Russian and South Korean scientists, including the cloning expert who was the focus of a stem-cell scandal six years ago, have signed a deal to try re-creating a woolly mammoth using cells recovered from 10,000-year-old frozen remains.

The papers for the joint research project were signed on Tuesday by Hwang Woo-Suk, chief technology officer for South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation; and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of Russia's North-Eastern Federal University, during a ceremony at Hwang's office in Seoul.

Hwang is infamous for his role in human embryonic stem-cell research: In 2004 and 2005, he and his colleagues claimed to have extracted stem cells from what they characterized as the world's first cloned human embryos. But in late 2005, his work was found to have been based on fabricated data, and he was barred from continuing research with human cells.

Despite the disgrace, Hwang continued working with animal cloning techniques. Before the scandal broke, his team announced that they produced the world's first cloned dog, nicknamed Snuppy, and that claim has stood up to scrutiny. Last October, Hwang's team at Sooam unveiled eight cloned coyotes that had been produced by injecting nuclei from coyote skin cells into dog eggs. At the time, he said he was interested in cloning an endangered African dog species known as the lycaon ... and was interested in cloning a mammoth, too.

In December, Japanese news media said that scientists recovered a seemingly viable sample of bone marrow from a frozen mammoth thigh bone in Russia's Sakha Republic, and that a mammoth could be cloned back from extinction within five years. This week, Agence France-Presse reported that North-Eastern Federal University is working with the Japanese scientists and with the Koreans. The Beijing Genomics Institute is said to be taking part in the Korean-Russian project as well.

Reports from Seoul suggest that the mammoth-cloning effort could be launched this year if the Russians can ship the remains to Sooam's laboratory. "The first and hardest mission is to restore mammoth cells," a colleague of Hwang's at Sooam, Hwang In-Sung, told AFP.

Jung Yeon-Je / AFP - Getty Images

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, (far left) and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of North-Eastern Federal University of Russia's Sakha Republic (far right), exchange agreements during a signing ceremony on joint research at Hwang's office in Seoul on Tuesday.

Sooam Biotech Research / AFP - Getty Images

This diagram released by the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation shows the process of replacing the nuclei of elephant egg cells with those taken from the mammoth's somatic cells to bring a mammoth back to life.

The plan calls for extracting nuclei from the thawed-out mammoth cells, putting them into elephant egg cells and stimulating the cells to start dividing. Embryos would be implanted into elephant wombs for gestation — and if the effort is successful, a mother elephant would give birth to a baby mammoth around 22 months later.

That's a big "if," as I wrote in December when I discussed the Japanese-Russian project. In addition to the usual problems surrounding interspecies cloning, it's highly doubtful that genetic material recovered from tissue that's been frozen for millennia would be sufficiently intact for extraction and implantation. What do you think of Hwang's chances? Feel free to register your vote at right, and voice your opinion in the comment section below.

More about mammoths:

• Clone a mammoth? Not so fast
• Mammoths mated with a different elephant species
• Mammoth resurrection on the way?
• Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped

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.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has traced the moon's early history as well as the latest trash left behind by moonwalkers, and now the team behind the mission has created a video smashing 4.5 billion years of the moon's existence into less than three minutes.

"Evolution of the Moon," released to mark LRO's first thousand days in orbit, starts just after the moon's congealment into a ball of molten rock, and guides you through the giant blast that formed the South Pole-Aitken Basin, through the pummeling known as the Heavy Bombardment, right through the hail of debris that resulted in the cratered satellite we all know and love.

Only one big scene is missing from the show, in my opinion: the catastrophic impact between Earth and another planet, an event that scientists believe led to the moon's creation. Consider it the prequel to "Evolution of the Moon."

There's yet another scene that scientists are thinking about adding to the story: a collision involving the moon and a smaller moonlet, sometime after the moon's formation. Some researchers suspect that such a "Big Splat" could have been responsible for the marked difference in the terrain of the moon's near side and far side — although others think the Aitken Basin blast or gravitational forces could have done the job. NASA's GRAIL mission, which was launched last year, could shed more light on that chapter of the story.

There's also a "Tour of the Moon," about five minutes in length, that guides you through the highlights of the moon's topography with the help of LRO imagery. You'll get a quick overview on the mysteries of Orientale Basin and Aitken Basin, the artifacts left behind by the Apollo 17 mission, the far-side craters we can never see from Earth, and the future of lunar exploration. For space fans, it's must-see video.

More from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

• Best view yet of the Apollo 11 landing site
• Giant moon crater detailed in close-up
• Rare volcanoes seen on moon's far side
• See the moon's marvels in 3-D

Tip o' the log to Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz and the LRO team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

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.

SpaceX

An artist's conception shows SpaceX's Dragon capsule at the International Space Station for a delivery.

SpaceX's president says the California-based rocket company is preparing to launch the first commercial cargo ship to the International Space Station as early as April 30 — but whether that date holds will depend on what happens between now and then.

The new "no earlier than" date came out on Tuesday during the Satellite 2012 conference in Washington. "I’m happy to say we have a launch date scheduled on the range and a berthing date with the ISS," New Space Journal quoted SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell as saying during a panel. "The launch date is April 30, and we hope to berth on May 3."

That date is just barely in line with SpaceX's previous statements that the company was preparing for a late-April launch of its Falcon 9 rocket, topped by its Dragon cargo capsule. Representatives of SpaceX as well as NASA emphasized that the official date has not yet been set.

"The launch date will be set officially at the Flight Readiness Review on April 12," NASA spokesman Michael Braukus told me in an email. "April 30 is the date SpaceX is working toward."

SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham echoed that assessment. "SpaceX is currently targeting April 30 for our upcoming demonstration mission," she said in an email. "However, NASA will not grant final approval for a targeted launch date until completion of the Flight Readiness Review."

The launch date has been postponed in the past, due to technical issues that have cropped up during the preparations. Even after an official date is set, further postponements may well be in store. Shotwell was quoted as saying that "we may have to have a couple of attempts, but we’re certainly looking forward to getting that flight off."

In a follow-up email, Grantham explained why the launch schedule is subject to change: "The upcoming mission is exciting because of the potential to make history.  But it is a test flight.  This is a challenging mission, and we intend to take every necessary precaution in order to improve the likelihood of success."

The flight plan calls for the robotically controlled Dragon to approach the station and conduct a series of test maneuvers. If everything checks out, astronauts would then use the station's robotic arm to grab the Dragon and bring it in for its berthing. After unloading supplies, the station's crew would unberth the Dragon and send it back down for splashdown and recovery.

SpaceX and another company, Orbital Sciences, have been receiving more than $600 million from NASA for the development of cargo craft capable of filling in for the now-retired space shuttle fleet. If the two companies are successful, they'll be eligible for $3.5 billion in NASA contracts for space station resupply.

SpaceX's Dragon successfully completed its first orbital test in December 2010, but it hasn't flown since. Orbital's Antares launch vehicle and Cygnus cargo craft have not yet gone into space, but their first test flight is scheduled for later this year.

The upcoming SpaceX launch would mark a milestone, due to its status as the first fully commercial flight to the space station. NASA is counting on commercial providers to send U.S. supplies into orbit, and eventually U.S. astronauts as well. Until those commercial craft are in operation, NASA has to depend on other countries for cargo supply, and exclusively on the Russians for crew transport. The per-seat cost for those crew flights is heading upwards of $60 million per seat. SpaceX and other would-be crew carriers, including the Boeing Co., Sierra Nevada Corp. and Blue Origin, say they can match that price.

Those four companies have been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from NASA for spaceship development, and the Obama administration's budget proposal calls for spending another $830 million on the commercial crew program in fiscal year 2013. That level of support would get the commercial crew transports flying by 2017, NASA says.

More about commercial space:

• Private rocket passes big test for space station launch
• Next steps in a new space race
• SpaceX signs up two more satellite launch customers
• Cosmic Log archive on commercial space

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.

JCVI via Science/AAAS

Scientists took a type of bacteria known as Mycoplasma capricolum and transplanted a custom-written version of the genome from a different type of bacteria, Mycoplasma mycoides. The synthetic genome included coding for the production of a blue compound, which served here as a signal that the bacteria were "synthetic cells."

More than 100 environmental and social-action groups say synthetic organisms shouldn't be sent out into the world until governments create a new framework to regulate them. Their recommendations for such a framework are outlined in a statement of principles issued today.

