Acoustic Barrel Grows New Materials in Space

What grows in space, is about the size of a baseball and is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Jacques Guigne is waiting to find out.

The research scientist and founder of Guigne International in Newfoundland owns a device, now aboard the International Space Station, that uses beams of sound to suspend materials for processing.

"The beams of sound energy work like invisible fingers that gently push the floating sample into the center of the container so that it doesn't touch the walls," explained Guigne.

Guigne told Discovery News the fingers of sound "are very intelligent in terms of how they are manipulated."

The primary advantage of using sound beams to hold materials in space is so that they can be processed cleanly, without any contamination from a container.

"With no gravity and nothing touching the walls (of a container) you can have a very pure structure. Hence, it's of great value," said Guigne, who pegs the price of a space-formed sample in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the type of material produced.

Those used for semiconductors, for example, would be among the most valuable, he added.

"If you have a steady base of manufacturing then you can see a good return," Guigne said.

Sound-suspended samples can be grown to relatively large sizes in space, about the diameter of a golf ball or baseball, which dwarfs the millimeter-sized materials previously produced in microgravity.

A ball of pure glass, for example, can be sliced and sold for a variety of commercial and manufacturing uses, though Guigne says at this point he considers his proprietary and patented technology to be a test bed.

discovery.com

Andromeda Galaxy a Cosmic Cannibal

Our nearest major galactic neighbor is a cosmic cannibal. And it's heading this way eventually.

Astronomers have long suspected Andromeda of being a space predator, consuming dwarf galaxies that wander too close. Now, cosmic detectives are doing a massive search of the neighborhood and have found proof of Andromeda's sordid past: They've spotted leftovers in Andromeda's wake.

Early results of a massive telescope scan of Andromeda and its surroundings found about half a dozen remnants of Andromeda's galactic appetite. Stars and dwarf galaxies that got too close to Andromeda were ripped from their usual surroundings.

"What we're seeing right now are the signs of cannibalism," said study lead author Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. "We're finding things that have been destroyed ... partly digested remains."

Their report is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

Andromeda and our Milky Way are the two big dogs of our galactic neighborhood. Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to us, about 2.5 million light years away. A light year is about 5.9 trillion miles. The massive mapping of Andromeda is looking half a million light years around Andromeda.

discovery.com

Meteorite Proves Mars Had Thicker Atmosphere

A huge iron-nickel meteorite discovered on the surface of Mars by one of NASA's robotic geology stations is giving scientists unexpected insights into the planet's past.

Among the questions scientists are scrambling to answer is how the watermelon-sized metallic rock managed to make it to surface of Mars intact.

Computer models show that the planet's current atmosphere could cushion the descent of a meteorite only about one-tenth the size of the meteorite the rover Opportunity spotted late last month.

Anything larger would have been mostly or totally obliterated on impact, leaving only a crater.

"The fact that this meteorite is still intact tells you that the atmosphere must have been denser to slow it down for the fall," planetary geologist Matt Golombek, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

Opportunity has been exploring an equatorial region of the planet known as Meridian Planum since January 2004 looking of signs of past water. It discovered a much smaller metallic meteorite in December 2004 as it was probing part of its discarded heat shield.

Comet Holds Building Block for Life

An amino acid, one of the essential ingredients to life on Earth, has been found in a comet for the first time, NASA announced Monday.

Since amino acids have already been discovered in meteorites, this new development, reported at the American Chemical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., suggests that early Earth had plenty of opportunities to have been seeded for life by extraterrestrial bodies.

Scientists concluded nearly two years of painstaking research on comet samples returned by the Stardust probe to confirm that glycine -- one of 20 known amino acids that form the building blocks for life on Earth -- was in the comet Wild 2, and not the result of terrestrial contamination.

"We're interested in understanding the inventory of materials that were available on early Earth when life got started," lead researcher Jamie Elsila, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.

"It's not a particularly unexpected discovery that glycine is in a comet -- we've found amino acids in meteorites before -- but it does show that comets are another way that amino acids could have come to Earth," she said.

Elsila and colleagues developed a technique to extract and analyze deposits of glycine from bits of aluminum foil that lined the probe's collection plates. They discovered that carbon atoms in the glycine had an extra neutron in its nucleus compared to terrestrial carbon, confirming that the amino acid did not come from Earth.

"This is telling us that the molecular ingredients for life are ubiquitous," Carl Pilcher, who oversees NASA's astrobiology program at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., told Discovery News.

