Armadillo Aerospace

This picture provides a view of the parachute ballute deployment on Armadillo Aerospace's STIG-A III rocket, launched from Spaceport America on Jan. 28.

Commercial spaceship companies are due to get some additional breathing space, thanks to legislation that was approved by the House on Friday and seems certain to become law.

The provision takes up just a few words in the reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration, but the impact of those words could be incredibly significant: Basically, they extend the current regulatory environment for reusable space vehicles for an additional three years, to October 2015. If the provision hadn't been worked out, things could have become much more difficult for space tourism companies.

Right now, the companies that are building passenger spaceships are required to demonstrate to the FAA that they're taking sufficient measures to protect the uninvolved public from harm. They're also required to disclose the risks of space trips to would-be passengers, and get their informed consent for flight. But beyond that, the FAA is restricted in its power to regulate crew or passenger safety.

The reason for that goes back to 2004, when Congress passed a law setting up an eight-year moratorium (some prefer the term "learning period") for passenger spaceflight regulation. The idea was that those eight years would give the space tourism industry a chance to get off the ground, and give regulators a chance to see how the industry's realities would mesh with future regulations. Should commercial spaceflight be regulated like air travel, for example, or more like deep-sea adventure diving?

The only problem is that no paying passengers have yet flown on commercial spacecraft, so it's not possible to do any sort of regulatory reality check. The three-year extension provides more time for companies such as Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace to get their rocket planes ready and build a track record. The current expectation is that passengers will start going into space on suborbital vehicles in the 2013-2014 time frame.

U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a news release that the extension will "promote continued innovation, growth and job creation in this cutting-edge sector of our economy." McCarthy's district includes the Mojave Air and Space Port, where Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, XCOR's Lynx rocket plane and other spacecraft are being developed.

McCarthy's news release provided positive comments from executives at several space companies, including XCOR Aerospace and Virgin Galactic as well as Space Adventures and Sierra Nevada Corp. Back in 2004, I wrote that Jim Muncy, a Washington-based space consultant and founder of PoliSpace, greeted the news of the initial legislation's approval with a "mild expletive of wonderment." Today, Muncy was slightly more measured in his response, but just as positive about the extension's effect.

"The status quo is restricted regulation, it's not a ban on regulation," he told me. "We would like this period of learning and limited regulation to continue for at least a few more years, so that the industry gets flight experience — and oh, by the way, the FAA gets experience with spaceflight as well. We're trying to make this a learning and data-driven process, so that future regulations are based on actual data rather than speculation."

The action in Washington is just one of several small moves reported this week by commercial space companies. But sometimes, small moves are what progress is all about. At least that's what the alien told Jodie Foster in the movie "Contact."

Here are some of the latest small moves, plus a big move that's coming up:

SpaceX conducted a successful full-duration, full-thrust test firing of its SuperDraco rocket engine, which is destined to be used in the launch escape system for its Dragon crew capsule. The eight-engine thruster system would be used to power the Dragon out of harm's way in the event of a problem during ascent, and it's a critical piece of SpaceX's plan to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station starting in 2017 or so. Discovery News' Ian O'Neill discussed the SuperDraco tests during Thursday's Weekly Space Hangout (you can tune in that part at about the 25:30 point in the video below):

Armadillo Aerospace launched its third STIG-A test rocket from Spaceport America in New Mexico to an altitude of about 50 miles (82 kilometers) on Jan. 28. A test of a balloon-parachute recovery system ("ballute") was not fully successful, but the Armadillo team was nevertheless able to recover the vehicle and pass along some fantastic imagery from the flight. Armadillo says its next test launch is due to go beyond 62 miles (100 kilometers), the boundary of outer space. Eventually Armadillo plans to develop a craft capable of taking passengers on suborbital space rides.

Space Adventures says it's planning for the launch of a Russian spacecraft on a round-the-moon trip in February 2017, with two paying passengers and a cosmonaut commander on board. The Virginia-based company's chairman, Eric Anderson, says one would-be flier has already paid the $150 million fare, and the other open seat is "very close to being sold." Anderson said the venture is shaping up as a "fantastic validation of the marketplace for private spaceflight."

Sierra Nevada Corp. has delivered the primary structure of its first Dream Chaser flight test vehicle to a Colorado facility where it will be assembled and integrated with other flight systems. The vehicle is due to be used for captive-carry and free-flight tests later this year.