Synthetic biology aims to create new genetic strains of microbes, such as algae that are tailor-made to produce biofuels, or bacteria that are engineered to fight medical maladies ranging from infections to cancer. Researchers estimate that the global market for synthetic biology was $1.1 billion in 2010, and is on track to increase to $10.8 billion in 2016.

Critics, however, say that the technology could lead to environmental hazards of Frankensteinian proportions, including new strains of unstoppable invasive species and unpredictable hazards to human health. The 111 groups behind today's statement, including Friends of the Earth, the International Center for Technology Assessment and the ETC Group, are on the critical side of the spectrum.

"We are calling for a global moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic organisms until we have established a public interest research agenda, examined alternatives, developed the proper regulations and put into place rigorous biosafety measures," Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, said in a news release. "It is our obligation to safeguard the future, to be wise in our development and use of technologies which could threaten humans and the Earth."

The groups call for an outright ban on the use of synthetic biology on the human genome, or on the human microbiome — that is, the wide assortment of microbes that are found inside us or on our skin. They say the current systems in place to regulate genetic engineering are inadequate for the task ahead. 

"Self-regulation of the synthetic biology industry simply won't work. Current laws and regulations around biotechnology are outdated and inadequate to deal with the novel risks posed by synthetic biology technologies and their products," said Andy Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment.

The debate over synthetic biology has intensified since geneticist J. Craig Venter and his colleagues announced the development of the "first synthetic cell" in 2010. In the wake of that announcement, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues said there was no need to halt research into synthetic biology or establish an entirely new regulatory framework. Instead, the commission called for a combination of industry self-regulation, closer coordination by existing regulatory agencies and further research into the potential for risk.

When that report was released, the ETC Group's Jim Thomas said it was "disappointingly empty and timid." Thomas' group is one of the principal backers of the proposed principles issued today.

A spokesman for the Biotechnology Industry Organization told ScienceInsider's Elizabeth Pennisi that the principles issued today were not helpful to policymakers or the public, due to "the shrillness of its tone and its lack of objectivity." He said "there are a lot of safeguards in place" today, while acknowledging that the existing regulations may eventually need to be upgraded.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has established its own project to study the policy implications of synthetic biology. One of the leaders of that project, senior research associate Todd Kuiken, told me that the principles issued today were "not that much different" from the presidential commission's recommendations, although he said the tone was a bit more strident. "The word 'moratorium' is a little strong," he said.

"There are potential risks there, and we need to look at these issues before we start putting these things out there," Kuiken said. "I don't think anything they said is that surprising to folks, nor is the response from industry that surprising."

The center's Synthetic Biology Project has voiced concern about the implications of genetic technology for the past 18 months. In a recent Nature commentary, Kuiken and four colleagues urged scientists and officials to take additional steps to avoid "a synthetic-biology disaster."

"Public agencies must link basic and environmental risk research by co-funding projects and requiring grant recipients to work with environmental agencies from the start," they wrote. "Given the complexity of the research questions, the economic and social value of successful synthetic-biology applications and the potential impact of errors, we think that a minimal investment of $20 million to $30 million over 10 years is appropriate."

Today, the Synthetic Biology Project is kicking off an online survey to gauge public opinion on the ethical, legal and social implications synthetic biology. The center said results from the survey would be compiled into a report to be released in May. To take the survey, click here. But first, register your opinion in our own unscientific poll at right.

More about synthetic biology:

• First synthetic life form holds promise and peril
• One-third of Americans back ban on synthetic biology
• Synthetic life could help humans colonize Mars
• DNA chip is 'printing press' for synthetic biology
• Yeast adds vitamins to bread

The folks who brought you Robonaut have teamed up to create a robotic glove that can help factory workers and astronauts get a grip more easily for a longer time.

NASA and GM today unveiled the Human Grasp Assist device, also known as the K-Glove or Robo-Glove. The contraption is a spin-off of their Robonaut 2 project, which put a two-armed android torso with a camera-equipped head on the International Space Station last year.

The space agency and the automaker both say they're trying to turn the glove into a stress-saver. "When fully developed, the Robo-Glove has the potential to reduce the amount of force that an auto worker would need to exert when operating a tool for an extended time or with repetitive motions," Dana Komin, GM's manufacturing engineering director for global automation strategy and execution, said in a news release. "In so doing, it is expected to reduce the risk of repetitive stress injury."

Actuators are built into the fingers of the glove to provide grasping support for human fingers, under the control of touch sensors incorporated into the fingertips. When the glove's wearer grabs a tool, synthetic tendons automatically retract, pulling the fingers into a gripping position and holding them there until the sensor is released.

GM

The Robo-Glove weighs about 2 pounds, but GM plans to make it lighter.

The technology could make things easier for astronauts, who have to grip tools with bulky spacesuit gloves over and over during hours-long spacewalks.  GM says an astronaut typically needs 15 to 20 pounds of gripping force to hold onto a tool, but the robo-glove could reduce that to 5 to 10 pounds of force. Trish Petete, division chief for the Crew and Thermal Systems Division at NASA's Johnson Space Center, said the technology "challenges our traditional thinking of what extravehicular activity hand dexterity could be."

The first prototype of the glove was built a year ago, and since then the design has gone through a round of tweaks. The current prototype weighs about 2 pounds (1 kilogram), which takes in the control electronics, the actuators and a small display for programming and diagnostics. The actuators are driven by an off-the-shelf lithium-ion power-tool battery that's worn on the belt.

Marty Linn, GM's principal engineer of robotics, told me that the company hasn't set a timetable for putting the robo-glove to work in a real-world environment. "As a matter of fact, we have not yet started the trials," he said.

He also acknowledged that the prototype device is a little too heavy for regular use on the factory floor. "We want to make it lighter and use less power," he said.

But once the technology is perfected, GM would like to license it for a variety of commercial applications here on Earth. The Robo-Glove could come in handy for construction workers who need to operate power tools for hours at a time, patients who need to rehabilitate cramped-up hands, firefighters who need to hang onto a fire hose ... and, of course, billionaires seeking superhero powers.

More robots in space:

• Robotic space 'gas attendant' touted
• Microbes may power up space robots
• NASA needs robot arms for satellite repairs

Dan Durda / SwRI

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

More than 11,000 people have signed an online petition to honor NASA's mission to Pluto and other denizens of the solar system's icy rim with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp — which is a fine way to celebrate the 82nd anniversary of Pluto's planetary coming-out party.

"I'm pretty happy," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who is the principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission. New Horizons is due to fly by the dwarf planet in 2015, and Stern is among the leading supporters of the stamp campaign.

"A lot of stamps get 1,000 petition names, and they're very happy with that," Stern told me. "Still, I'd rather have 12,000 than 11,000."

Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of the announcement of Pluto's discovery by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, and it also marks a turning point for the petition drive. Stern said he and his colleagues are now turning their attention to the preparation of a formal proposal that will be submitted to the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee next month.

Years-long process
Back in 1991, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps honoring NASA's interplanetary missions — but the set included a stamp picturing Pluto, with the legend "Not Yet Explored." The $700 million New Horizons mission aims to cancel that earlier stamp's sentiment, and Stern is hoping that a brand-new New Horizons stamp will provide a stickable way to set the record straight.

The half-ton, piano-sized New Horizons probe was launched in 2006 and has made its way well beyond the orbit of Uranus, but it'll probably be another three years before most people sit up and truly take notice of the mission, Stern said. New Horizons' view of Pluto's surface features should match the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope around April 2015.

Why start so early on the stamp? That's just the way things are done: Proposals for commemorative stamps are considered by the advisory panel, and recommendations are then forwarded to the postmaster general for a final decision. "I don't think we're going to hear anything for two to three years," Stern said.

That time frame sounds about right to Robert Z. Pearlman, editor of the CollectSpace online publication and an expert on space history and memorabilia. "We'll probably know if it's a success in mid-2014," he said. Pearlman based that estimate on the circumstances surrounding the stamp that commemorated NASA's Messenger mission to Mercury. In Messenger's case, postal officials announced in August 2010 that the stamp would be part of its lineup. That was followed by its issuance in May 2011.

Spacecraft in semi-slumber
The New Horizons spacecraft has been rousing itself from hibernation every week to transmit status signals confirming that it's still on course and healthy (the so-called "green beacon"). Stern said the spacecraft is due to wake up fully on April 30 for "a very intensive couple of months of activities," aimed at rehearsing the procedures that will be used for the flyby of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in July 2015.