NASA Looks to Fly Commercial

NASA will spend $50 million of federal economic stimulus funds to seed development of commercial passenger spaceships; however, a presidential panel reviewing the U.S. space program says that may be just the beginning.

According to the recommendations of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans committee, which delivered its preliminary findings to the White House on Friday, NASA should set aside $2.4 billion between 2011 and 2014 for rides to the International Space Station on commercial U.S. carriers.

"There are companies that would love to move forward with orbital launch service on their own, using only private funds, but it just wouldn't happen for many, many years," John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a Washington, D.C.-based industry trade group, told Discovery News. "What the government funding would do is basically allow these companies to accelerate these efforts."

With the government as a base customer, commercial firms would be able to develop an array of new markets for orbital launch services, including tourism and scientific research, Gedmark added.

"When you have multiple companies doing this as part of their core business, you open the doors for all sorts of things that you can do in space," he said.

The agency has $50 million available for firms to flesh out plans to provide astronauts rides to and from space station, which orbits about 225 miles above Earth. Proposals are due by Sept. 22.

Space Shuttle Discovery Arrives at ISS

Space shuttle Discovery pulled up and docked at the International Space Station on Sunday night, delivering a full load of gear and science experiments.

The linkup occurred as the spacecraft zoomed more than 200 miles above the Atlantic and ended a round-the-world chase of nearly two days. The astronauts cheered when the hatches swung open, and the two crews greeted each other with hugs and handshakes.

A thruster failure made the rendezvous all the more challenging for shuttle commander Rick Sturckow.

One of Discovery's small thrusters began leaking shortly after Friday's midnight liftoff and was shut down. None of the little jets was available for the rendezvous and docking, and Sturckow had to use the bigger, more powerful primary thrusters, making for a somewhat bumpier, noisier ride.

Struckow had trained for this backup method -- never before attempted for a space station docking -- well before the flight. Mission Control radioed up congratulations after his stellar performance.

"You'll be happy to know it occurred on the 25th anniversary of the maiden flight of Discovery," Mission Control said.

Orbital Gas Station Puts Moon, Mars in Reach

While debate swirls over whether the United States should stick with plans for a base on the moon or head straight to Mars, members of a presidential panel assessing options for NASA's future have another idea: orbital gas stations.

Stashing rocket fuel in orbit around Earth would open a world of possibilities for long-distance space travel, said a subcommittee of the board convened by the White House to review the nation's human space flight program.

"It is often said that if you want to go beyond LEO (low-Earth orbit, or about 200 miles above the planet) you've got to have a big rocket. I don't think that's right," said Jeff Greason, co-founder of XCOR Aerospace based in Mojave, Calif., and a member of the space program review panel.

A key facet of the current plan for the space program after the space shuttles are retired next year is to design a heavy-lift rocket called Ares 5 which, like the Saturn boosters of the 1960s Apollo-era program, would have the muscle to leave Earth's orbit and deliver cargo to the moon.

The space agency estimates the cost of a program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2020 to be $108 billion.

Giant Star Boils, Releasing Matter Into Space

Astronomers have long been curious how red supergiants stars, like the bright star, Betelgeuse, manage to shed so much matter into space.

Now, thanks to a collaborative effort which gave scientists a detailed view of the distant star's surface, they have an answer -- it's boiling.

Observations with a trio of 1.8-meter radio telescopes show giant bubble-like structures bobbing on the surface of Betelgeuse, a massive star located 640 light-years away in the constellation Orion.

Emitting about 100,000 times more light than our sun, Betelgeuse is the bright orange star on the shoulder of Orion, also known as The Hunter.

The observations, which are being reported in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics, are the first to spatially resolve the motion of gas on the surface of a star other than the sun, said Keiichi Ohnaka, with the Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany.

Ohnaka and colleagues found giant gas bubbles -- some as large as the star itself -- moving vigorously up and down in the star's atmosphere.

Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its relatively short life and is expected to explode as a supernova in the next few thousand to hundred thousand years. When it blows, it should be visible from Earth even in daylight.

Scientists aren't sure about the bubbles' origins, but they do point to a likely mechanism for the release of gas and heavy elements into space. These materials become fodder for new stars and planets.

University of California at Berkeley astronomers reported in June that Betelgeuse shrank 15 percent over the past 15 years. At the time, scientists speculated that giant convection cells on the star's surface might be to blame.