NASA says it will be offering $110,000 in awards this July for the Space Frontier Foundation's annual NewSpace Business Plan Competition, conducted at NASA Ames Research Center. Executives from space-oriented start-ups will present their business plans to a panel of experts and investors, and the plan that's judged the best will receive $100,000. There'll also be a $10,000 second prize.

XCOR Aerospace says it will award a suborbital spaceflight on its Lynx rocket plane to "one lucky paid registrant" at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, scheduled from Feb. 27 to 29 in Palo Alto, Calif. Registration has to be made by Feb. 10 in order to be eligible for the drawing. To read the official rules and register, check out the conference website. The XCOR Lynx flight is valued at $95,000. "We're going to pick a name out of a fishbowl shaped like an XCOR spacecraft," conference organizer Alan Stern told me. "It just shows how approachable spaceflight is going to be."

NASA is due to lay out its plan on Feb. 7 for the next phase in the development of space transportation systems capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Proposals will be solicited from commercial teams, and this summer NASA will select which teams get hundreds of millions of dollars to work on those systems over the next couple of years. It's not yet clear exactly how much money will be available for the coming phase. Nevertheless, if the program goes forward as planned, it'll be a really big move toward once again launching NASA astronauts from U.S. soil on spacecraft made in the USA.

More about the commercial space race:

• NASA says key SpaceX launch may slip to April
• NASA revises its commercial space plans
• The next steps in a new space race
• Boeing runs hard in the new space race
• Future spaceflight goes virtual at Sierra Nevada
• Blue Origin spruces up its rocket report
• Orbital Sciences delivers robotic cargo craft
• Billionaire plans monster plane for orbital launches
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race

Previously on the Weekly Space Hangout:

• Jan. 26: Moon-base politics and more
• Jan. 19: Is some poor planet getting blasted?
• Jan. 12: Planets, dark matter, "Trek" tricorders and more
• Jan. 5: NASA's moon probes, the hype over 2012 and more
• Dec. 20: All about Kepler's alien worlds

To follow every step in the commercial space industry, keep a close watch on Clark Lindsey's Space Transport News, Doug Messier's Parabolic Arc and Jeff Foust's NewSpace Journal.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This false-color view of Toro Crater on Mars was captured on Dec. 1, 2011, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and released on Wednesday. The different colors reflect different mineral composition on the Martian surface.

There's not much red in this picture of the Red Planet, produced by the high-resolution camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Browns and blues and greens and yellows and violets ... but red? Not so much. There's a method in this colorful madness: The riot of color tells scientists that, mineralogically speaking, this is a wildly diverse region of Mars.

The orbiter took this picture of Toro Crater in Mars' northern hemisphere back on Dec. 1, and the processed version was released just this week. The University of Arizona's Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment or HiRISE, says the different colors point to different kinds of minerals that may have been altered through the action of liquid water and heat on ancient Mars.

HiRISE's views in different wavelengths can be tweaked to tell geologists things about surface composition that you might not notice in a "true color" photograph.

"In general, the blue and green colors indicate unaltered minerals like pyroxene and olivine, whereas the warmer colors indicate alteration into clays and other minerals," McEwen writes in his image advisory. "The linear north-south trending features are windblown dunes that are much younger than the bedrock."

Such hydrothermal alteration could get a closer examination elsewhere on Mars when NASA's Curiosity rover touches down in Gale Crater this August.

For more of this crazy imagery, check out this longer, higher-resolution view of the Toro Crater scene. If you've got red-blue glasses, you'll get a kick out of this 3-D version. The HiRISE home page will point you to thousands of pictures from Mars — some in true color, some in false color, some in black and white, and some in 3-D red and blue. Feel free to go crazy.

S. Robbins / Moon Mappers / CosmoQuest / NASA

This image of the moon shows craters that have been identified by citizen scientists as part of the Moon Mappers project. The blue circles indicate raw IDs by individual users, while the red circles indicate craters identified by a computer program that groups together individual markings.

Where in the Cosmos?
On the Cosmic Log Facebook page, we've been featuring a series called "Where in the Cosmos" — in which we put up a curious space picture for people to puzzle over. Last week, I posted a picture of some cratered terrain with red and blue circles all over it. It took less than 24 hours for Robert Dryden to figure out that the picture showed some of the first results from a citizen-science project called Moon Mappers.