Pluto has been the subject of a lot of discussion since New Horizons was launched: In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted to classify the icy world as a "dwarf planet" rather than a major planet — a move that was widely seen as a demotion. March 13, the date on which Pluto's discovery was announced in 1930, has become known in some circles as "Pluto Day." It's a day to draw attention to the little guys of the solar system, and as the author of "The Case for Pluto," I can't help but keep it on my holiday calendar.

Glenn Fleishman via Twitpic

Tim Lloyd hoists a protest sign during a Pluto Day rally in Seattle on Saturday.

Over the weekend, I was among about 30 grown-ups and kids who attended an early Pluto Day rally at the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. in Seattle. At the appointed time, we raised our protest signs, marched down the sidewalk and shouted good-natured chants ("Can't stop the power, the power of the Pluto, 'cause the power of the Pluto don't stop") as well as edgier ones ("Hey, hey, ho, ho, the IAU has got to go"). My favorite placard read, "Keep your laws off my icy body."

At the end of the block-long march (on both sides of the street), we gathered at a local coffee shop for a teach-in about dwarf planets. The climax was a rock-paper-scissors contest to decide whether or not Pluto was an honest-to-goodness planet. I'm happy to report that I triumphed in a two-out-of-three match against University of Washington astronomer Toby Smith.

I'm also happy to report that two Cosmic Log correspondents have won 3-D glasses in last week's "Where in the Cosmos" contest on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, which had a Pluto-stamp theme. Congratulations to Allison Rae Hannigan and Jacob Smith! Pluto lives!

More about Pluto and other dwarfs:

• Scientists spot Pluto's fourth moon
• Carbon monoxide found in Pluto's air
• Join the search for icy worlds
• Interactive: The new solar system
• More about Pluto on Cosmic Log
• More about 'The Case for Pluto'

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

A plume of water ice is backlit as it spews from the south polar region of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on Feb. 20, from a distance of about 83,000 miles (134,000 kilometers).

NASA's Cassini mission has delivered a dark but dramatically backlit view of "Spaceship Enceladus": an icy moon of Saturn with geysers of water ice spewing from its south polar region, as if it were turning on its thrusters.

Enceladus isn't going anywhere, of course, but the geysers have launched a lot of speculation about what might be giving rise to the spray. Is water from a hidden ocean welling up through the cracks known as "tiger stripes"? If so, what creatures might lurk in that subsurface sea?

The picture released today by Cassini's imaging team fires up the imagination, even for team leader Carolyn Porco. "Now try to tell me Enceladus isn't the coolest, most fascinating moon there is!" she said in a Twitter update touting the view.

Really? But what about Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter that is also thought to harbor a subsurface ocean, and perhaps life. A probe to study Europa is high on NASA's list of future big-ticket missions, even though such missions are currently on hold due to budgetary constraints. (There's also some recent research suggesting that Europa's hidden ocean might be too acidic for life as we know it.)

Porco made her preference plain in a volley of tweets: "Enceladus, with the most accessible habitable zone beyond Earth, is far better for discovering anything about life than Europa."

NASA is said to be planning a concept study for an eventual Enceladus mission, although tight budgets may force a change of plan. The German Aerospace Center recently unveiled a study project known as Enceladus Explorer, or EnEx, which is looking at the possibility of putting a base station on the moon's surface and drilling down into the ice. The concept calls for a type of probe known as an IceMole to melt its way down to a water crevasse, retrieve a sample of liquid water and analyze it for the presence of microbes.

EnEx's collaborators have been testing a prototype IceMole on Switzerland's Morteratsch Glacier, and they're planning to try it out on glaciers in Alaska and Antarctica, leading up to the sampling of a subglacial lake in Antarctica in 2014. If those tests are successful, the team will propose sending IceMoles to Mars and eventually to Enceladus.

Enceladus isn't the only star of this week's Saturnian show. Fresh pictures of Saturn's second-largest moon, Rhea, were released as well. These pictures were captured over the weekend during a flyby that brought Cassini within 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers) of the heavily cratered moon. NASA says the flyby was "relatively distant" but well-suited for global geologic mapping.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

This raw, unprocessed image of Rhea was acquired by the Cassini spacecraft on Saturday and received on Earth on Sunday. The camera was pointing toward Rhea from a distance of about 26,000 miles (41,873 kilometers).

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

This raw image of Rhea was taken on Saturday from a distance of about 26,000 miles (42,096 kilometers). The pattern of lines on the right side of the image is the result of data loss during transmission.

The next big flyby is scheduled for March 27, when Cassini is due to come within 46 miles (74 kilometers) of Enceladus. That's close enough to sample those plumes of ice directly — and perhaps take one more step toward unraveling the mystery of Enceladus' hidden seas.

More about Enceladus, Rhea and Cassini:

• New images reveal Enceladus' icy secrets
• See what's hot on Enceladus
• Rhea and Titan line up in photo
• Greatest hits from Cassini

ESA / NASA

A picture from the International Space Station, provided Saturday by Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers, shows southern lights between Antarctica and Australia.

Most of the fantastic auroral views we've been getting over the past month have been from the north side of the world — but the southern lights are getting their day in the sun as well, thanks largely to the International Space Station.

The northern lights are more widely seen primarily because the high northern latitudes are more populated than similar latitudes in the south: The southernmost cities in Australia and New Zealand are in the 40s, latitude-wise, while Argentina and Chile dip down into the mid-50s. In comparison, the prime aurora-viewing areas in the north are in the 60s and 70s.

The International Space Station flies as far as 51.6 north and south latitude on every orbit, and its astronauts have a far more commanding view of the polar regions than earthly skywatchers. So it's no surprise that they're regularly seeing the auroral glow during the current period of heightened solar activity. Right now, the station's crew is in the midst of a viewing campaign that's being coordinated with the Canadian Space Agency's AuroraMAX project. Some of the reddish glows reach all the way up to the space station's level, 240 miles above Earth.

"We can actually fly into the auroras," space station resident Don Pettit said recently. "It's like being shrunk down and put inside of a neon sign."

You've got lots of choices for browsing through auroral sights and other views from space. There's Kuipers' Flickr gallery, the NASA 2Explore Flickr site, NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, the Expedition 30 gallery on NASA's Human Spaceflight website, and the Fragile Oasis Facebook page, where astronaut Ron Garan and his colleagues keep track of everything that's out there. To find out when you can see the space station from your locale, consult NASA's database for sighting opportunities.

NASA

This March 6 photo from the International Space Station highlights daybreak on the left side of the horizon, and the southern lights on the right side. The station was flying over the Indian Ocean at the time, or about 1,200 miles south of Australia. The view is toward the east. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft is connected to the Pirs docking compartment at center, and a Russian Progress cargo craft is docked at right.

The space station's astronauts aren't the only ones who are seeing the southern lights: Check out the pictures from New Zealand and Tasmania that are being posted to SpaceWeather.com. And stay tuned: Thanks to a series of solar outbursts over the weekend, heightened geomagnetic activity should continue through Tuesday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center. That means there could be still more neon lights in the sky. Check out NOAA's Ovation Auroral Forecast and the University's Aurora Forecast website to find out if you're in the potential aurora zone.

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: Tonight's northern lights were not to be missed at Sweden's Abisko National Park. "Tonight was very special," photographer Chad Blakley of Lights Over Lapland wrote in an email. "We had incredible auroras and were able to watch them dance as Venus and Jupiter went down behind the mountains." Here's a must-see time-lapse video of the scene:

Update for 4:30 p.m. ET March 14: ... And looking back Down Under, here's a wonderful video clip from Ian Stewart in Tasmania, looking south over Bruny Island. "This aurora was short lived, and obscured for the most part by cloud," Stewart wrote. "The cloud cleared just as the sky started glowing an eerie soft red, and the aurora faded into the beams of the rising moon at the end." Still more solar particles are coming our way, so stay tuned for more great views from the north and south. Check SpaceWeather.com for the latest.

More auroral glories:

• Sky lights go wild, north and south
• Solar storm lights up northern skies
• Rocket flies into the northern lights
• Aurora extravaganza glows in space
• Planet looks back at the northern lights
• Auroras spark awe across the north
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

DigitalGlobe

DigitalGlobe acquired this satellite image of Japan's Fukushima nuclear complex on Feb. 2, 2012, almost a year after the tsunami. Click here for larger version.

Satellite images tracked the catastrophic impact of Japan's magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami on the Fukushima nuclear complex and other key sites, and now they're tracking the reconstruction.

