an interesting intellectual challenge, allowing you to use your problem-solving skills, 'feel' for protein shapes, and whatever biochemical knowledge you have to obtain a solution to each puzzle, but it also provides a unique society of players driven by both individual and team rivalry with an overall purpose of improving the game and the results achieved. A body of knowledge has been built up in the Wiki by contributions from players, and ideas are constantly fed back to the game designers.

"In the case of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, I had looked at the structure of the options we were presented with and identified that it would be better if the 'flap' could be made to sit closer to the body of the protein — one of the basic rules of folding is to make the protein as compact as possible — but when I tried this with my solo solution, I couldn't get it to work. However, when I applied the same approach to the evolved solution that had been worked on by other team members, I was able to get it to tuck in, and that proved to be the answer to the structure. I believe that it was the changes made by my colleagues that enabled mine to work, so it was very much a team effort.

"We were all very excited to hear that we had helped to find the answer to this crystal form, especially since it had been outstanding so long and other methods had been unsuccessful. The feeling of having done something that could make a significant contribution to research in this field is very special and unexpected. Foldit players have achieved a number of successes so far, and I hope we will go on to make many more.

"You may be aware that we asked for accreditation for the Foldit Contenders Team within the article, rather than being named individually.

"Many of the people playing the game are known only by their user name, even within a team.

"I would be grateful if you could refer to me as 'mimi' rather than using my full name."

Update for 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20: I've added an MSNBC video about the Foldit project, and I've also heard back via email from another one of the Contenders, a player known as "Bletchley Park":

"We are all very excited about the discovery, to see the story unfold now is very gratifying. The main motivator of the Contenders group, and most Foldit players for that matter, is the advancement of science. It is very typical for mimi not to have her real name listed or even to claim the discovery as her own.

"Contenders is a group of like-minded individuals. The strength lies in comradeship, cooperation and perseverance. Most of us have been 'folding' for several hours each day over the past years.

"To be part of this adventure is a very fulfilling experience. Quite a few of us have or have had family members who suffered from the modern terminal diseases and find energy in those experiences to keep folding with the intention to make a difference."

More games for science:

• Play a game and engineer real RNA
• Fight disease by playing a game
• Xbox's Kinect could improve surgery
• Help scientists decipher a 'lost' gospel
• Join a worldwide planet search
• Look for icy worlds over the Internet
• Still more research games from Zooniverse
• SETI @ home and much more from BOINC

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In addition to Khatib, DiMaio, Cooper, Popovic and the Foldit Contenders Group, the authors of "Crystal Structure of a Monomeric Retroviral Protease Solved by Protein Folding Game Players" include the Foldit Void Crushers Group, Maciej Kazmierczyk, Miroslaw Gilski, Szymon Krzywda, Helena Zabranska, Iva Pichova, James Thompson, Mariusz Jaskolski and David Baker. The authors also acknowledged "the members of the Foldit team for their help designing and developing the game and all the Foldit players and Rosetta @ home volunteers who have made this work possible."

The work was supported by UW's Center for Game Science, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Czech Ministry of Education, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Microsoft Corp. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture involving Microsoft and NBC Universal.) Foldit was created by computer scientists at the Center for Game Science in collaboration with the UW's Baker Laboratory.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

The lines of debate over the future of space exploration are becoming clearer — and it doesn't necessarily add up to a pretty picture. NASA's $35 billion Space Launch System is just a piece of the puzzle: This week's developments also touch upon SpaceX, the James Webb Space Telescope and next-gen technologies. Here are a few not-so-easy pieces to muse over during the weekend:

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James Webb Space Telescope: A House panel stirred up a ruckus earlier this summer when it called for canceling the JWST, the grand observatory widely regarded as Hubble's heir. The problem is that the project is way behind schedule and over budget. Now the Senate Appropriations Committee has released its version of the fiscal 2012 bill that covers NASA's budget, and it provides just enough money to keep the JWST on track, based on NASA's current projections. Some observers are exulting that the next-gen telescope has been "saved," but there's a long way to go yet, including House-Senate budget negotiations.

Space Launch System: The same Senate bill follows through on the SLS plan that senators worked out with NASA and the White House. It would provide $3 billion during the next fiscal year ($1.8 billion for the rocket, $1.2 billion for the multipurpose crew vehicle), just as NASA projected. A $17 billion cost cap is also specified for work through fiscal 2017. That compares with NASA's estimate of $18 billion earlier in the week. New-space opposition to the SLS plan is continuing, with the Space Access Society and the Space Frontier Foundation weighing in against what they see as a money-gobbling white elephant. But one of the Senate bill's provisions would hold back $200 million of the $500 million allotted for NASA's commercial crew program unless NASA makes good on its promise to get to work on the SLS. For details on the Senate bill, check out the Space Politics blog and Space News.

SpaceX schedule: California-based SpaceX, which is arguably the country's most successful new-space venture, voiced support for the $500 million commercial crew plan laid out by the Senate bill. The company had been due to launch an uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station on Nov. 30, as the final test opening the way for U.S. cargo resupply flights in the post-shuttle era. But this week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that mission might have to be postponed until January or February, due to the launch delays caused by last month's problem with a Soyuz rocket. What's more, RIA Novosti quoted a Russian space official as saying that SpaceX does not have permission to dock with the space station. "So far, we have no proof that this spacecraft duly complies with the accepted norms of spaceflight safety," said Roscosmos' Alexei Krasnov. That led NASA to issue a Twitter retort: "A decision has yet to be made regarding the upcoming @SpaceXer test flight to ISS."  

Wild-card technologies: There's good news and bad news for space technology fans. First, the good news: NASA announced awards totaling up to $3 million to five companies working on solar electric propulsion, the kind of technology that many experts think will be needed for a mission to Mars. Today, NASA announced additional awards amounting to more than $3.7 million for two "game-changing" space technologies: beamed power (for ground-to-air and ground-to-ground applications) and next-generation lithium-ion batteries (for future space missions). Now for the bad news: The Senate bill for fiscal 2012 trims almost $400 million from President Barack Obama's $1.02 billion request for space technology initiatives. (The good news is that it's more than what the House bill would provide.)

How do you see the space picture shaping up? Feel free to add your comments below.

More puzzle pieces to ponder:

• Big questions about big rockets
• Some scientists balk at telescope bailout
• Is Apollo's past spoiling our future in space?
• Houston Chronicle SciGuy: A splash of cold water

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The best source for keeping up with the new space race is Clark Lindsey's RLV and Space Transport News. But if you're interested in this subject, you probably knew that already.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

The giant asteroid Vesta gets the all-around treatment in a new video from NASA's $466 million Dawn mission.

The two-minute visualization was created from imagery collected by the Dawn spacecraft's framing camera from a distance of about 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers). The Dawn team used all that imagery to figure out exactly how Vesta rotated on its axis, relative to celestial north and south.

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In today's video advisory, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the asteroid's prime meridian was defined using a 1,640-foot-wide (500-meter-wide) crater that they named "Claudia," after a prominent Roman vestal virgin from the second century B.C. Dawn's scientists decided that the craters they found on Vesta would be named after vestal virgins, who were the priestesses of the goddess Vesta in ancient Rome. Other features will be named for festivals and towns of the ancient Roman era.

The most prominent feature on Vesta is the huge circular depression at the asteroid's south pole, which is thought to have been created by a cosmic impact. The cliffs along the sides of the structure are several miles high, and a 9-mile-high (15-kilometer-high) mountain rises from the center. In the video above, you can hear Carol Raymond, the Dawn mission's deputy principal investigator, talk about the depression as well as Vesta's grooves and the "Snowman" crater chain.