Scientists have long studied craters on the moon to trace the evolution of the solar system. The distribution and estimated ages of lunar craters have led astronomers to conclude, for example, that the inner solar system weathered a hailstorm of impacts known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" about 4 billion years ago.

Crater counting is a valuable exercise, but it's hard to automate. Moon Mappers, a project presented by the CosmoQuest website, is calling upon the wisdom of crowds to help scientists make sense out of the imagery being sent back to Earth by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Similar citizen-science projects, organized by Zooniverse, have yielded published research — and Moon Mappers is likely to be similarly productive. So if you want to take part in some real science, consider joining the Moon Mappers team.

The moon picture was doubly apt, because of the Moon Mappers angle as well as the past week's political debates over future moon missions. For the latest word in that debate, check out this commentary by NBC News' longtime Cape Canaveral correspondent, Jay Barbree.

I posted this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle earlier today, and within an hour several Cosmic Log Facebookers figured out that it was a 3-D view of the Snowman crater chain on the asteroid Vesta, as seen by NASA's Dawn probe. This means that Jarin Udom, Joan Tweedell and Ryan Anthony Sebastian Carroll join Robert Dryden in the winner's circle. They're all eligible to receive 3-D glasses once I get their mailing addresses.

To get in on the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle, be sure to hit the "Like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page ... and if you're already a fan, thanks for being part of the community!

More fun with space pictures:

• Jan. 27: 3-D color map of the universe
• Jan. 20: Stephen Hawking's curios explained

Slideshow: Get an eyeful from outer space

ESO / VISTA / J. Emerson / EPA

Gaze into the Helix Nebula's golden eye and see the other cosmic highlights of January 2012.

Launch slideshow

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

Slideshow: Stunning scientific sights

Click through prize-winning photos and illustrations from the 2011 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Launch slideshow

Visualizing science has come a long way from the days of overhead projectors and boxes of microscope slides — and to see just how far we've come, all you need to do is take a look at this year's top entries in the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

This is the ninth year for the competition, which is sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation. The 212 entries, received from 33 countries, focused on subjects ranging from transmission electron microscopy to the cosmic web that stretches across the universe.

Expert judges selected their top entries in five categories: photography, illustrations, informational posters and graphics, interactive games, and videos. But the general public got in on the judging as well, casting 3,200 online votes to select "People's Choice" award winners.

"The talent of these award winners is remarkable," Monica Bradford, Science's executive editor, said in a news release. "These winners communicate science in a manner that not only captures your attention but in many instances strives to look at different ways to solve scientific problems through their varied art forms."

Check out our slideshow, featuring the winners in the photography, illustration, poster/graphic and interactive game categories.

A mere slideshow doesn't give you the full flavor of the interactive games, however, so you'll really have to give them a try separately. The top-rated game is Foldit, a protein-folding puzzle game that has led to published research. We've written quite a bit about Foldit already: Check out our reports about the AIDS-like virus puzzle that was solved by Foldit players, and the molecular "recipes" that gamers came up with.

Three more games merited honorable mention: Meta!Blast 3D, an educational game about cellular biology; Build-a-Body, which lets players put together virtual organ system; and Powers of Minus Ten, which lets players zoom into the structure of virtual cells. Velu the Welder, a game from India that actually trains players to do welding, won the People's Choice award.

Before you get too involved in the game-playing, take a look at these winning videos:

Here's the list of winning entries in the other four categories of the 2011 challenge:

Photography: First place goes to Bryan William Jones, University of Utah, Moran Eye Center, for "Metabolomic Eye."

Honorable mention: Robert Rock Belliveau for "Microscopic Image of Trichomes on the Skin of an Immature Cucumber."

People's Choice: Babak Anasori, Michael Naguib, Yury Gogotsi, and Michel W. Barsoum of Drexel University for "The Cliff of the Two-Dimensional World."