To mark Sunday's anniversary of the disaster, DigitalGlobe is releasing pictures showing "before, during and after" views of the devastation. You can see the three views of Fukushima here — but you really should check out our interactive slideshow to get a better sense of the changes that have taken place over the past year at Fukushima and at the Port of Sendai, which was destroyed in the tsunami.

"I'm struck by the progress, by how efficient the Japanese have been in reconstructing their infrastructure," Steve Wood, vice president of DigitalGlobe's analysis center, told me today. "In less than a year they've been able to turn this port into an active, functioning component. That's significant, considering that a year ago there were shipping containers, fires and mud covering that entire area. ... And there are literally hundreds of examples of that up and down the coast."

In the hours, days and weeks after the March 11 quake, satellite operators funneled fresh imagery to disaster workers, relief groups, government agencies and private companies coping with the aftermath. "We saw everything from big industrial partners who wanted to see the status of their factories, to government agencies involved in the actual reconstruction," Wood said.

Japanese officials and the U.S. military used the images to figure out which places were best for setting up aid operations, while relief organizations scanned wide-scale maps to see which areas were most in need of help. In places where planes weren't allowed to fly, "we were effectively the only game in town" for that initial post-quake aerial imagery.

Today, satellite images provide an effective way to gauge how much progress is being made, through comparisons of the before-during-and-after views. "To communicate and explain that to people is really an important and powerful tool that I've seen evolve over the years," Wood said. Pictures from space were important in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean quake and tsunami, they're important for Japan, and they'll be important for current and future hotspots such as Syria.

During Japan's crisis, Wood's team at DigitalGlobe was working 24/7, and the weeks and months have sped by. "It's hard for me to believe it's been a year," Wood said. For some of us, Sunday's anniversary may seem like a turning point — but it's really just one more day in the timeline of Japan's reconstruction. These pictures remind us that the work is far from finished.

DigitalGlobe

A labeled version of the image from Feb. 2 shows the status of the four nuclear reactor buildings at the Fukushima plant.

DigitalGlobe

A satellite image from March 14, 2011, shows the ruined Fukushima nuclear complex during the height of the crisis. Click here for larger version.

DigitalGlobe

A satellite image from Nov. 21, 2004, shows the Fukushima complex long before the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Click here for larger version.

More about the Japan quake and tsunami:

• Fukushima wants to know: Is radiation still a threat?
• Japan tourism slowly rebounds year after tsunami
• Slimy, salty, but tasty seaweed revives Japan village
• Tsunami survivors: Obstacles remain for rice farmer
• Tsunami scientists get set for the next wave
• Giant quake like Japan's could hit Pacific Northwest
• Earthquake experts gain predictive powers
• Cook uses recipes to help earthquake survivors heal
• Japan's nuclear plant town remains frozen in time
• Nuke pill frenzy fizzles in U.S. as disaster fades
• PhotoBlog: Panoramic images, then and now
• Japan disaster snarls US nuke plant plans

PMEL / NOAA

A false-color virtual globe, centered on the Pacific Ocean, shows the propagation of tsunami waves from their seismic source off the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011. Black, purple and red denote the highest waves.

Last year's earthquake and tsunami was a catastrophe for Japan — but a problem averted for Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, partly due to luck and partly due to the success of long-range tsunami tracking. Now researchers are working to bring that success closer to home.

If a similar ocean wave were to target the U.S. coastline in the future — and seismologists say that's only a matter of time — the emergency response should be much improved, thanks to the lessons learned from last March's super-tsunami.

"Definitely there are a lot of lessons learned from a big event like that," Vasily Titov, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Tsunami Research, told me this week.

Titov and his colleagues, who are based at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, have focused for years on building better computer models to predict how tsunami waves will spread out from an undersea seismic shock like the one that rocked Japan. Tsunami trackers came in for a good deal of criticism after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 nations. Since then, government agencies have worked together to fill in the gaps in an oceanwide network of deep-sea and surface-buoy sensors — and the upgrades paid off big time last year.

Readings from a network of more than 50 buoys — including the federal governnment's Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis system, or DART —tracked wave heights after a magnitude-9.0 shift in the ocean floor set off a giant wall of water. The waves rose as much as 6 feet in open ocean. "Ten years ago, people would say, 'Oh, it's not possible to have a tsunami that high,'" Titov said. "That was the event that I was hoping not to see in my life."

The computer model correctly predicted the level of flooding that Hawaii would face, seven hours after the earthquake. That provided enough time for a proper evacuation. "Deaths were avoided in Hawaii — I'm pretty confident about that," Titov said.

The model also showed that there'd be only minor impact on the West Coast, due to the fact that the tsunami wave arrived at low tide. "If the West Coast had high tide during tsunami, it would have been much different," Titov said. "There would have been flooding all over the place."

The next wave?
Titov happens to be headquartered in a region that could become ground zero for a future Japan-style tsunami. Studies have indicated that the Cascadia subduction zone, off the coast of Washington state, Oregon and British Columbia, is capable of generating the same kind of ocean wave. In fact, it's thought that such a shock took place off the West Coast more than 300 years ago, setting off a tsunami wave that reached all the way to Japan.

Concerns about the next big wave, wherever it may come, is driving international efforts to track tsunami phenomena closer to the source. Last year's quake and tsunami killed nearly 16,000 people, with many of those deaths coming along the coast. If Japanese authorities had had a quicker assessment of the tsunami threat, they might have launched more intensive evacuation efforts in the first half-hour after the earthquake was detected. Thousands more lives might have been saved.

"That has become the main challenge," Titov told me. "What can be done for this type of event?"

To get a better grip on the local effects of a tsunami, a different kind of monitoring system is needed — a system that has scores of interconnected sea-floor stations, situated close to the source of a potential tsunami shift. The stations would have to be equipped with seismometers and pressure gauges, and send real-time data via satellite links for sophisticated analysis.

Titov and his colleagues think they have come up with a solution to the challenge. "The system we developed worked better than expected," he said. "Detectors can be placed much closer to the source."

Now Japan is making plans to deploy a new $400 million network of 154 sensor stations straddling the Japan Trench, which was the source of last year's seismic shock. That network is due to be put into place in the 2014-2015 time frame. Meanwhile, NOAA is planning to move some of its DART buoys closer to the Cascadia subduction zone and other seismic hot spots.

Simulations suggest that the sensor system and upgraded analysis software can deliver an accurate assessment of local flooding in 30 minutes or less. That might still require authorities to go ahead with pre-emptive evacuations in some areas, even if the initial tsunami alert turns out to be a false alarm. "While the timing is challenging, the situation is manageable," Titov said.

Maintaining the network
At the same time, the existing network of tsunami-tracking buoys needs to be maintained. One of the problems that came to light after the 2004 tsunami was that some of the buoys in the DART network were prone to failure. One critic complained that the tsunami monitoring system was like "a fire alarm that cannot ring."

"The problem is that even that strong array is budgetarily difficult to maintain," Titov said. "That has become the main challenge. We're trying to figure out how to maintain it."

Titov said he found it hard to believe that it's already been a year since that horrible day — March 11, 2011, which is known as "3-11" in Japan. "My heart goes out to all the Japanese," he said. "A lot of our colleagues are from Japan. This has become very personal."

That personal perspective sharpens Titov's desire to develop faster, better ways to predict the paths of the giant waves to come.

"The fact that it's been a year already makes me a little nervous," he told me. "I want to move fast with this research so we're ready for the next tsunami."

More about the Japan quake anniversary:

• Japan-style catastrophe could hit Pacific Northwest
• Earthquake experts upgrade their alert systems
• One year after Fukushima, Japanese town is frozen in time
• Japanese tsunami survivor, 79, looks ahead
• Tsunami Survivors: Struggling to live on, alone
• Japan Red Cross: Whole year wasted after tsunami
• Cosmic Log: Hear the soundtrack of a super-quake
• Nuke pill frenzy fizzles in U.S. as Fukushima fades
• Photo Blog: Panoramic images, then and now
• Japan disaster snarls U.S. nuke plant plans

For more about the future of tsunami forecasting, check out Richard Monastersky's report in the journal Nature.

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.

Francois Campredon / AFP - Getty Images

Northen lights ripple through the skies over Abisko in Swedish Lapland late March 7.

So far, the disruption caused by this week's solar storm seems to be minimal, but skywatchers are maximizing the opportunity to see auroral fireworks — and tonight just might be prime time for the show. Or maybe not.

For several days now, the sun has been sending out bursts of electrically charged particles, known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs. The most spectacular flare-up came late Tuesday, when two X-class solar flares blazed up from a particularly active sunspot region. The waves of particles associated with those flares began sweeping over Earth's magnetic field today.