Dawn is due to study Vesta from closer range over the next year, and then move on to a rendezvous with the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. Speaking of Ceres, this weekend is a fine time to go out with binoculars or a telescope and see the biggest thing in the main asteroid belt.

More about asteroids and dwarf planets:

• Dawn spacecraft gets down to work at Vesta (in 3-D)
• Asteroid or planet? NASA may settle Vesta debate
• Meet the solar system's dwarf planets
• Interactive: The new solar system

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Travel to almost anywhere in the world and chances are high that a bottle of Coke or Pepsi is close at hand. That's why the development and rollout of plastic bottles made with at least a portion of plant materials is potentially good news for the environment.

The Coca-Cola Co. made headlines in the UK on Mondaywith the rollout there of its plastic bottle made with up to 30 percent plant material. The bottle is an identical match with polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a type of recyclable plastic widely used around the world.

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The so-called PlantBottle is already found in markets from Brazil to Sweden. The UK addition keeps the company on track to reach its 2011 goal of shipping 5 billion of the bottles worldwide.

Meanwhile, the company's competitor, PepsiCo, reported in March that it has developed "the world's first PET plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources." The company plans to test the product in 2012 and, assuming all goes well, will move to full scale commercialization.

Departure from tradition
Both bottles are a departure from traditional PET, which is made with a variety of petroleum-based materials. The Coke bottle consists of a formula to make one of these components, mono-ethylene glycol (MEG), from plant material.

MEG accounts for about 30 percent of the weight of a PET bottle. The other 70 percent comes from purified terephthalic acid (PTA). PepsiCo "cracked the code" that allows for a 100 percent PET plant based plastic bottle, Rocco Papalia, a senior vice president of advanced research, told The Associated Press.

Darby Hoover, a resource specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, told me Friday that this molecular development makes the bottles "recyclable with regular fossil fuel derived PET" and that PET in their fossil fuel form are some of the plastic-recycling industry's biggest success stories.

For its part, the Coca Cola Co. said in a FAQ that it's working on the technology to develop PTA from plants, but it will take a few more years for a commercial breakthrough.

The innovation in the bottles, Hoover noted, is likely possible given the R&D budgets of the companies and could, potentially, influence other business. "The challenge is going to be will they enable companies to access the technology that makes it possible," she said.

Always, there are tradeoffs
Of course, using plants to make recyclable plastics has many of the same conundrums of using plants to make biofuels – that is, they compete for access to resources such as water, fertilizer and land, all of which can impact the availability and price of food.

Currently, the PlantBottle is made using sugarcane ethanol from Brazil, which has been criticized for eating away at the Amazon rain forest. Coca-Cola says they source their sugarcane ethanol from farms that "use effective cultivation processes."

PepsiCo's bottle is made from materials such as corn husks, switch grass, and pine bark, which in theory compete less with food crops for land and water. The Guardian notes that Scott Vitters, head of sustainable packaging at Coca Cola, has his eyes on those sources as well.

But even if the technology is made open source and the world's plastic bottles are all plant derived, the bioplastic PET bottles aren't perfect from an environmental point of view, Hoover said. For example, they could easily find themselves in the garbage patches of the sea.

"Something like this PlantBottle, which is made to be molecularly identical with fossil fuel derived PET, is going to be an equal concern as marine debris as a fossil fuel derived bottle," she said. "There're always tradeoffs and there's always going to be something that is a challenge."

More stories on the green future:

• Green cars of the future
• Ten hot green energy trends to watch
• Green energy ideas so crazy they just might work
• Eight hurdles on a track to a green energy future
• Robotic spy planes go green

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Hat tip to Tom Paulson's Humanosphere.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

After at least two episodes involving supposedly "magnetic" children in the Balkans who can hang spoons and forks from their chests, you'd think we'd wise up. But no. Yet another story about the phenomenon is going viral today: a report from Serbia about two kids with seemingly magnetic powers.

Four-year-old David Petrovic and his cousin, 6-year-old Luka Lukic, showed off the cutlery trick for journalists and doctors, and the doctors confessed that they were flummoxed.

"As far as I know, there is no medical or scientific explanation," The Associated Press quoted radiologist Mihajlo Dodic as saying.

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"Nobody can tell us why this is happening," said Luka's father, Slavisa Lukic.

Benjamin Radford could tell them. He's the author or "Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries," and he's already explained the "magnetic" powers exhibited by another Serbian boy named Bogdan as well as a Croatian boy named Ivan.

"They just crank 'em out over there, don't they?" Radford said today when told about the latest case.

The explanation is that kids are particularly good at attaching things to their bodies, because you have one smooth, sticky surface (hairless skin, with a slight sheen of sweat) adhering to another smooth surface.

"When you look at the things involved in these cases, they're all smooth," Radford said. "They're glass, they're plates, they're metal. You don't see rough surfaces. You don't see steel wool."

The trick may also involve a slight backward lean, to keep the spoon from falling off the chest or the nose. Or you can set the cutlery along the collar bones, as David is doing in the photo above.

One tip-off that the magnetic claims are bogus: The effect can be done with smooth, non-magnetic items such as plates or glasses. Another tip-off: The trick works only on bare, sticky skin, and it's spoiled if talcum powder is used or the kid puts on a shirt.

The AP story quotes Patrick Regan, a physics professor at the University of Surrey in Britain, as saying "humans are made of the wrong material to be magnetic." Even surgical implants tend to be made out of non-magnetic materials, such as titanium. Otherwise, they'd cause problems for MRI scans.

It is possible to levitate small animals by taking advantage of water's diamagnetic properties, provided you have a super-strong magnet. But that's definitely not what's going on in Serbia. 

The real question may very well be: Why are parents and the public magnetically attracted to stories like this? There's a special allure to the idea that some humans may well have special powers, whether it's Magneto in the "X-Men" saga or the German in the "Heroes" TV series. Both those characters were known for being able to control materials with magnetism.

Are the kids or the parents bent on perpetrating a hoax? Radford said that's not necessarily the case. "It's easy to overlook the fact that you can fool yourself. ... There are people who sincerely just don't think critically about this," he said. When amazing feats are reported in regions far removed from the global media infrastructure — the Balkan countryside, for instance — it can be easier to just go with the folk tale and dial down the skepticism.

So the tale of Serbia's magnetic boys makes for a good late-summer yarn. But an unexplained scientific mystery? Not so fast.

More 'unexplained' mysteries:

• That's no chupacabra! It's a mangy old fox
• Loch Ness monster-like shape filmed in Alaska
• UFO fans latch onto underwater anomaly
• Cosmic Log's 2012 archive: DON'T PANIC

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Last updated 1 a.m. ET Sept. 19:

NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is now expected to fall to Earth sometime between Sept. 22 and 24, orbital experts reported Friday.

That's toward the early end of the original projections for UARS' fiery descent: Last week, when NASA announced that the long-defunct, six-ton satellite would crash, the time frame was given as late September to early October. That wide window of possibilities was due to the uncertainties over atmospheric conditions. Now the picture is becoming clearer, said Nicholas Johnson, head of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office at Johnson Space Center in Texas.

"The sun has become very active since the beginning of this week, and it's accelerating the prediction," he told me.

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Higher solar activity heats and expands the upper atmosphere, creating more drag for satellites in decaying orbits. The increased drag pulls down those satellites more quickly — and that's what's behind the earlier prediction.