Illustration: Three honorable mentions were cited. Emiko Paul and Quade Paul (Echo Medical Media) as well as Ron Gamble (UAB Insight) for "Tumor Death-Cell Receptors on Breast Cancer Cell." Joel Brehm of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Office of Research & Economic Development for "Variable-Diameter Carbon Nanotubes." Konstantin Poelke and Konrad Polthier of Free University Berlin for "Exploring Complex Functions using Domain Coloring." People's Choice: Andrew Noske and Thomas Deerinck (National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego) as well as Horng Ou and Clodagh O'Shea (Salk Institute) for "Separation of a Cell."

Informational posters and graphics: First place goes to Miguel Angel Aragon-Calvo (Johns Hopkins University), Julieta Aguilera and Mark SubbaRao (Adler Planetarium) for "The Cosmic Web."

Honorable mention: Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Alexander Kovalevsky and Anastasya Bakulina of Visual Science for "The Ebola Virus."

People's Choice: Fabian de Kok-Mercado, Victoria Wahl-Jensen and Laura Bollinger of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases IRF for "Transmission Electron Microscopy: Structure, Function & 3D Reconstruction."

Interactive games: First place: Seth Cooper, David Baker, Zoran Popović, Firas Khatib, Jeff Flatten, Kefan Xu, Dun-Yu Hsiao, and Riley Adams of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington for "Foldit."

Three honorable mentions were cited: W. Schneller, P.J. Campbell, M. Stenerson, D. Bassham, and E.S. Wurtele of Iowa State University for "Meta!Blast 3D Interactive Application for Cell and Metabolic Biology. Level 1: The Cell." Jeremy Friedberg, Nicole Husain, Ian Wood, Genevieve Brydson, Wensi Sheng, Lorraine Trecroce, Kariane St-Denis, David Rowe, Ruby Pajares, Arij Al Chawaf, Shaun Rana and Nancy Reilly of Spongelab Interactive for "Build-a-Body." Laura Lynn Gonzalez of Green-Eye Visualization for "Powers of Minus Ten."

People's Choice: Muralitharan Vengadasalam, Ganesh Venkat, Vignesh Palanimuthu, Fabian Herrera, and Ashok Maharaja of Tata Consultancy Services for "Velu the Welder."

More scientific visions to enjoy:

• Visions of science go viral: 2010's winners
• The top sights of science: 2009's winners
• Science that you can see: 2008's winners 
• Science's best sights: 2007's winners
• More visions of science: 2006's winners
• Visualization challenge: 2005's winners
• A scientific visual feast: 2004's winners
• Visualization challenge: 2003's winners
  

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

ScienceDebate.org

Uncle Sam's famous appeal gets a science-minded twist in this poster from Science Debate 2012.

Some might argue that GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich blew his political chances by emphasizing big scientific ideas like the establishment of a moon colony — but what's really needed is more science, not less.

That's the way Shawn Otto sees it, anyway. Otto, a filmmaker who was born and raised in Minnesota, is the co-founder of ScienceDebate.org and the author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America." He's also my guest tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show about the scientific frontier that happens on BlogTalkRadio and in the Second Life virtual world.

I hope you can join us at 9 p.m. ET (which is 6 p.m. PT and Second Life time), but if you can't, you can catch up with the podcast via BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.

Even though Otto and his colleagues at ScienceDebate.org didn't get a full-bore, live-action presidential debate on science and technology issues during the 2008 campaign, they got the next best thing: A rundown from Barack Obama as well as his Republican rival for the presidency, John McCain, on 14 key issues. ScienceDebate is planning to reprise the "14 Questions" exercise this year, augmented by other questions from the general public. The organizers are even talking with TV networks again about having a broadcast science debate at some point during the presidential campaign.

ShawnOtto.com

Shawn Lawrence Otto is an author, science advocate and filmmaker.

Are people really interested in scientific perspectives when it comes to politics? Some studies suggest that increased scientific knowledge about political issues just confirms pre-existing cultural attitudes rather than changing anyone's mind. And there's experimental evidence that Gingrich's support in the Florida primary campaign went down dramatically last week after he highlighted the idea of creating a U.S. colony (and perhaps eventually the 51st state) on the moon by 2020. He ended up losing to Mitt Romney by a substantial margin in Tuesday's primary.

"I don't think he handled it well," Otto said of Gingrich's moon moment.

But Otto also said there should be room in a political campaign to debate big ideas — even the idea of going to the moon, Mars and beyond. "When have we gotten to a point where painting a big vision is seen as outside the mainstream?" he asked.