Usually, that would suggest that tonight's the night to look for the northern lights in somewhat less northern regions of the globe — say, Massachusetts, Nebraska or Oregon. Two factors could put a damper on those expectations: First, the geomagnetic component of the storm is not as powerful as space weather forecasters had expected, at least not yet. Second, the full moon's glare might wash out the delicate glow of the aurora.

To find out whether there's a chance of seeing the northern lights, check out the Ovation Auroral Forecast map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Testbed, as well as the Aurora Forecast website maintained by the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute. Right now the outlook is great for Fairbanks and Edmonton, not so good for Boise or Boston. But you never know — and besides, it's worth going out to take a look at the moon and several planets together in the sky, even if the northern lights aren't shining in your locale.

Rest assured the lights will be shining in the usual places, including Scandinavia, Russia and Canada. Here are a few of the beauties from last night. For even more, click on over to the galleries at SpaceWeather.com:

Timo Veijalainen / AV-Lappi

Timo Veijalainen of Sodankyla, Finland, sends along this picture of the northern lights. "There were lots of clouds during the night, but driving to east was answer to our problem," he said in a note to SpaceWeather.com. "Near midnight, auroras started to dance. It didn't last long, but luckily I got few images." Check out the gallery at SpaceWeather.com, and stop by Veijalainen's AV-Lappi website.

AuroraMAX / CSA

The AuroraMAX all-sky camera near Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories captured this subtle display of greenish and reddish auroral lights early this morning. For more from AuroraMAX, check out the project's website and Twitpic gallery.

More auroral glories:

• Rocket flies into the northern lights
• Aurora extravaganza glows in space
• Planet looks back at the northern lights
• Auroras spark awe across the north
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

Find out more about solar storms and their effects. Larger version of Reuters graphic.

More about solar storms:

• Solar storm hits Earth ... but so far, no problems
• Raging solar storm 'blinds' Venus Express probe
• Cosmic Log archive on auroral displays
  

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From 242.5 miles about the surface of the earth at the International Space Station, Flight Engineer Don Pettit demonstrated how trajectories in microgravity work by shooting an Angry Bird plush toy around the space station using a bungie cord. In-Game's Todd Kenreck reports.

You can talk about video game awesomeness with Todd Kenreck on Twitter and on Facebook.

One year after Japan's earthquake warning system was put to its sternest real-world test, U.S. researchers have built a system that could provide the same type of advance alerts for quake-prone California — the only problem is that they can't afford to get it ready for prime time.

"I've got a system that works in my office," said Thomas Heaton, director of Caltech's Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory. "It works for maybe 100 of us who are prototyping the system. It's been a grassroots effort where a number of scientists have cobbled it together as a demonstration project. But to turn it into a system where literally 50 million Americans would have everything linked into it? It's not ready for that."

The California network, known as Earthquake Early Warning or ShakeAlert, has been in development since long before the magnitude-9.0 quake and tsunami that swept over Japan last March 11. It operates much like the Japanese network does: Readings from about 400 seismic monitoring stations around California are processed on a real-time basis, and when a quake is detected, computer software figures out how long it will take seismic waves to reach your location.

The system takes advantage of the fact that two types of seismic waves emanate from the epicenter: The first waves to arrive are primary waves, or P waves, which are followed by slower secondary waves, or S waves. The S waves, which travel through Earth's crust at a speed of about 2 miles per second, produce more up-and-down motion and tend to be more damaging. The P waves serve as precursors, enabling experts to estimate the intensity and arrival time for the S waves that will follow.

If the projected intensity is above the level you're worried about, your computer will start sounding an alarm and clicking through a countdown, as seen in the video above.

"Right now it's working as well as you could hope for a kludged-together demonstration project from a bunch of professors," Heaton told me. He can adjust the controls downward to be alerted about minor quakes heading toward Caltech in Pasadena, or turn them up so high he can work undisturbed in his office.

"You can go days without anything, and then a day comes when there's a cluster," he said.

The Japanese system, which was developed at an estimated cost of $500 million, turned in a stellar performance during last year's quake. As the video below demonstrates, Tokyo residents had as much as 30 seconds' warning before the shaking began.

Thirty seconds may not sound like much warning, but it's enough time to shut off gas mains and issue a warning to take cover. In Japan, the warnings are flashed via radio and TV, as well as through computer links and mobile phones. Automated broadcast alerts can be set to turn on a car's emergency flashers and warn drivers to slow down and pull over. The same principle is applied to safeguarding Japan's extensive rail system: Thanks to automated warnings, two dozen trains that were operating in the earthquake zone on March 11 were brought to a halt within seconds, with no reports of serious injuries or damage.

Bugs in the system
During last year's catastrophe, the biggest problem had to do with the fact that the closer residents were to the quake's epicenter, the less warning they received. Another issue was that the complexity of the initial seismic shock and the aftershocks caused the  system to become overloaded, leading to a temporary shutdown.

Heaton and his colleagues are encountering similar bugs in the California system. "They're always being engineered to be better systems and less buggy, but we'll never eliminate all the bugs," he said. Right now, the team is working on an Android app version of ShakeAlert. Even the app would be unsuitable for mass distribution, however.

"The technology exists to deploy it, but strategically, I don't see how we could ever support it," Heaton said.

Going public with ShakeAlert would require a more concerted effort, backed by the expertise and funds that are typically associated with federal government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey. So far, the USGS has spent about $2 million on ShakeAlert, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is backing the research with $6 million in contributions to Caltech, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Washington over the next three years. Other supporters include Google.org and Deutsche Telekom's Silicon Valley Innovation Center.

The California Integrated Seismic Network estimates that a statewide quake warning system would cost about $80 million over five years, while the cost of a similar system for the Pacific Northwest has been estimated at $70 million. But it might take additional funding to get the system as fully linked in with society as Japan's system is now.

"Ultimately, when it does run, you don't want university professors running it," Heaton said, with a tone of amiable self-deprecation. "We're the least reliable people to run something like that."

Realistically, will ShakeAlert ever be ready for prime time? Heaton thinks it might take more than a catastrophic earthquake on the other side of the world to get Americans motivated about earthquake alerts at home.

"My experience at this point in my life is that it's hard to get people to focus on things like this unless something bad happens," he said. "It's been really peaceful and quiet in the western U.S. for quite some time now. ... We're very concentrated on our own issues. We were shocked by what happened [in Japan], but not enough to actually do something."

Longer-range prediction?
If it's hard to put in a system based on well-tested geophysics that provides a warning just seconds in advance of the Big One, it's a lot harder to extend the lead time to hours, or days. But people keep trying.

"One prediction that we have learned to make following earthquakes, and this one is a very strong prediction, is that several people will claim to have predicted the earthquake," Heaton joked.

Some researchers are trying to determine whether a statistical analysis of earthquake clustering can lead to better assessments of the chances that a big earthquake will follow smaller tremors. This month's issue of Physics World looks into the prospects for short-term probabilistic forecasting, as well as the controversy surrounding the researchers who didn't predict the deadly 2009 L'Aquila earthquake in Italy (and are now facing manslaughter charges).

Heaton is doubtful that statistics could ever predict the onset of future quakes with the kind of reliability people expect. He noted that 50 percent of all earthquakes have foreshocks, and one quake out of 20 turns out to be a foreshock for a larger quake. "We can say, yeah, earthquakes come in clumps, but to get more particular and specific — personally, I don't think it's very helpful," he said. "What are people going to do with that information, anyway?"

It's possible that some as-yet-unknown mechanism might provide advance indications that a big quake is coming. "There are interesting observations that seem to be reliable about phenomena that are totally mysterious to us," Heaton acknowledged. "Many of them concern electrical phenomena."

Heaton even keeps an open mind about claims that animal behavior can be analyzed to predict future earthquakes.

"I think we know some things that animals are unlikely to do — that is, pick up vibrations from the earth," he told me. "There may be other things out there that are happening that we don't understand very well. So I'm not going to say 'never' to something like that. But the more we think about the problem, the more we recognize that once an earthquake starts, at some point, trying to predict how big it will get before it stops seems to be a particularly difficult dynamics problem."

More about the Japan quake anniversary:

• One year after Fukushima, Japanese town is frozen in time
• Japanese tsunami survivor, 79, looks ahead
• Tsunami Survivors: Struggling to live on, alone
• Japan Red Cross: Whole year wasted after tsunami
• Cosmic Log: Hear the soundtrack of a super-quake
• Nuke pill frenzy fizzles in U.S. as Fukushima fades
• Photo Blog: Panoramic images, then and now
• Japan disaster snarls U.S. nuke plant plans

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.