On Thursday, the prediction was revised to say the fall would come Sept. 24, plus or minus a day. On Friday, the time frame was revised again to put the fall at Sept. 23, plus or minus a day.

As of Friday, NASA's UARS status page said the bus-sized satellite's orbit was 140 by 155 miles (225 by 250 kilometers). That compares with 143 by 158 miles (230 by 255 kilometers) for Thursday, and 155 by 174 miles (250 by 280 kilometers) on Sept. 7. The figures suggest that the decay of the satellite's orbit is accelerating.

Other parts of the prediction remain in force: The satellite, which monitored atmospheric changes between 1991 and 2005 but was then put in a disposal orbit, could fall anywhere in latitude between northern Canada and southern South America. The biggest piece to survive the fall is expected to weigh about 300 pounds (150 kilograms), or roughly the weight of a refrigerator. Johnson says the chance that any piece of the satellite will hit anybody at all is 1-in-3,200, and the chance that you specifically would be hit is 1-in-20 trillion. (Unless you live in, say, Finland. Then there's zero chance.)

The minuscule chance that someone will be hit is largely due to the fact that most of our planet's area is empty of people.

When word of the revised prediction got out over Twitter, Astro Guyz blogger David Dickinson noted that UARS would make a series of nighttime passes over the southeastern U.S. starting Sept. 20 — which means it's possible Americans might see debris streaking through the skies when UARS falls. But at this point, there's no way to predict when that might be, so we'll just have to wait and watch.

Where's UARS now? This satellite-tracking page shows you its location in real time.

Update for 1 a.m. ET Sept. 19: NASA's prediction still calls for re-entry on Sept. 23, plus or minus a day. As of early Sunday, UARS' orbit was at 133 by 149 miles (215 by 240 kilometers).

More about space debris:

• Who'll get hit by a falling satellite
• Experts sound alarm about space junk
• Japan to go fishing for space debris

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Check NASA's UARS status page for updated information about the satellite's whereabouts, all the way to the end.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

The future of war at sea is looking fast and agile.

The U.S. Navy will christen on Saturday a catamaran-style cargo ship that can zip through shallow waters at speeds up to 40 miles per hour, loaded down with 1.2 million pounds worth of gear.

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The joint high speed vessel, named Spearhead, is the first of ten 338-foot-long aluminum dual-hull boats that are being constructed by Austral USA in Mobile, Ala., as part of a contract worth a reported $1.6 billion.

The company is also under a $3.5 billion contract to build ten trimaran Littoral Combat Ships, which can cruise at more than 45 miles per hour.

This need for speed stems from a desire for ships to operate in near-shore environments in the post Cold-War era, explained Loren Thompson, a defense analyst and chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

"The Navy decided that its future was going to be mainly about influencing developments ashore," he told me Thursday. "It therefore started thinking about what sorts of vessels could survive close to shore and the conclusion it came to was speed mattered a lot."

Fast ships, for example, can outrun enemy warships and torpedoes, and the nimble agility of these new boats also allow quick maneuvers to dodge other types of dangers, Thompson added.

The JHSV being christened on Saturday in Mobile can berth 146 passengers and carry an additional 312 in airline-style seating. A flight deck allows helicopters and rotary air vehicles to take off and land. It has a range of more than 1,380 miles.

The ship is essentially a giant ferry, Thompson noted, and neither it nor the [Littoral] combat ship was "designed with the goal of conducting highly-classified sensitive missions. They were designed with the goal of getting around fast."

The highly-classified missions could be conducted by ships such as the stealthy Ghost, being produced by Juliet Marine in New Hampshire.

More on military tech:

• New stealth boat touted as ideal for special ops
• Navy testing two pricey, super-fast warships
• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy raygun disables boat with new high energy laser

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

 

Planet-hunters say they've detected the first world that's absolutely known to circle two stars, like Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in the fictional "Star Wars" saga.

"Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality," said Carnegie Institution astronomer Alan Boss, a member of the team for NASA's Kepler mission and a co-author of a paper on the discovery in the journal Science.

To mark the occasion, NASA invited John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic, the special-effects company behind the "Star Wars" movies, to sit in on today's announcement. "When I was a kid, I didn't think it was going to be possible to make discoveries like this," Knoll told journalists.

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Tatooine serves as the setting for the first movie in the series, released in 1977 and now subtitled "A New Hope." The saga's main character, Luke Skywalker, could watch a double-sunset as he toiled in the desert on his uncle's moisture farm, aided by his trusty robots C-3PO and R2-D2.

Luke probably couldn't stand on the surface of Kepler-16b, which orbits a red and an orange star in the constellation Cygnus, 200 light-years from Earth. It certainly wouldn't be a desert. The planet is most like Saturn in our own solar system — too cold for life as we know it, most likely with a thick, gassy atmosphere. "This one's just outside the habitable zone," the paper's lead author, SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle, told me.

But if Han Solo were to park the Millennium Falcon on one of Kepler-16b's hypothetical moons, there'd be plenty of double-sunsets. In fact, because the two suns orbit each other, each sunset would bring a different configuration, with the small red sun occasionally crossing over the larger orange one. "You might get two eclipses every 41 days," Doyle said.

How the Tatooine planet was found
It's the complex crossings of the suns and the planet that tipped off Doyle and his colleagues to Kepler-16b's existence. NASA's Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, stares at a 105-square-degree patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for the telltale signs of something dark moving across a star. Kepler watches for periodic dips in the light coming from 155,000 stars. When those dips are detected, scientists use sophisticated software to figure out if the pattern could be caused by a planet.

One of the big challenges is that such dips can also be caused by one of the companions in a double-star system crossing over the other one. This is what's known as an eclipsing binary. The Kepler team has found hundreds of eclipsing binaries, including Kepler 16 — but scientists saw something extra in Kepler 16's pattern of dimming and brightening. "We saw extra dips in the light curve," Doyle recalled.

In the Science paper and 12 pages of supporting material, the Kepler scientists describe the painstaking process used to figure out what was behind those extra dips. They analyzed the pattern of the dips, as well as the varying lengths of time it took for objects to cross over each other (a method known as transit timing variation, or TTV). That resulted in a gravitational model demonstrating that the pattern could only be caused by a planet and two suns passing across each other repeatedly, as seen from Earth's point of view.

The team found that Kepler-16b is almost exactly a third as massive as Jupiter, and three-quarters as wide — which makes it comparable to Saturn. It's somewhat denser than Saturn, but not quite as dense as water — which suggests it's half-gassy (with a helium-hydrogen atmosphere) and half-heavy (with an icy-rocky core).

Both of the two suns are smaller and dimmer than our own sun, and they orbit each other once every 41 days. The Kepler-16b planet is in a nearly circular orbit around both stars. It takes 229 days to make one circuit at a distance of 65 million miles — which is similar to the parameters for Venus' 225-day orbit. Because the twin suns are dimmer, Kepler-16b is colder than Venus, with an estimated surface (or cloud-top) temperature of -100 to -150 degrees Fahrenheit (170 to 200 Kelvin).

"You better have your long underwear," Boss joked.

Doyle said it was lucky that Kepler happened to be watching now. The orbital characteristics are such that the planet-sun transits won't be visible from Earth starting in the 2014 time frame. "In 2018, the primary transits will stop for 24 years. And in 2014, the secondary transits will stop for 45 years. Delay Kepler, and a lot wouldn't have happened," he said. 