Saturn's Day Five Minutes Shorter Than Thought

A day on Saturn is pretty short, and it just got shorter. The time it takes the be-ringed behemoth to complete a spin on its axis has just been calculated by astrophysicists at 10 hours, 34 minutes and 13 seconds, more than five minutes shorter than previous estimates.

A planet comprising clouds of gas driven by layers of mighty jet streams, Saturn has no lasting visual landmarks as a rocky planet does, and this lack makes it hard to measure the planet's rotation.

As a result, astronomers have traditionally based their calculations on Saturn's magnetic field. But this signal can fluctuate and does not accurately measure how fast the planet's deep interior is rotating.

An international team led by scientists from Oxford University and the University of Louisville, Kentucky, used a different technique based on infrared images taken by the U.S. spacecraft Cassini orbiting Saturn.

Shuttle Heads Home, Leaving Six at Space Station

After 11 days together in orbit, space shuttle Endeavour undocked from the International Space Station on Tuesday and began its trip home, leaving behind a bigger and more energized outpost.

Endeavour's departure broke up the biggest orbiting crowd ever: 13 people altogether in space. Seven astronauts were headed home aboard the shuttle. Six remained on the station.

"Six seems like a very small number just now," observed space station astronaut Michael Barratt.

The two spacecraft parted company 220 miles above the Indian Ocean and the shuttle is expected to land in Florida on Friday.

During their shared flight, the two crews improved and expanded the space station, installing a porch for experiments on Japan's science lab and plugging in fresh batteries. They also shared some unexpected inconveniences, most notably a flooded toilet and an overheated air-cleansing system, both of which ended up being fixed.

On their last morning together, they even dressed alike. All wore matching black polo shirts and most of them had on tan pants.

Shuttle commander Mark Polansky thanked the station residents for being "tremendous hosts."

"It was just a wonderful, wonderful experience to be part of the first crew of 13 people up here and to have representatives from all the international partners, which made it a very special event," Polansky said just before the hatches were closed.

"We will miss you," replied the station's skipper, Russian Gennady Padalka. "Have a safe trip."

Space Station Gets X-Ray Eyes

A new telescope to scan for transient X-ray sources was installed on the International Space Station last week, giving astronomers a new tool for finding flaring suns, black holes and exploding stars.

The Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, or MAXI, will scan the sky once every 96 minutes as the space station orbits Earth.

The data will be transmitted via satellite networks live and distributed through the Internet by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which designed and owns the telescope.

"This is a nice idea that they have," astronomer Neil Gehrels with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.

"There are a lot of things in the sky that turn on and off between minutes and hours and sometimes days. This MAXI instrument will be more sensitive to detect fainter ones of those than anything that has flown before. It's really the next step forward."

Gehrels, who is the principal investigator of the gamma ray-hunting Swift telescope, says MAXI complements the existing suite of high-energy orbital observatories.

"They'll provide the X-ray data that we don't have," Gehrels said.

The telescope's design makes it particularly suited for studying small black holes in the local Milky Way galaxy, as well as the highly variable massive black holes at the center of quasars. Supernovas, which are the exploded remains of dying stars, also emit X-rays, as do stars with highly active magnetic fields on their surfaces.

Sun Creates El Nino-like Weather on Earth

Two years after the sun peaks in its 11-year cycle, Earth's climate undergoes small El Nino-like warming effects, which have been tied to floods, droughts and other weather systems.

So concludes a new study that is one of the first to link cyclical variations in solar activity to Earth's climate.

The research, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, is based on computer models of ocean surface temperatures recorded between 1890 and 2006.

The team then simulated how changes in solar output -- which varies only by about 0.1 percent throughout the sun's 11-year cycle -- would impact temperatures on Earth.

They discovered that solar max slightly elevates atmospheric heating, particularly over the tropical and subtropical Pacific, where sun-blocking clouds are scarce.

The extra heat leads to more evaporation, which in turn increases the amount of water vapor in upper-atmospheric winds, triggering heavier rains in the western tropical Pacific and cooler, drier conditions in the east.

The researchers found an El Nino-like warming event occurs about two years after solar max and lasts about a year.

Endeavour Astronauts Complete Fourth Spacewalk

Astronauts outfitted the International Space Station with fresh batteries in an extra-long spacewalk Friday, moving slowly to avoid a repeat of the suit trouble that cut short the previous outing.