NASA / LMSAL via SpaceWeather. com

This color-coded image combines observations made by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory in several extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, highlighting a bright X-class flare toward the upper left of the sun's disk on March 6.

 The sun unleashed one of the biggest flares ever seen during its current activity cycle late Tuesday — an X5.4-class outburst strong enough to trigger a radio blackout. The resulting geomagnetic storm could affect electrical grids, communication links, satellite navigation systems and airline schedules over the next couple of days.

The outburst at 7:24 p.m. ET was followed about an hour later by an X1.3-class blast. Solar flares are rated on a letter-plus-number scale, with X being the most powerful category. Usually the numbers run from 1 to 9, but X-class flares can run higher. The highest reading recorded recently is an X28, observed in 2003.

Joe Kunches, a space scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, says the double blast made for a "Super Tuesday," in a different sense from the political meaning.

The big question is, what effect will this solar activity have on Earth? The solar blasts threw off waves of electrically charged particles known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. Those waves are now speeding outward, and space-weather forecasters expect them to touch off strong geomagnetic storms when they interact with Earth's magnetic field late Wednesday and early Thursday.

"The most northern states in the 'Lower 48' should have a chance to see the aurora," the prediction center reported on Facebook.

Could something more serious happen? All this activity is already whipping up an S3 solar radiation storm. "Such a storm is mainly a nuisance to satellites, causing occasional reboots of onboard computers and adding noise to imaging systems," SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips said.

The coming geomagnetic storm is predicted to reach the G3 level, which could trigger alarms on electrical power systems and create intermittent problems for GPS navigation services. Some airline flights are likely to be rerouted so they don't fly so close to the poles, and problems could arise with communication systems in polar regions. That's the bad news. The good news is that NASA and NOAA have lots of resources in space to monitor solar activity, giving network operators more time to assess and prepare.

Check out NOAA's chart of space weather scales to learn more about what S3, G3 and the other storm desigations mean.

Experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center say the storm generated by the X5.4-class flare is on a trajectory to deliver a glancing blow rather than a direct hit on Earth, but they caution that the sunspot region responsible for the flare, AR1429, "remains potent, and subsequent activity is certainly possible."

For now, chances are that the most noticeable effect for most people will be an upswing in the number of fantastic pictures of the northern lights. AR1429 has been acting up over the past few days, and SpaceWeather.com has been adding plenty of stunners to its aurora gallery. If you get a nice snapshot, please consider sharing it with us via the Cosmic Log Facebook page or msnbc.com's FirstPerson in-box.

Update for 4:40 p.m. ET March 7: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center reports that the coronal mass ejections sent out on Tuesday are projected to impact Earth and Mars as well as several interplanetary spacecraft, including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the Messenger probe at Mercury and the sun-watching STEREO-B satellite. The NASA advisory also notes that the X5.4-class flare was the strongest solar outburst since an X6.9 blast on Aug. 9, 2011. In that previous case, the resulting CME was not directed at Earth, and no ill effects were felt.

Update for 5 p.m. ET March 7: A lot of commenters are talking about the Carrington Event of 1859, a solar storm that was so strong it frazzled telegraph wires. That was associated with what was surely an off-the-scale solar flare, much more powerful than the X28 referenced at the beginning of this item — so I've rephrased that reference accordingly.

More about solar storms and auroras:

• Northern lights shine through a crack
• Rocket flies into the northern lights
• Aurora extravaganza glows in space
• Planet looks back at the northern lights
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

This item was first published at 12:30 a.m. ET March 7.

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.

NASA

In this artist's conception, Mars astronauts come upon one of the Viking landers that touched down in 1976.

The quest to learn about life on Mars has been lowering its sights for the past century, but researchers think they finally have the right strategy for addressing the key mysteries surrounding the Red Planet: Were the conditions right for living things to arise on Mars? And if so, what happened?

The romantic vision of Mars that many folks held onto in the early 20th century is on full display in Hollywood's 3-D blockbuster, "John Carter," which makes its debut Friday. In the movie, a visitor from Earth journeys along Mars' deserts and rivers, encountering green-skinned aliens, airship-riding warriors and, of course, a fetchingly clad Martian princess.

In August, which is probably around the time that "John Carter" comes out on DVD, the real-life Mars will take center stage. NASA's car-sized Curiosity rover is due to touch down at the end of a rocket-powered crane and become the latest robotic visitor from Earth. It will take pictures, drill into rocks, scoop up soil and perform chemical tests. If those tests match the science team's wildest dreams, the $2.5 billion mission will reveal ... a smattering of organic molecules.

NASA

Dave Beaty is chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"We want to find places that have high potential for habitability and high potential for preservation," David Beaty, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me. "The actual test for life would be a subsequent mission."

Beaty will discuss the 21st-century plan for exploring Mars at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT) on Wednesday as my guest on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show that airs online as well as in the Second Life virtual world. Please join us by clicking onto BlogTalkRadio or teleporting into our Second Life auditorium. If you just can't make it, you can download the podcast after the show via BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.

How times have changed
NASA's expectations for the Curiosity rover mission — also known as Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL — are far less ambitious than the expectations that were common in the late 1800s, when millionaire astronomer Percival Lowell thought he saw evidence of a canal-building civilization on the Red Planet. The "canals" turned out to be visual illusions, and they weren't the last illusions surrounding the search for life on Mars. In the 1950s, the most famous rocket scientist of the age, Wernher von Braun, declared that a quarter of the Red Planet was "covered with a sort of plant life that our biological knowledge cannot quite encompass."

Such illusions were shattered once spacecraft came close enough to take pictures of Mars' magnificent desolation, starting with the Mariner 4 in 1964. Scientists saw a cold, dry world, with no verifiable signs of life on the surface. The Viking landers detected hints of organic activity, but not enough evidence to resolve the uncertainty. Since then, no additional evidence has come to light.

"Virtually every mission to the surface of Mars provides no evidence for anything," Caltech geologist John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory mission, told me. "We don't expect to see any evidence for anything that might represent macroscopic life. At this point, we understand why that is. With reference to our own planet, if you go to extreme environments on Earth, places like Antarctica ... the only things that you would really ever see in these extreme places are microorganisms or other simple organisms, like lichens. We're not asking something special of Mars, we're just conditioning our expectations based on analogs to extreme environments here on Earth.

"You put deserts and extreme cold together, and you're not kidding anybody," he said. "You know you're looking for something that's probably going to be very small and highly specialized, with adaptation to an extreme environment."

Best places on Mars
Before they search seriously for that kind of life, scientists have to figure out the best places to look. That's what the MSL mission is all about. Grotzinger, Beaty and other members of NASA's Mars science team think the rover's destination in Gale Crater could be a promising place to sample billions of years' worth of geological layers. Rather than looking exclusively for present-day life, MSL's scientists will be hunting for chemical indicators that point to potential habitability as well as the prospects for preserving the traces of past life.

Scientists suspect that Martian surface may not be the best place to find those chemical indicators, due to the exposure to harsh radiation and oxidation. But if Curiosity can drill or dig a little deeper, it should have a better chance of finding intact amino acids and other chemicals that have been linked to life.

"If MSL were to make a pretty good discovery ... that may be enough to cause a subsequent mission to go back to that exact spot," Beaty said. But even if Curiosity doesn't hit a home run, the observations made in Gale Crater should provide enough geological diversity to give scientists a better sense of where future life-seeking probes should be sent.

Tough times ... and tough questions
Right now, NASA's Mars exploration program is going through tough budgetary times, and it's not yet clear how those future missions will be laid out. But Beaty is confident that NASA will continue to send robots to the Red Planet, with humans eventually following in their wheel tracks.

"Mars is widely thought to be the ultimate destination, at least for the foreseeable future," he said. "It may not be the next destination. We may have to go some other place first — to the moon, or a near-Earth object — to develop the experience to go onward to Mars. But I think the current view of the strategy is that those things would be way points on the way to Mars, and Mars is the object of greatest interest."

The big reason for that interest has a lot in common with the reason why Percival Lowell, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others looked so longingly at the Red Planet a century ago.

"The thing that's fascinating about Mars is that the period during which the planet as a whole was habitable was such a narrow window that opened early in its history, say, from 4.2 billion years ago," Beaty said. "There's evidence of channels and valleys and clay minerals, but then somehow the water was lost. Where did the water go?