Looking back and looking ahead
The Kepler team says Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a planet orbiting two stars. Several years ago, astronomers wondered whether binary-star systems, which make up more than half of our Milky Way's stellar population, would be too unstable to harbor planets for long. Since then, theoretical models have shown that double-sunset planets could be far more common than previously thought.

There have been a number ofl tentative reports of double-star planets. Last year, astronomers reported detecting a "Tatooine planet" that orbited one of the stars in a binary-star system. That research team used a different analysis method known as astrometry.

Boss said the case for Kepler-16b was more solid, not only because it orbited two stars in a close-in binary system, but also because Kepler's transit observations were "rock-hard solid."

"With astrometric observations, you're always a bit uncertain if it's real," Boss said.

Beyond the "Star Wars" angle, Kepler-16b is significant because it shows once again that a wide variety of star systems can foster planets, and perhaps habitable planets at that. "This is an example of another planetary system, a completely different type that no one's ever seen before," Doyle said. "That's why people are making a big deal out of this."

William Borucki, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center who serves as the Kepler mission's principal investigator, said the research "confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life."

"Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars," Borucki said in a NASA news release. "This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

Doyle said Kepler-16b almost certainly will not be the last double-sunset planet discovered by the $600 million Kepler mission. When the numbers all added up, "I didn't feel like it's the end of 20 years of searching ... it felt like the beginning of something" he said. "I predict that in the next couple of months, we're going to have some more."

But time's running out for Kepler. Boss noted that the current mission plan calls for the telescope to be "out of business one year from now." That would be a shame, Boss said, because it looks as if it will take longer than expected for Kepler to get the data to identify Earthlike planets in Earthlike orbits around sunlike stars — which is the mission's prime objective. The reason for that is that the readings from alien suns are unusually noisy. "It turns out that most stars are not as quiet as the sun," Boss said.

Kepler's scientists are already talking about seeking an extension of the mission. That could be a challenge in this era of tightening budgets, but Boss argues that it could be a long time before NASA gets another opportunity to launch a planet-hunting mission.

"Kepler has become, in essence, our only Terrestrial Planet Finder," Boss said. "This is it, for the foreseeable future."

Extra credit: Doyle says that anyone with a good telescope (8-inch mirror or larger) and a CCD camera could record a Kepler 16 planetary transit next June 28 from China and other parts of northeastern Asia. The light from the star system would be seen to dip by about 1.7 percent, if observers train their telescopes on the stars at just the right time. "They'll be able to measure the next transit since the discovery of the planet," Doyle said.

More about weird planets:

• Q&A with planet hunter Laurance Doyle
• 'Super-Earth' just might support life
• Planetary six-pack poses a puzzle
• Probe finds planetary 'missing link'
• Planets spotted in changing orbits
• 'Invisible' planet spotted with new technique
• Looking for alien Earths? Here they come
• Cosmic Log archive on the Kepler mission
• Search for Kepler planets on msnbc.com

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This report was last updated at 5:20 p.m. ET.

In addition to Doyle and Boss, the authors of "Kepler-16: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet" include Joshua A. Carter, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Robert W. Slawson, Steve B. Howell, Joshua N. Winn, Jerome A. Orosz, Andrej Prsa, William F. Welsh, Samuel N. Quinn, David Latham, Guillermo Torres, Lars A. Buchhave, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Jonathan J. Fortney, Avi Shporer, Eric B. Ford, Jack J. Lissauer, Darin Ragozzine, Michael Rucker, Natalie Batalha, Jon M. Jenkins, William J. Borucki, David Koch, Christopher K. Middour, Jennifer R. Hall, Sean McCauliff, Michael N. Fanelli, Elisa V. Quintana, Matthew J. Holman, Douglas A. Caldwell, Martin Still, Robert P. Stefanik, Warren R. Brown, Gilbert A. Esquerdo, Sumin Tang, Gabor Furesz, John C. Geary, Perry Berlind, Michael L. Calkins, Donald R. Short, Jason H. Steffen, Dimitar Sasselov, Edward W. Dunham, William D. Cochran, Michael R. Haas, Derek Buzasi and Debra Fischer.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

NASA, the White House and congressional leaders say they're happy about a big new rocket design for going beyond Earth orbit, but many observers of the commercial space industry are already wondering whether this $35 billion trip is necessary.

They worry that the newly announced Space Launch System, or SLS, will soak up too much of NASA’s budget and preclude the development of next-generation technologies such as on-orbit refueling stations for outbound spacecraft. A different approach might not require the decade-long development of a super-rocket, and still open the way for journeys to Mars well before the 2030-2040 time frame laid out in NASA's current plan for future spaceflight.

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These critics say the program satisfies the mandates and timetables specified by jobs-conscious members of Congress, but may not satisfy America's long-term aspirations in outer space. They fear that a lengthy, expensive development program could be canceled by a future administration, just as NASA's Constellation back-to-the-moon program was canceled by the Obama White House.

"This has got to be stopped," said Charles Lurio, an independent space consultant who publishes The Lurio Report. "This is insanity."

Lurio is one of the more caustic critics of the big-rocket approach to human spaceflight. He has joked that the SLS and its crew-carrying Orion capsule, also known as the Multipurpose Crew Vehicle or MPCV, should be renamed the "Senate Launch System" and the “Missing-purpose Crew Vehicle.” But he's not alone. Here are some of the questions being raised about the road ahead:

• RLV and Space Transport News' Clark Lindsey says NASA should have gone through "a competitive process for determining the best options for a deep-space exploration program. ... If after a competitive process, NASA was nevertheless forced to go with a sub-optimal architecture because of congressional directives, this at least would have been obvious to everyone."
• Behind the Black's Robert Zimmerman lists five previous NASA spaceflight initiatives that ended up going nowhere, at a cost of billions upon billions of dollars. "To be really blunt, this new rocket, like all its predecessors, will never fly either," he writes. "It costs too much, will take too long to build, and will certainly be canceled by a future administration before it is finished."
• Eleven Point Two's Paul Wren notes that the SLS is projected to be ready to launch 70-metric-ton payloads by 2017, at an estimated cost of $18 billion. (Billions more would be spent to prepare for manned flights starting in 2021 or so.) Meanwhile, SpaceX is projected to be ready to launch 53-ton payloads on its Falcon Heavy rocket by 2012, with each launch expected to cost between $80 million and $125 million. "So why are we gutting the rest of NASA's dwindling budget to fund the SLS?" Wren asks.
• Popular Mechanics contributor Rand Simberg doesn't think SLS will face smooth sailing through Congress, particularly if SpaceX comes through with its Falcon Heavy and the fuel-depot concept gains traction. "Without a course correction, SLS could already be on the way to cancellation, like Constellation before it," he writes.
• SpaceRef's Keith Cowing says that "what is still lacking in this whole story is exactly what NASA will do with this big rocket. Missions to asteroids, Mars, etc., are often tossed out by NASA representatives — but no timeline whatsoever has yet to be presented, not even a 'notional' one."

If there is a debate over the go/no-go decision on the SLS, it will probably fall along these lines: Could commercial space providers such as SpaceX, or the Boeing Co., or Lockheed Martin, come up with cheaper, faster, more innovative ways to send astronauts into deep space? Or is the SLS plan, which relies on updated versions of components from past space programs, the surer way to go?

"It's not fair to say this is really a rocket built from shuttle parts," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations. "This is really these components used in a new and novel way."

NASA's big-rocket plan is likely to get high-profile endorsements next week during a House committee hearing featuring the first and last man to walk on the moon (Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Apollo 17's Gene Cernan) as well as former NASA chief Mike Griffin. It sounds as if NASA officials, White House budgeteers and congressional leaders are all on board. Is this the most realistic plan for going beyond Earth orbit? Realistic or not, is it a fait accompli? What do you think?