You can bet we'll be talking about big ideas on "Virtually Speaking Science" tonight. For a warmup, here's an edited transcript of my pre-show Q&A with Otto:

Cosmic Log: How are science and technology issues being addressed this time around, as compared with 2008? Any big differences?

Otto: Yeah, it's quite a bit different. Last time, because there was an open seat, we were getting to know candidates on both sides. Nobody knew for sure what their science positions were. We were trying to figure out where the candidates stood on a lot of these issues.

This time, that's still true in part, but some of their views are quite well known. Obama has broadly been viewed as being pro-science, and he's appointed a lot of well-known scientists to top positions. But he's also taken some surprising stances, such as his support of Kathleen Sebelius' overruling of the recommendations of her scientists about Plan B. [The decision means "morning-after" birth control pills won't be made available over the counter to girls younger than 17.]

There's also been the back-and-forth over the Keystone XL pipeline, and the fact that his administration has pretty much banished the words "climate change" and is only talking about green energy. And how he has cut back on NASA's plans, for instance. So there are some less than thrilling aspects from the science perspective, but he's much more of a known entity now.

On the Republican side, particularly because of activism around climate change that's funded by energy industry money, and energy-industry-funded libertarian think tanks that are supporting Republican candidates in the primary process, there's been a lot of increased activism on the climate issue — and a lot of denial of the results of science.

Also, ALEC has been suggesting that state legislatures should require schools to teach skepticism of evolution and climate change in science class. That appeals to the foot soldiers, largely on the right and in the Republican Party. It seems that whenever a candidate on the Republican side has been slipping in the polls, they've taken a vocal anti-science position to recapture some momentum. Which is the opposite of what you would have expected even 10 years ago. 

Whoever the winning candidate is on the Republican side is going to be interested in not appearing unreasonable or anti-science to the moderate, mainstream, middle-of-the-road swing voters once they get the party endorsement. So whoever gets the nomination is going to be anxious to moderate their views on science.

Q: Right. You secure the base, and then you move to the center.

A: Both Newt and Mitt have been very careful not to paint themselves too tightly into a corner — for instance, on climate change. Newt has said, very adroitly, that it "hasn't been fully proven." He's smart enough to know that nothing in science is ever fully proven. That is in fact a true statement. But most of his constituency may not realize that. So that's a careful nuancing on his part that I thought was quite clever. Mitt has gotten himself in trouble by his various recorded statements on the issue that seem to be contradictory. So I think Newt has handled it in a smarter way.

But it's interesting to see what happened to Newt with the whole space theme last week. When have we gotten to a point where painting a big vision is seen as outside the mainstream? The big science issues are about the future. Certainly it's not a central plank in the campaign platform this time around, but it is worth talking about, I would think, especially in Florida.

Q: It's similar to what happened when President George W. Bush announced the plan to return to the moon. It was easy to lampoon that, with the bumper stickers saying "Send Bush to Mars." I heard the same thing this time around ... "Send Newt to the moon." You could print the same bumper sticker. Was it a good thing that a scientific issue somehow captured the attention, or a bad thing because his stock went down as soon as he brought it up?

A: I don't think he handled it well. I don't think his stock went down because of the subject matter, but more probably because of the emphasis that he placed on it relative to the other topics that the GOP base is concerned about — space and the moon or Mars is not high on the list when people are worried about the economy, or keeping jobs, or Social Security, or addressing housing foreclosures. If he emphasized it a little differently, I don't think it would have come out the way it did.

Q: Do you think science and technology issues will play more of a part, or less of a part, compared with 2008?

A: I think it's already clear that they're playing more of a part. The topic of science, and the denial of science, is much more of a politically charged issue. Unfortunately, science has come to be viewed as more of a partisan topic. I don't think that's right. I don't think that's healthy for America or the Republican Party. I'd like to see the Republicans get away from that, but it's part of the fabric, and people are much more keyed in on it. They're curious whether there are other areas where candidates don't see eye to eye with science.

Q: You mean besides climate change and evolution?

A: Wherever they pop up, whether it's HPV vaccine or other issues. Newt has said that embryonic stem cell research is killing children for research material. So it's getting a little extreme.

Q: At one time you suggested that scientists should consider becoming Republicans. Is that still your counsel?