"If Mars was able to establish life during the period when water was there, did it find a refuge — for example, in the deep subsurface — or did it just die out? ... And if Mars didn't have life, an equally important question is, why not? We have to know that, too. If it had all the right conditions, and Earth developed life while Mars didn't, what was different?"

To delve into these questions and other Martian mysteries, tune into "Virtually Speaking Science."

Join us at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday 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. The hourlong show will be archived on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. Check out these other podcasts from "VSScience":

• Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science
• Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Propulsion expert 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

This is the second of a two-part series about Mars in fact and fiction. For the fictional side of things, check out my interview with "John Carter" film director Andrew Stanton.

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.

Researchers from Georgia Tech suggest that the best way to visualize the seismic effects of last year's Japan earthquake is with your ears — and they've put together three "audifications" to demonstrate.

One recording is based on seismometer readings taken on March 11, 2011, along the Japanese coastline between Tokyo and the hard-hit Fukushima nuclear complex. The audio starts with a bang — the magnitude-9.0 shock — and continues with the pounding noise of aftershocks that sound like a bull knocking over shelves in a china shop.

Readings from seismometers that were place about 90 miles away from the quake's epicenter reveal a double-barreled bang. That suggests there were "at least two patches of high-frequency radiation from the mainshock rupture," the researchers note.

A third clip is based on readings from California. The Japan quake sparked deep rumblings in the San Andreas Fault, which begin with a sound like distant thunder, and then continue with a crackle that represents "induced tremor activity at the fault," the Georgia Tech team says.

The audio was created by taking the seismic signals, which are typically detected in the 0.01 to 100 Hz frequency range, and speeding the soundtrack by a factor of 50 to 100 times. That brings the sound into the audible range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and crunches hours' worth of data into less than a minute of audio.

In these YouTube videos, the seismic data is also displayed on a graph.

"By combining seismic auditory and visual information, static 'snapshots' of earthquake data come to life," Georgia Tech's Zhigang Peng and his colleagues write in the March-April edition of Seismological Research Letters. "In addition, this approach allows the audience to relate seismic signals generated by earthquakes to familiar sounds such as thunder, popcorn popping, rattlesnakes, gunshots, firecrackers, etc."

The researchers say that seismic audifications can make it easier to explain the concept of distant quake triggering to general audiences, and that they also provide a tool for experts to identify and understand such seismic signals in other regions. What do you think? Do these clips give you a better feel for how seismic events get started and keep rattling on?

One year after the disaster in Japan:

• Then and now: The 2011 Japan tsunami
• Kuni Takahashi revisits the earthquake zone
• Ridley Scott and Japan TV team up on documentary
• Midway Atoll expecting Japan tsunami debris soon

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.

Director Andrew Stanton watches over the filming of a scene for "John Carter," the Disney blockbuster based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' century-old Mars fantasy novel.

Hollywood film director Andrew Stanton says no one should go to the $250 million 3-D blockbuster "John Carter" expecting to see a documentary about Mars — but he also says the movie, based on a century-old fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, reflects some 21st-century insights about the Red Planet.

He's not talking about the 9-foot-tall green aliens or the impossibly agile feather fliers that folks on Mars get around on. He's not even talking about the scenes where the title character, a Civil War veteran who finds himself mysteriously transported to the next world over, jumps hundreds of feet in the air and lands effortlessly with nary a thud. (Sure, Mars has just one-third of Earth's gravity, but you'd still land pretty hard.)

What Stanton has in mind is the wide-angle view: the fact that at least in some places, the real Mars looks much like the terrain in Utah where many of the exterior scenes were filmed. Some scenes were filmed just one hill over from the site of the Mars Desert Research Station, where researchers operating under the aegis of the Mars Society are testing the tools and techniques that someday might be used for real-life missions to the Red Planet.

Stanton notes that Burroughs had it right when he imagined a dry world where water once flowed in profusion. Findings from NASA's Mars rovers and orbiters have reinforced the view that Mars was warmer and wetter billions of years ago, but lost its oceans and much of its atmosphere due to its weak magnetic field and weak gravity. If life ever flourished on the Martian surface, it lost its footing a long time ago.

The vision of Mars provided in Burroughs' 11 "Barsoom" novels, and in Stanton's movie, is more like the Red Planet as it was understood in the late 19th and early 20th century. This was an era when tycoon astronomer Percival Lowell thought he could make out well-built canals and the hints of civilization through the telescope he had built in Arizona for Mars-watching. The Martian maps created by Lowell and his contemporaries set the scene at the start of the movie.

Burroughs' novels have been a staple of youngsters' imaginings for generations — and today they're freely available online, thanks to Project Gutenberg. Just go to Gutenberg.org's search page, type in "Burroughs," and start with "A Princess of Mars," the novel that provides the plot for "John Carter." You can even download an audiobook version for free.

The movie will hit your pocketbook a bit harder — and that raises the big question about "John Carter": Will the film earn back the estimated quarter-billion dollars in costs and go on to make a profit? Stanton has had a pretty good track record so far, artistically and financially: The 46-year-old Oscar-winner was one of the first animators to join the Pixar studio, became one of the key writers for "Toy Story," made a splash as the director of "Finding Nemo" and had an out-of-this world success as director, writer and voice character for "WALL-E."

"John Carter" marks Stanton's live-action directing debut — and the stakes could hardly be higher, not just because of the huge financial gamble, but also because of the tricky source material. Can Stanton breathe new life into a tale first told in 1912, and still do right by Burroughs' fans? Stanton thinks he can, in part because he's a super-fan himself.

"I’ve wanted to see this story on the screen since I was 11," he told me. "As a fan, I’ve spent my whole life just waiting for somebody to please put it on the screen. When it finally got put into my lap, I suddenly found myself in the driver’s seat."

Stanton and I talked about his vision of Mars, and his expectations for the movie, during a telephone interview last month. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A: 

Cosmic Log: A lot of directors say when they're doing a science-fiction movie, the first thing they think about is telling a good story, and then they have to think about being faithful to the source material, and then they try to slide in a little science just so the film doesn’t look too outlandish. Did you find that you had to keep a lot of those factors in mind as you were working on "John Carter"?

Andrew Stanton: Well, part of the charm and the romance of the book is attached to the time it was written, when we didn’t know enough. It was inspired by the slight improvement in telescopes, and you could see a little bit more of vague detail on the surface of Mars. And that inspired a lot of imagination and wonder in a lot of people’s minds, including Edgar Rice Burroughs. The fantasy he came up with was intriguing, and I didn’t want to debunk it. There’s no fun in that. I mean, there’s a reason why I do stories with fish that talk underwater. If you’re not up for taking that license with your imagination, then you might as well not read the story.

Frank Connor / Disney

During filming in Utah, "John Carter" director Andrew Stanton looks over some papers in the foreground while Taylor Kitsch, who plays the title role in the movie, stands in the background.

Q: Is there anything in particular you did to try to have the audience accept that?

A: Yeah, there was. As a kid, the 11-year-old part of me that read the book, you want to believe that it might be something that could happen. You want to put yourself in the position of the main character and say, "Wow, what would it really be like?" That was certainly part of the attraction. You want to believe that these kinds of flora and fauna and this civilization might exist out there.

We have the one advantage now that we know exactly what the surface of Mars looks like, thanks to all the Mars rovers rolling around and sending back all the images, and all the satellite images. You can Google-map Mars from your iPhone. What that told us is exactly what the geography looks like, and it looks a lot like the Southwest. It’s very much an empty 'Dead Sea' desert, where it’s very evident that billions of years ago there used to be water. That was something I could immediately take advantage of and incorporate. That allowed me to shoot in real locations, and make it much more believable and authentic. If you can take a little bit of license and ask, "What if Burroughs was right?" — this might be what it would be like.

Q: Are there things that you want to let Edgar Rice Burroughs fans know? To say, "This is going to be just a little bit different, because of the way we had to do this movie for the 21st century"?

A: No, the funny thing is, I took the exact opposite approach. If I was the kid in 1976 who could fall in love with a 1912 book, for example, the way it was written, I took it as no different from somebody suddenly coming across "Moby Dick" or "Romeo and Juliet." I fell in love with the time period that it evoked. I wanted to embrace, wholeheartedly, the timelessness of the story and the mythic aspects, but also embrace the historical aspect of it. So I delved right into the late 1800s in the U.S., and I tried to treat the surface of Mars as the people of that time period saw it. They’re all things of the past, and there’s nobody alive today to prove it was any different. It really kind of works that way. I think that's what I want, and I know that's what a lot of people want when they go to see movies. They don’t hope everything's been contemporized to now. I want to be transported somewhere else, and be brought to another place, and meet other people, and believe it.