More about future spaceflight:

• NASA makes a deal for another new rocket
• Is America's space effort dying or evolving?
• SpaceX chief sets his sights on Mars
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race 

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For an hourlong dose of unconventional thinking about space policy, check out this "Virtually Speaking Science" podcast featuring Transterrestrial Musing's Rand Simberg and yours truly.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

The hit movie "Contagion" focuses on a fictional killer outbreak that spreads from bats to humans, but a real-life killer is taking the reverse route.

The Hollywood outbreak is based on a real pathogen, the Nipah virus, which originates in bats and can be passed through pigs to humans. The so-called paramyxovirus has been implicated in more than a dozen outbreaks in South Asia. The filmmakers behind "Contagion" merely turned up the dials on the bug's virulence to produce the plot's pandemic.

The real pandemic is afflicting bats, not humans. Biologists are seeing evidence that humans are behind the spread of Geomyces destructans, a fungus that's linked to the bat-killing disease known as white-nose syndrome. In some areas of the northeastern United States, white-nose syndrome is wiping out 90 to 100 percent of the brown-bat population.

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Scientific sleuths have traced the disease to the batty equivalent of "Patient Zero": a cave in upstate New York where bats with white noses were first noticed in 2006. When bats started dying, the connection to the white nose led to a determination that Geomyces destructans was playing a role.

"Scientists in Europe said, 'We have bats that are exhibiting similar symptoms, but we're not having the same problem with mortality,'" said Ann Froschauer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who focuses on white-nose syndrome. "One of the leading hypotheses is that recreational cavers potentially brought the fungus from Europe and carried it here."

The suspicion is that fungal spores survived the trip and took root in the New York cave, where the cold and damp conditions were well-suited for the fungus. The effect on bats in the Northeast was eerily similar to the "Contagion" virus' effect on Hollywood actors.

"Once this fungus made its way into our caves in the U.S., it was the 'perfect storm,'" Froschauer explained. "The environmental conditions were right for the fungus to start growing, and bats here don't have any immunity."

The bats were more vulnerable because they were hit by G. destructans while they were hibernating, when their immune reactions were suppressed. And even if one batch of bats is wiped out, the fungus can remain in the caves, waiting for the next wave of bats to move in and spread the disease.

So far, biologists have found signs of white-nose syndrome in 17 states and four Canadian provinces. An international task force, led by the Fish and Wildlife Service and including representatives from more than 100 agencies and organizations, is trying to figure out what to do about the problem, Froschauer said. Among the potential options: holding bats in captivity over the winter to keep them away from the fungus, closing caves to human visitors, developing antifungal treatments, and even cryopreservation of bat sperm and eggs to allow for in vitro reproduction.

Wouldn't the world be better off without bats? Although you might not know it from their Hollywood image, bats do way more good than harm. No joke: A study published in the April 1 issue of the journal Science pointed out that bats are "voracious predators" of insects that include many crop and forest pests. Without bats, North America's economy would suffer agricultural losses amounting to more than $3.7 billion a year, the researchers said. Some have called them the "unsung heroes of organic farming."

Froschauer sees "Contagion" as an opportunity to do some consciousness-raising about the fate of a species that doesn't usually get much sympathy.

"Historically, they've always gotten a bad rap, and especially at this time of year, when we're often dealing with rabies reports," she told me. "In popular culture, they've always had this negative image."

Ali Khan, an assistant surgeon general who leads the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agrees that bats are classic bad guys.

"They make the best bogeymen, no doubt about it," he joked. "Better than Freddy Krueger."

Nipah virus and rabies aren't the only pathogens linked to bats, Khan pointed out. Researchers believe that fruit bats are the natural reservoir for the Ebola and Marburg viruses, which cause deadly hemorrhagic fevers in humans. Bats are also thought to be a natural host for viruses similar to the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

But bats aren't the only suspect when it comes to species-jumping diseases. The list also include pigs and birds (implicated in 2009's global outbreak of H1N1 swine flu) as well as monkeys (implicated in the long-running HIV epidemic), mice (linked to hantavirus) and rats (linked to the Black Death in the Middle Ages).

Khan told me that "Contagion" has stirred up a lot of interest among the press and the public in the question, "Could this really happen?"

"Not only 'could this really happen,' but it routinely happens," he answered, "not just to the magnitude seen in the movie — except perhaps during the 1918 flu pandemic or the Black Death."

Like Froschauer, Khan sees "Contagion" as a teachable moment for epidemiologists — and now that he's seen the movie, he gives it a big thumbs-up. "They did as good a job as you could expect for Hollywood," he said.

That shouldn't be surprising when you consider that the film's actors visited the CDC headquarters in Atlanta to chat with Khan and other experts. "When Kate Winslet said, 'This is what an R-naught is,' I thought, 'I taught her that!'" Khan said.

Khan realizes that Hollywood requires villains as well as heroes to tell a good story, but he nevertheless wanted to clear up a couple of things about the way the movie portrayed epidemiologists doing their jobs:

• "In the movie, the Department of Homeland Security comes off as the bogeyman, at least in the early part of the movie. In our operation, there's excellent collaboration with Homeland Security and particularly with FEMA."
• "It seems like there's just a handful of people who solve this whole mystery, and that definitely isn't true to form. There are hundreds of people involved in this operation. We don't send Kate Winslet all by herself to deal with a global pandemic."

Then Khan had a darker thought. "Maybe that's the future situation, if there are continued CDC [budget] cuts," he said. "There will be no one available to go out and deal with pandemics."

Now that would be a scary movie.

More about 'Contagion,' bats and public health:

• 'Contagion' leaves CDC's real scientists eager for details
• 'Contagion' billboards painted with creepy microbes 
• Keep on top of infectious diseases with msnbc.com
• More on white-nose syndrome from msnbc.com

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

U.S. citizens may soon reach into their pants to elect their next president, according to researchers studying the feasibility of using smartphone technology to enable online voting.

Reporters have spilled their share of digital ink covering the future of electronic voting since the botched U.S. presidential election in 2000. Casting votes over the Internet is fraught with security concerns such as ballot fraud and voter identification.

 

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Despite these concerns, e-voting has made some inroads around the world. In 2005, Estonia held the first election where online voting was allowed and is planning to include mobile phone voting this fall. During the 2008 election, a few U.S. soldiers stationed overseas were allowed to vote over the Internet and 32 percent of voters used machines that recorded their votes electronically.

 

But e-voting technology has yet to really take off as envisioned in the U.S., in part because security concerns limited research efforts on the efficiency — or usability — of such systems. And usability — think the poorly-designed butterfly ballots — was a primary cause of the 2000 election debacle.

While security concerns will continue to be of paramount importance for future e-voting schemes, researchers are beginning to study the usability of smartphones, which more and more of us carry around in our pants and purses, as the voting machine of the future.

The gadgets "could increase voter participation, reduce election administration costs, and allow voters to interact with familiar technology," write Bryan Campbell of Rice University and colleagues in a paper to be presented next week at the annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

In the study, the team asked 55 people to vote on two types of systems: an iPhone and either a traditional online voting platform or paper ballot. They found that voting with a smartphone takes a bit longer — about 90 seconds — but users committed fewer errors than they did on the other systems.

The results of the study, the authors say, should help guide efforts for designing mobile voting platforms of the future, a platform that could one day be used to elect our future leaders. For now, though, elections will continue to be won or lost, for the most part, the old-fashioned way.