A: Well, there are a couple of reasons there. One is that there are relatively few voters or activists involved in the grass roots of either of the political parties. So few, in fact, that if scientists actually did become heavily involved, for instance in the Republican Party, they could take over a lot of the process. There's a reasoned argument to be made that there's a leverage point there. Whether scientists would feel comfortable doing that is another matter entirely.

I've had some long and interesting conversations with science writers and scientists about this question ... whether or not that's the way to do it, or whether the Republican Party will have to experience a time-out that's so painful that they'll change their anti-science, anti-reason, anti-intellectual ways. I don't know if that actually would happen. There's enough fervor fueling the constituencies in the Republican Party, and enough money supporting that fervor, that I'm not sure whether they'd abandon those views or just become more clever about marketing them. I think change has to happen from both within and without, as it usually does.

Personally, I don't care what party scientists belong to. We just need their voice to be raised in our civic dialogue right now, more than we have in many decades. 

Join us at 9 p.m. ET tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science," which is broadcast on BlogTalkRadio and in the Second Life virtual world at the MICA Small Auditorium at Stella Nova. Many thanks to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for co-sponsoring the Second Life event. Tonight's hourlong show will be archived on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. Check out these other podcasts from the "VSScience" show:

• Marc Abrahams on silly science
• Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

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

This image shows a type of bacteria called GFAJ-1 that was said to incorporate arsenic in its cellular machinery.

Researchers say they ran a more rigorous version of the experiment that sparked a yearlong debate over the prospects for arsenic-based bacteria — but found no trace of arsenic within the organisms' DNA.

The findings, submitted to the journal Science this week and distributed openly via the ArxiV.org website, serve as the most definitive refutation to date of the "weird life" claims that caused such a stir in December 2010. "They match with what basically all the scientists had concluded a year ago," University of British Columbia microbiologist Rosie Redfield, the paper's senior author, told me.

Redfield had criticized the original study from the start, suggesting that the arsenic detected in a strain of bacteria known as GFAJ-1 was not actually incorporated into the machinery of life but was merely the result of insufficient purification. "We were much more meticulous about purifying the DNA before we analyzed it," she said today.

She and her colleagues worked with the same bacteria used for the original research, which had astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon as lead author and was published in Science. The bacteria were bred to live in a high-arsenic environment, with virtually no phosphorus present. The aim was to see whether arsenic compounds known as arsenates, which are typically poisonous to life as we know it, could be substituted for chemically similar phosphorus compounds known as phosphates. If that turned out to be the case, that would suggest that alien life forms could operate using biochemical processes radically different from Earth's.

In their paper, Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues said they saw evidence that the bacteria could be bred to live in the arsenic-rich environment, and that arsenates were detected in "macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins."

Redfield and her colleagues were able to grow the bacteria amid high arsenic levels, under special conditions, but they found that the arsenic wasn't necessary for the bacteria's survival — and that the highly purified DNA from the bacteria did not contain detectable levels of arsenate.

Redfield noted that some arsenate stuck to the DNA even after what she thought would be sufficient purification, but was removed during a second round of washing. "That shows that arsenate does persist through steps in the DNA purification, but in a form that will wash away," she told me.

The researchers acknowledged that arsenate might occasionally get into the bacteria's biological machinery.

"Given the chemical similarity of arsenate to phosphate, it is likely that GFAJ-1 may sometimes assimilate arsenate into some small molecules in place of phosphate, such as sugar phosphates or nucleotides. Our results do not rule out the possibility that such assimilation could be beneficial," they wrote. "When it comes to DNA synthesis, however, GFAJ-1 does not appear to productively assimilate any arsenate."

Open review for results
The scientists behind the original study have said they would refrain from commenting on follow-up research until the peer-review and publication process is completed. Wolfe-Simon did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, but Science News' Rachel Ehrenberg quoted her as saying she and her colleagues never actually claimed that arsenate was being incorporated in GFAJ-1’s DNA.

"As far as we know, all the data in our paper still stand,” Science News quoted Wolfe-Simon as saying in an email. “Yet, it may take some time to accurately establish where the [arsenic] ends up."

That response left Redfield figuratively scratching her head — and literally wondering "WTF??" in a Twitter update. She pointed to several references in the original Science paper referring to DNA, including a sentence saying that the measurements "specifically demonstrated that purified DNA extracted from +As/-P [high-arsenic, low-phosphorus] cells contained As [arsenic]."