Q: Are there any things that you drew from planetology, or anything you thought was helpful for filling the gaps when you go from the book to the movie? Often people have scientific advisers to tell them what it should be like in the movie…

A: I found that I had way more scientific advisers on "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E" than I did on this one, because of the fantasy nature. I had more research done on what it was like to live and work in the United States in the late 1800s. But once it came to Mars, it was all whatever you wanted to make up and whatever Burroughs described. But my big mandate was, I wanted to treat it like a "period film" of a period we just didn’t know about. I wanted it to have as much authenticity as if I had done the historical research — as if we had gone back to somewhere in time in our own world, whether that would be the Middle East or feudal Japan or South America. I wanted it to have that kind of gravitas, even though we had to make it up.

Disney

Director Andrew Stanton (right) consults with actor Willem Dafoe, who is perched on stilts for a motion-capture scene. Another crew member wears a green body suit to blend in with the special effects.

It’s the same thing with the environment. Instead of making up these evil-looking creatures, we looked at anything we could think of in nature that would root itself with any the creatures that people rode, or some of the species. One of the most prominent things is this race of green men called the Tharks, which are 9 feet tall with tusks and four arms. I didn’t want them to look like characters that some little kid drew in his notebook and then put on the screen. I wanted them to look like beings that truly evolved in the desert. We have all this history to go back to — so many cultures that have had to survive and push for many generations in the desert, whether it’s Australia’s Aborigines, or the Masai warriors, or the Bedouin. You see all these common denominators that connect them: They’re very thin, they’re very ropy, they just need the essentials to survive. You can pull those common denominators and then make up your own derivative race from that. We did that with everything, so that it would really feel as if nature had evolved all of this.

Q: When it came to designing the landscapes for the movie, it sounds as if you were inspired by that blending of American Southwest and what’s currently known about Mars. Did you go with what our current knowledge of the Martian landscape, or did you go with the Burroughsesque fantasy?

A: I went with what’s really out there, because I wanted it to be believable. I didn’t have the money or the desire to make stuff up. If an ocean goes away, and the ground is left there … like I said, the Mars rover footage proved that it looks like it does in Utah. There’s really very little difference. As a matter of fact, there were areas where we shot where NASA has had people researching what it might be like to colonize Mars if we ever do put a man there. And you can see why: You feel like you’re on another planet. It’s very alienesque. It’s not flat and boring. It’s not like Sahara sand deserts. It’s very unique, and that was part of the attraction of Utah as well, that you could drive two or three hours in any direction and see entirely different, foreign, alien terrain. It’s like having a state-sized movie lot.

Q: Do you draw any inspiration from other science-fiction films? For example, a lot of people have been wondering whether this film is going to be another "Avatar" … What did you take from other imaginative presentations of otherworldly settings?

A: I didn’t need to. Again, Burroughs is the source. Burroughs is the Rosetta Stone of science fiction. It’s what everything else has been inspired by. It inspired "Superman," "Flash Gordon," "Star Wars," "Avatar" — so I had no interest in making a Xerox of a Xerox. I wanted to go to the original source to try to capitalize on what was specific to Burroughs’ DNA and thumbprint. That was the thing nobody had ever copied.

Nobody’s ever really done his book. People have only been inspired by it. It’s like saying people have been inspired to create very nice harmonious, catchy tunes, but nobody’s literally tried to riff off the Beatles, and nobody’s heard the actual Beatles music. That’s what I felt like I was doing by embracing the book itself. A lot of people don’t know that Burroughs wrote 11 books about this character and this world. So it was like having my own field guide. It was like having an encyclopedia describing how the history of this world went, the people’s names, the names of places, dates, flora, fauna. It was almost an overload of information. If anything, we had to cut down how much we described the place. The books are so dense with description. It doesn’t read like a sci-fi space novel, it reads like a traveler or a tourist who has gone to an unexplored area of our world and found a lost continent. That’s what was romantic and interesting to me. It really wasn’t space.

Q: Did you base it on "A Princess of Mars," or did you incorporate material from the other books as well?

A: It’s 100 percent based on "A Princess of Mars." But because we know that these relationships and stories continue, to improve the narrative, to give it a much stronger three-act structure and make it more of a character-growth piece — which is not what the first book was like — I took license to either edit things out or took characters from places that we needed to know about in the later books and brought them in earlier. We treated it like a good television season that you’re planning for, but now you’re putting out the pilot.

Q: So there may be a sequel in the works?

A: We were really smart, because I fell in love with this as a series. The series was finished in 1959 or 1960, so it was all written by the time I was born and started to read these things. I never saw it as a single novel, I saw it as my "Harry Potter" series. I always hoped it would start a whole legacy of films, so what we did is, we optioned the rights to the first three books and outlined all three together like a trilogy, and just set our sights on seriously making the first one. We’re just crossing our fingers that people will like it enough that we can continue.

Q: But you didn’t pull a “Lord of the Rings” maneuver and shoot scenes for future films, I take it.

A: We talked about it. Fortunately, Disney had been through shooting "Pirates" 2 and 3 at the same time, and they had come to the conclusion that there really was no upside to doing that. As clever as it sounds, it causes an equal amount of problems as if you  didn’t shoot the movies together. So they said it wasn’t worth it, especially for me, doing this for my first time. It’s hard enough for me to try to do this one time around, let alone shooting two movies at the same time.

Q: I wanted to ask about that idea of going from animated to live action. Was there anything about the subject matter that made it easier or harder for you to make the switch?

A: Every film that I've ever worked on has taken a minimum of four years. I learned a long time ago that I have to love the idea so much that I’ll be willing to get out of bed and face it when it’s not working, which is most of the time. Most of the time, these movies aren’t working. It’s like raising children. Most of the time, it’s a struggle, and then you get these wonderful little pockets of bliss. That’s the fuel. That’s what gets me into making a movie and working on a movie.

I don’t have a love for a medium. I don’t think, "Oh, I want to make this just because it’s animated, or just because it’s live action." There’s no carrot there for me. It’s all about the story and the idea that I want to see done. That’s what gave me the guts to tackle working in animation on "Toy Story" in the first place. It gave me the guts to suddenly jump into being a screenwriter and try my hand at directing when I did "Nemo." Everything I’ve worked on has had some huge challenge, some huge first that I’ve never done before, but it’s always been fueled by the feeling that I really wanted to see that story on the screen.

This had the deepest seed planted, because I’ve wanted to see this story on the screen since I was 11. As a fan, I’ve spent my whole life just waiting for somebody to please put it on the screen. When it finally got put into my lap, I suddenly found myself in the driver’s seat. That’s what gave me the guts to tackle the live-action part.

But what a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s half an animated movie and half a live-action movie, blended perfectly together. There are more animated shots in this movie than in "Finding Nemo." So I really wasn’t giving up anything that I’ve learned. This is capitalizing on everything that I’ve learned and then adding on top of it the live-action aspect. Which wasn’t as huge of a change as I expected it to be. It’s really still talking to 200 artists about what’s going to be on the screen, what’s the story about, what we’re designing. The conversations were identical. There was really no translation. It’s just that suddenly you’re doing it under duress, outside all the time, in extreme conditions. It’s almost like boot camp, because you don’t have a life. You’re working from sunrise to sunset for 100 days straight. That was very different. I was so used to working banker’s hours in offices for years. But the physical endurance was the only big, big difference.

Q: With the premiere coming up, I’m curious about how you’re feeling – because there are mixed reports. Some people say it’s going to be a huge bomb. Other people say they can hardly wait to see it. Do you get butterflies in your stomach, or have you been through all this before?

A: Yeah, you can look back, and that’s been said about every big film, and about everything I’ve ever worked on. You just have to ignore it all. All you can do is control how good it'll be when you sit in the theater. I can't control people's predictions. I can’t control people's responses afterward, as far as box office and all that kind of stuff. But what I've always been able to control is to make it the best experience I can for you when you sit down in the theater. And that, I feel I've done.

More about our changing view of Mars:

• You saw it on Mars? You must be seeing things
• Google lets you tour Mars, old and new
• Where did Mars' water go? Maybe underground
• NASA rover will look deep into Mars' past

Later this week: Planetary scientists reflect on how our conception of Mars has changed in the past century, and how it will change again in the next year.

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.