More on e-voting:

• E-voting, we hardly knew you
• Sparks fly in e-voting debate
• Problems seen in American's e-voting overseas
• Princeton prof hacks e-vote machine

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

Our planet has managed to dodge the potential ill effects from a string of solar storms over the past couple of weeks ... while still enjoying the wonders.

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The region on the sun's disk known as sunspot 1283 has been spouting off with one flare after another, earning it the title of "Old Faithful" among solar physicists. Old Faithful has thrown off several coronal mass ejections, which are outbursts of solar particles that stream through the solar system at speeds of a million miles per hour. If a powerful outburst hits Earth's magnetic field were to hit just wrong, that could cause problems for satellite operations, communication links and electrical grids.

One of the most famous disruptions in recent times was the Hydro-Quebec blackout of 1989, caused by a huge disturbance in space weather. Back in 1859, an even bigger solar storm flashed through daylight skies and set telegraph wires sizzling. Some observers say such an event would blow out civilization's fuses if it happened today, but experts downplay the chances of seeing a solar doomsday anytime soon.

Solar activity is definitely on the upswing toward an expected maximum in 2013, but so far, we haven't seen any direct hits on the magnetosphere. Instead, we're seeing a series of glancing blows that have set off beautiful auroral displays in the upper atmosphere, like the show that photographer Sylvain Serre captured from northern Quebec on Sept. 3.

"For the first time of the season, there was a clear sky in the northern village of Ivujivik (the highest point in Quebec)," Serre wrote in a note to SpaceWeather.com. "So I went outside with a friend to take a little walk and to get more familiar with the landscape around here. Fortunately, the northern lights were very bright, dense and colorful."

For the camera buffs out there, Serre used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 16-35mm lens set at f/2.8 and 4000 ISO, at exposures ranging from 10 to 25 seconds. Check out the SpaceWeather gallery or Serre's website for still more thrilling views of the northern lights.

For a completely different perspective on the aurora, feast your eyes on this view of the southern lights, as seen by NASA astronaut Ron Garan from the International Space Station over the weekend. The space station's Italian-built Leonardo storage module is visible in the foreground.

Garan has had the good fortune to see a wide range of glorious phenomena during his time in orbit — including the Perseid meteor shower, as viewed from above, and an astronaut's-eye view of Atlantis' historic descent to the last-ever space shuttle landing. He's been sharing these and other visual treats via his Twitpic account as well as his Fragile Oasis website.

Garan promises that better pictures of the aurora are "coming soon." But those pictures might have to wait until after he lands back on Earth on Friday aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. "I have thousands of pictures for Twitter when back from space," he wrote on Monday. "You've seen just the tip of the iceberg."

As a parting shot, here's the final installment of Garan's "Cupola Corner" video series with fellow NASA astronaut Mike Fossum:

More views of auroras and space sights:

• Northern lights caught on video
• From U.S. to Paris with the northern lights
• Familiar sights from alien heights
• Space station takes center stage
• Month in Space: Still more beautiful blasts

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Electric vehicles outfitted with a $10 computer chip can help streamline the addition of wind power to the electric grid, according to a study that shows how the two types of technology could piece together the puzzle of our green energy future.

One of the biggest hurdles utilities face with the addition of wind power and other renewable sources of energy to the grid is where and how to store excess generation for use when people actually need it. Until that happens, if the wind blows when nobody needs electricity, for example, the energy is wasted.

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"If I could wave my magic wand and have anything, new types of technology that allow you to store large amounts of energy cheaply would be fantastic," Steve Kern, a power supply and environmental affairs officer with Seattle City Light, told me along with a group of reporters this July on a trip sponsored by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Kern was speaking at a hydropower dam in the North Cascades that supplies 17 percent of Seattle's electricity. The utility occasionally lets water spill over the dam instead of through its turbines because there is no place to store the excess generated electricity.

Despite the storage limitations, Renewable Portfolio Standards require utilities to add more sources of energy such as wind to the grid. In the Pacific Northwest, 10 gigawatts of wind power will come online by 2019, for example. The conundrum is how to effectively manage the wind's fickleness.

EVs absorb the wind
The new study put out by the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory shows that plug-in electric vehicles equipped with so-called Grid Friendly charging technology could help utilities better utilize this additional wind energy.

The technology essentially ramps up and down the rate at which the battery is charged depending on availability of electricity, Michael Kintner-Myer, a staff scientist at the lab and a co-author of the new report, told me on Monday.

The chip, which is added to the vehicle battery or charging station, reads the signal of the voltage and current at the outlet, he explained. Utilities in the United States try to maintain this metric, called frequency, at 60 hertz.

When there's more demand for electricity than is being generated, the frequency drops. When there is more generation than needed, like when the wind blows in the middle of the night, the frequency speeds up.

"We are evaluating what the frequency is … and in the over-generation mode we really ramp up the charging current to its maximum and if it is under generation, we ramp it down," Kintner-Myer explained.

This starting and stopping of the charging cycle allows electric vehicles to absorb the excess wind power when it is generated. Doing so reduces the need for backup power plants to keep the grid in balance, according to PNNL.

This grid-friendly approach contrasts with another, potentially more robust, load management system known as vehicle-to-grid technology, which maintains a two-way communication between the car battery and the electric grid.

In this scenario, the battery is a storage device as well as a generator, providing electricity to the grid when demand rises. This causes more wear and tear on batteries and requires a more complex and expensive integration with the grid, according to Kintner-Myer.

"From a cost-benefit process, I think we have a higher value," he added.

This benefit of the Grid Friendly approach comes if about 13 percent, or 2.1 million vehicles in the Northwest Power Pool, which covers Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming, are equipped with the technology, according to the PNNL study.

In addition, about 10 percent of the cars would need access to charging stations during the day in order to absorb excess wind energy. "That means for utilizing these vehicles for grid applications, you don't have to have a one-to-one ratio of public-to-private charging stations," Kintner-Myer said, noting that has been a concern within the energy industry.

His team is negotiating with a public utility in the Pacific Northwest to demonstrate the feasibility of the technology, which he said is available today. In fact, similar chips were tested in home appliances on the Olympic Peninsula a few years ago.

No silver bullet
Kern, with Seattle City Light, told me today that the Grid Friendly technology can help, "but it is not going to be the silver bullet" he longs for.

One problem from the utility perspective, he noted, is an obligation to customers to provide power when they want and need it. And, for most owners of electric vehicles, that means when cars are parked in the garage at night.

So, if electric-vehicle owners plug in their cars but the wind's not blowing, "I still have to have the underlying supply to backstop that wind," he noted

More on wind, electric vehicles, and battery storage:

• Electric cars powered by wind set for Denmark
• Store wind energy for later? Idea still inefficient
• NASA's battery know how powers electric cars
• Electric cars meet the real world
• Your EV battery may end up on a farm

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

NASA and ATK, the Utah-based company that built solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle, have announced a deal to work together on the development of a new commercial rocket.

Today's Space Act agreement, which runs through next March, does not call for NASA to pay ATK. In fact, it's conceivable that ATK could pay NASA for services rendered at Kennedy Space Center in Florida or elsewhere. But eventually ATK hopes that the Liberty rocket, built in cooperation with Europe's EADS Astrium aerospace consortium, will be used to send astronauts to the International Space Station, with NASA paying the cost.

"This is going to be the home of Liberty," Kent Rominger, vice president of strategy and business development for ATK Aerospace, told journalists at Kennedy Space Center during a news briefing.