The paper written by Redfield and her colleagues is open for review and comment even in advance of its consideration for journal publication. That's consistent with Redfield's advocacy of an "open science" approach to research, as reflected in the regular updates posted to her RRResearch blog. Thanks to the blog, avid followers of the #ArsenicLife issue have known for weeks that the original results couldn't be replicated.

Redfield said she has received assurances that freely distributing the draft paper won't hurt the prospects for publication in Science — which goes against the traditional grain for peer-reviewed publication.

"What's happening, and I'm really pleased by this, is that interested people are reading the manuscript, and they're putting comments on it," she observed.

Redfield said she and her colleagues appreciated the feedback being posted to her blog by experts — as well as by non-experts. "Their comments are going to let us polish the manuscript to make it more accessible to non-experts," she told me.

More about the arsenic-life debate:

• A year later, the debate still percolates
• Nature: Study challenges existence of arsenic-based life
• Chemical & Engineering News: The arsenic aftermath

In addition to Redfield, the authors of "Absence of Arsenate in DNA From Arsenate-Grown GFAJ-1 Cells" include M.L. Reaves, S. Sinha, J.D. Rabinowitz and L. Kruglyak.

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

This concept art for a 2015 stamp celebrates NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.

The next three years just might be prime time for poor little Pluto, thanks to NASA's New Horizons mission — and if the leaders of that mission are successful, a brand-new Pluto postage stamp will be part of the celebration. But they need your help.

Today marks the start of an online petition campaign at Change.org, calling for the creation of a stamp commemorating the $700 million mission and its 2015 Pluto flyby. It would mark only the second time the dwarf planet has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. The first time was in 1991, when a 29-cent stamp labeled Pluto as "Not Yet Explored."

Back then, some planetary scientists saw that stamp as a challenge — and that gave an early boost to the efforts that eventually led to New Horizons' launch in 2006. The mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, even included one of the old stamps as a pint-sized payload on the spacecraft. Now the postal connection is coming full circle, just in time to render that "Not Yet Explored" label obsolete.

"We're asking people to sign the petition because the post office considers not just the merits of a new stamp proposal, but also whether it is supported by a significant number of people," Stern said in today's kickoff announcement. "This is a chance for us all to celebrate what American space exploration can achieve through hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry and the uniquely human drive to explore."

USPS

The 1991 stamp was part of a solar-system set.

The petition, along with the formal stamp proposal, would be sent to the U.S. Postal Service's Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, which sifts through thousands of suggestions and recommends which subjects should be transformed into commemorative stamps. Last year, for example, one set of stamps paid tribute to Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard's history-making flight in 1961, as well as the Messenger mission to Mercury.

It takes about three years to move from the submission of a proposal to the issuance of a new stamp — which is why Stern and his colleagues are making a big push now for a stamp that would be unveiled in 2015. The more signatures they can get, the better the chances of winning the approval of the committee and the postmaster general.

"If we get 10,000 signatures, we'll get a stamp — that's the impression I get," Stern told me. "But we're aiming for 100,000."

Stern said he'd like to turn in the signatures as well as the stamp proposal during the week of March 13, which marks the 82nd anniversary of the announcement of Pluto's discovery. That's not entirely out of the question, even though the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006. After all, how many other celestial bodies have been the subject of letter-writing campaigns, legislative action, street protests and petitions by planetary scientists?

Dan Durda, an artist and space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute whose works appear on the New Horizons website and in many other places (including my book, "The Case for Pluto"), has drawn up a concept for the Pluto stamp — but if the stamp proposal is approved, the stamp's design may well be out of his hands.

"Stamp designing is an unusual art form requiring exacting skill in portraying a subject within very small dimensions," the Postal Service says. "Due to the demands of stamp design and reproduction requirements, it is our policy not to review nor accept unsolicited artwork."

The design isn't uppermost in Stern's mind right now. "You know, I'm sure it will turn out fine," he told me. "Our goal is to commemorate the historic nature of the mission and celebrate U.S. leadership in space exploration. And involve the public."

That's where you come in.

"Sign the petition, and mention it on Facebook," Stern said. "Let's see how high we can drive the numbers for Pluto and for space exploration."

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