That means ATK would have to buddy up with a spaceship company, such as the Boeing Co. (with its CST-100 crew vehicle) or Sierra Nevada Corp. (with its Dream Chaser space plane). ATK sees today's agreement as a way to get through the door and make its pitch to those future spaceship providers.

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Rominger said the Liberty rocket could be used by any of the space taxis currently being considered for NASA's use.

ATK, or Alliant Techsystems, is already testing a modified version of its four-segment solid rocket booster for NASA's future use. The latest on-the-ground engine test went off successfully just last week in Utah. Beefed-up versions of the booster could be used not only as part of the Liberty launch system but also as part of NASA's more powerful Space Launch System, which is still in the planning stage.

The company had been working on a five-segment version of the booster for NASA's Ares 1 rocket as an element to support NASA's Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon, but Ares 1 went by the wayside when the back-to-the-moon effort was canceled. Today's agreement could lead to a revival of at least a part of the Ares 1 program under a different name. 

Between now and next March, ATK and NASA would work together on the design of the Liberty rocket. The current design calls for the five-segment booster to serve as Liberty's first stage, with an adapted version of Europe's workhorse Ariane 5 rocket serving as the second stage. The rocket would be capable of lifting 44,000 pounds (20 metric tons) to low-Earth orbit, ATK says.

Although the company is working on hardware at its Utah facilities, no hardware would be delivered to NASA under the terms of the current agreement, Rominger said. "Right now, it's paper," he said.

Ed Mango, NASA's commercial crew program manager, said the Liberty project provided an "outstanding opportunity" for international cooperation in the post-shuttle era.

John Schumacher, vice president of space programs for EADS North America, told journalists that the Liberty concept "brings together the best of U.S. and European launch capabilities."

The Liberty rocket was proposed as an option for NASA development funding during the current phase of commercial crew vehicle development, but it lost out in that $269.3 million competition to four other firms that were building spacecraft: Boeing, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX. ATK hopes to partner with spaceship builders to win NASA funding in the next phase of the commercial crew development program, or CCDev.

"We're talking to everybody that we can," Rominger said. Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada have said they are initially aiming to use United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 vehicle, which is already supported by a Space Act agreement similar to ATK's. SpaceX plans to use its own Falcon 9 rocket. Rominger acknowledged that SpaceX was not in the market for Liberty, but he voiced hope that ATK could strike a deal with other spaceship companies.

"We believe pricing-wise for the performance, nobody can match what Liberty can do," he said.

Other tidbits:

• Rominger said "our best guess" is that the first stage of the Liberty development effort would bring 300 jobs to Florida. Mango estimated that 50 individuals at NASA may be involved in the work with ATK under the Space Act agreement, but not full-time.
• The testing schedule for Liberty depends on NASA's future awards for the next phase of CCDev, but Rominger said the rocket could be ready by the time any spaceship was ready for flight. NASA is targeting the middle of the decade as the time frame for such flights. ATK's news release says Liberty could be ready for its first test flight in 2014, leading to a crewed flight for the third launch in 2015.
• If ATK loses out in the commercial crew vehicle competition, there would still be a business case for Liberty, "but it's not as strong," Rominger said. The rocket could also be used for launching satellites or transporting cargo to the International Space Station, he said.

More about the commercial space race:

• Amazon's Jeff Bezos reports crash of Blue Origin rocket ship
• SpaceX looks for an extra rocket base
• Is America's space effort dying, or evolving?
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Extreme-sports junkies, meet Paraswift, the robot that wants to be as cool as you. It is able to climb the walls of tall buildings, jump off and deploy a parachute to soften the landing.

The base-jumping robot was built with entertainment value in mind, though the point-of-view footage captured by its onboard video cameras could find practical use in creating 3D models of the environment.

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"For example, with Google Street View, at street level, trees and pedestrians could obscure the view," Lukas Geisssmann, a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, told New Scientist.

 

The robot, he noted, could scurry up the sides of nearby buildings and get aerial views that could be used to complete the picture.

ETH built the Paraswift in collaboration with Disney Research. Geissmann presented the robot earlier this month at the Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines in Paris. 

To stick to the wall as it climbs, Paraswift uses an impeller, a rotor spinning in a tube that creates a mini-tornado-like vortex that's essentially a partial vacuum.

Other robots climb using snake-like articulations to wrap themselves around scaffolding, or magnetic adhesion to climb metallic surfaces, or even mimic the stickiness of a gecko's foot to climb walls.

One of the advantages of Paraswift's impeller vacuum-like suction is its ability to cling to a variety of surfaces and then, when it's ready, deploy a parachute and jump.

Unlike some thrill-seeking base jumpers, the robot deploys its parachute before turning off its impeller and leaping from the building.

Despite the extra caution before leaping, its landing, at least from the video above, doesn't look entirely soft. That's Ok, says ETH, since Paraswift is encased in a shell of fiber-reinforced plastic to protect the robot against impact.

More stories on robots:

• Climbing no obstacle for snakebots
• Robot finds hidden hieroglyphs inside pyramid
• Meet Treebot, the tree-climbing forest sentinel
• Rescue robots made just for mine disasters

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

European astronomers have announced the discovery of more than 50 new planets beyond our solar system, including 16 that are just a notch above our own planet in mass. They say their record-breaking findings suggest that more than half of the stars like our sun possess planets, and that many of those worlds are less massive than Saturn.

The pick of the litter is a planet that's already been in the spotlight: HD 85512 b, a world at least 3.6 times as massive as Earth that's located 36 light-years away in the constellation Vela. HD 85512 b is the only one of the 16 super-Earths on today's list that is located in its star system's habitable zone. That's the area around a star where scientists believe water could exist in liquid form, which would make a rocky planet potentially livable.

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HD 85512 b's status came to light a couple of weeks ago in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but the team behind the discovery provided more details about that super-Earth and the dozens of other worlds in papers presented today at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Wyoming.

The findings came from the team behind the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, which is installed at the European Southern Observatory's 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) La Silla Observatory in Chile.

"The detection of HD 85512 b is far from the limit of HARPS, and demonstrates the possibility of discovering other super-Earths in the habitable zones around stars similar to the sun," University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor said in today's news release from the ESO.

Super-Earths, which range from Earth's mass to worlds 10 times more massive, are of particular interest to planet-hunters because it's thought that they could be even more conducive to the development of life than our own planet. When the search for extrasolar planets began more than 15 years ago, the telescopes used for the task could only detect giant planets like our own solar system's Jupiter. Since then, the techniques and tools used for the search have become much more sensitive.

HARPS, for example, can detect the slight gravitational wobble caused by planets as small as Earth, if they have incredibly close-in orbits. HARPS' observations of 376 sunlike stars has led the team to conclude not only that more than half of such stars are surrounded by planets (maybe as many as 70 or 80 percent), but also that about 40 percent of sunlike stars have at least one planet less massive than Saturn.

One of the team members, Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told journalists today that the latest round of findings marked a new age in the search for habitable planets.

"We are actually entering an incredibly interesting time in our history," she said.

Keeping track of the habitables
ESO's Markus Kissler-Patig said the discovery of HD 85512 b could be one of the first entries in "a good catalog of habitables" marked for further study. Kissler-Patig is the project scientist for the ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, which is slated to be built over the next decade at a cost of 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion).

HD 85512 b "is in the zone where we can directly image it," Kissler-Patig said, and that means astronomers could theoretically analyze its atmosphere for the signatures of life, such as the presence of oxygen, methane and water vapor.

The HARPS team members were able to figure out the minimum mass and orbital characteristics of HD 85512 b, but they couldn't determine its density, composition or the nature of its atmosphere — which means astronomers will have to wait for the completion of E-ELT or similar high-resolution observing instruments to confirm that the world is truly habitable.

Francesco Pepe, a colleague of Mayor's at the University of Geneva, said that the HARPS team's discoveries include 10 worlds described in papers submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics, including HD 85512 b, and 49 planets reported today at the Wyoming conference. Eight of the new planets were detected as part of the Swiss-led CORALIE search effort in Chile, he said. The ESO says this is the largest number of extrasolar planets reported at one time.

Pepe said the findings pointed up a fresh mystery for planet-hunters to ponder: the existence of a "planet desert" between low-mass worlds and gas giants. Relatively few planets have been found at a level around 30 times the mass of Earth. "It may point towards different formation mechanisms" for planets like Earth and Neptune vs. planets like Jupiter and Saturn.

HARPS isn't the only instrument engaged in the search for extrasolar planets: Two space telescopes, NASA's Kepler and the European Space Agency's Corot, are detecting planets by looking for the telltale dimming of their parent stars. Kepler and Corot can determine how big a planet is, but they can't tell how massive it is. In contrast, HARPS can determine the mass but not the size.

Unfortunately, Kepler can't be used to confirm HARPS' discoveries, nor can HARPS confirm Kepler's. The good news is that the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands is being outfitted for a HARPS North instrument that will begin operation next year and facilitate the follow-up of Kepler detections. 

Today's revelations bring the official tally of extrasolar planets to 645.

Other findings from the Extreme Solar Systems II conference:
• Over at the "Dynamics of Cats" blog, Steinn Sigurdsson quotes Kepler team members as saying they have identified 1,781 candidate planets, with up to 27 of those confirmed. Among the reported candidates are 123 potential worlds that are less than 1.25 times as wide as Earth, and 121 that are in the nominal habitable zones of their parent stars.

• Astronomers say they have observed brightness changes on a failed star, also known as a brown dwarf, that may indicate a storm grander than any seen yet on a planet. The stormy brown dwarf is known as 2MASS 2139.

"We found that our target's brightness changed by a whopping 30 per cent in just under eight hours," the University of Toronto's Jacqueline Radigan said in a news release. "The best explanation is that brighter and darker patches of its atmosphere are coming into our view as the brown dwarf spins on its axis."

Radigan is the lead author of a paper being presented this week at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference.

More about alien planets:

• Previously: Super-Earth on the 'edge of habitability'
• Interactive: How scientists search for other worlds
• 'Invisible' planet discovered using new technique
• Background: Looking for alien Earths? Here they come

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Authors of  “The HARPS search for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, I — Very low-mass planets around HD20794, HD85512, HD192310" include F. Pepe, C. Lovis, D.D. Ségransan, W. Benz, J. L. Bertaux , F. Bouchy, X. Dumusque, M. Mayor, D. Queloz, N.C. Santos and S. Udry.

Authors of "The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets XXXIV. Occurrence, mass distribution and orbital properties of super-Earths and Neptune-mass planets" include M. Mayor, M. Marmier, C. Lovis, S. Udry, D.D. Ségransan, F. Pepe, W. Benz, J. L. Bertaux , F. Bouchy, X. Dumusque, G. Lo Curto, C. Mordasini, D. Queloz and N.C. Santos.

Authors of "High amplitude, periodic variability of a cool brown dwarf: Evidence for patchy, high-contrast cloud features" include Jacqueline Radigan, Ray Jayawardhana, David Lafreniere, Etienne Artigau, Mark Marley and Didier Saumon.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

The troubles surrounding NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is often seen as Hubble's successor, are now drawing grumbles from astronomers as well as lawmakers.

Keeping JWST alive has been a cause celebre for the past couple of months, ever since a House panel proposed cutting off funding for the telescope. Over the years, the project's price tag has repeatedly gotten bigger while the launch timetable has faced repeated delays. At one time, the next-generation telescope was slated for launch this year with a mission cost of $3.5 billion. In contrast, the latest estimates suggest that the telescope won't lift off until 2018 at the earliest, with costs rising as high as $8.7 billion.

In July, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee that the JWST would open "new horizons far greater than we got from Hubble." But since then, the space agency has signaled that other areas of space science and exploration might have to face cuts to make up for JWST's cost overruns — which has sparked the protests from scientists.

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On Thursday, a newsletter published by the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute published a signed editorial complaining that the game plan for planetary science in the next decade "is under threat from cost overruns by the NASA James Webb Space Telescope." If NASA is not given more funding to cover the costs, "JWST should not be restored unless and until an open science community assessment is made of the value of what will be gained and what will be lost across the entire NASA science portfolio," the editorial read.

Among the 17 signers of the editorial were the the institute's CEO (Mark Sykes), the CEO of the SETI Institute (Tom Pierson), the principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto (Alan Stern) and the principal investigator for NASA's Deep Impact / EPOXI mission (Michael A'Hearn).

The independent online publication NASA Watch, meanwhile, published letters from Rice University solar physicist David Alexander, the head of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division, complaining that "the cost of the JWST threatens to swamp us all." He voiced concern that the space agency's proposed strategy for dealing with the JWST program's problems would reduce the ability of other divisions within the NASA Science Mission Directorate to "accomplish their own nationally sanctioned scientific programs."

Alexander's letters were addressed to the leadership of the AAS and the American Geophysical Union's Heliophysics Section and obtained by NASA Watch.

All this led Nature News' Eric Hand to observe today that "the internecine warfare among NASA scientists over the fate of the James Webb Space Telescope has begun," with planetary scientists and solar physicists pitted against astrophysicists.

NASA says the James Webb Space Telescope would be powerful enough to see the first stars and galaxies form on the edge of the observable universe. It could also study the mechanics of planet formation in unprecedented detail, and investigate the potential for life in alien planetary systems. But the debate is starting to turn from those lofty scientific goals to issues of dollars and cents. Is this the beginning of the end for the JWST bailout, or will NASA stick to its view that Hubble's heir is too big to fail? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 4:50 p.m. ET Sept. 12: Still more scientists are weighing in on "what to do about Webb":

• Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, is urging scientists to "step back for a moment and reflect on why we want to build such an audacious telescope" in the latest issue of the institute's newsletter. "In the end, someone has to provide 'the next Hubble' to the next generation. If not us, then who?" he writes.
• Presenters from NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the astronomical community will describe the current state of the JWST project and "address recent media coverage surrounding the mission's cost and status" during a webinar for scientists scheduled at 2 p.m. ET Sept. 19.
• The American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences has issued a statement saying that it's following the discussion over the JWST and future science funding "with close attention." The DPS statement urges that "the clear priorities of the planetary sciences community be kept in mind."
• The AAS' leadership has sent out a memo recognizing the rise of JWST rumors "which have led to speculation, fear and distrust." The memo says that the AAS "does not support any one Division or astronomical discipline above others, to the detriment of others," and will refrain from selecting between priorities proposed by the various disciplines. "As we face the new economic climate, it might be worth recalling Abraham Lincoln's words: 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'"

More on telescopes and budget woes:

• Researchers face budget bind
• Plan to scrap telescope riles up scientists
• What tomorrow's space telescopes will see
• Gallery: The coolest next-generation telescopes

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Hat tip to Keith Cowing at NASA Watch for keeping on top of the JWST debate.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.