At Mission Control's request, Christopher Cassidy and Thomas Marshburn took their time heading out to the far end of the space station, where a series of critical battery changes awaited them. It was difficult dealing with all the stiff bolts, and the men paced themselves accordingly as they pulled out 9-year-old batteries and plugged in new ones.

By midafternoon, five hours into their spacewalk, the two had installed three fresh batteries. One more remained.

The last time Cassidy went out, on Wednesday, he was so gung-ho and moved so fast that the air-cleansing canister in his suit could not keep up. That resulted in rising carbon dioxide levels that forced an early end to the spacewalk.

"He's a Navy SEAL, he's in great shape, and so we really needed to tell him, 'Hey, we know you can do this really well and really fast ... just slow down a little and take your time,'" explained flight director Holly Ridings.

The spacewalkers took the advice to heart. But despite Cassidy's effort to stay relaxed, his metabolic rate was a little high at one point and Mission Control gave some of the early battery tasks to Marshburn. That gave Cassidy, a 39-year-old Navy commander, a bit of a break.

World's Largest Telescope Acts Like Big Bucket

A new telescope scheduled to be inaugurated this week on Spain's Canary Islands holds the title as the world's largest, but contenders are gathering in the wings.

The Gran Telescopio Canarias, or GTC for short, has 10.4 meters (34 feet) of mirrors for collecting faint light from distant objects.

"Basically, a telescope mirror functions like a bucket in the rain: The larger the bucket, the faster you collect water," said Michael Richer, an astronomer with Mexico's Instituto de Astronomia Ensenada, who serves as a scientific advisor for the GTC.

"Larger telescopes allow you to collect light faster. This permits the observation of fainter sources -- either because they're farther away or because they're intrinsically fainter -- or more detailed observations that require more precise manipulation of the light," Richer told Discovery News.

GTC tops the 10-meter (32.8-foot) Keck Telescopes on Hawaii's Mauna Kea and folds new teams of astronomers into a heated quest for knowledge about how the universe formed and what it contains. The $180 million GTC is owned Spain, Mexico and the University of Florida.

"When you're a partner in your own telescope, you have a competitive advantage," said Stan Dermott, chairman of the astronomy department at the University of Florida.

Molten Mars Too Hot to Handle Life

The surface of Mars was molten for more than 100 million years after it formed, preventing any early life evolving on the planet, said researchers.

Their findings, based on analysis of rare Martian meteorites at NASA's Johnson Space Center in the U.S., are published in Nature Geoscience.

Co-author Craig O'Neill, of Macquarie University's Department of Earth and Planetary Science, says the study overturns previous thought that the surface of Mars cooled within a few thousand years.

Instead they found the planet remained a molten ball due to a "hyper-heated steamy atmosphere" that kept the surface temperature above more than 1000 degrees Celsius (1832 degrees Fahrenheit) for more than 100 million years.

O'Neill says this effectively sterilized the planet making it unlikely that any life form could evolve.

Solar Eclipse Draws in Thousands

Hordes of scientists, students and nature enthusiasts prepared Tuesday for the longest total solar eclipse of this century, while millions planned to shutter themselves indoors, giving in to superstitious myths about the phenomenon.

Wednesday's eclipse will first be sighted at dawn in India's Gulf of Khambhat, just north of the metropolis of Mumbai, before being seen in a broad swath moving north and east to Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and China.

The eclipse will reach its peak in India at about 6:20 a.m. local time (8:50 p.m. EDT; 0050 GMT), and will last 6 minutes and 39 seconds at its maximum point.

It will be seen for 3 minutes and 48 seconds in the Indian village of Taregna, where scientists say residents will have the clearest view.

Over the past week the village has been swamped by researchers who will study scientific phenomena ranging from the behavior of birds and other animals to atmospheric changes affected by the eclipse.

Hotels in Patna were fully booked while taxis raised their rates sensing a brief opportunity in the sudden interest in the village.

Jupiter Smashed, NASA Confirms, Leaving Scar

Fifteen years after being battered by Comet Shoemaker-Levy, Jupiter has drawn the fire of another renegade body.

A dark scar near the planet's southern polar region, first noticed by an amateur astronomer in Australia, is believed to have been caused by a comet crashing into the giant planet.

Infrared images taken by a NASA telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, show a dark scar-like patch and a bright shower of debris particles in the planet's upper atmosphere. The impact site also shows a warming in the planet's troposphere, and possibly higher levels of ammonia gas.

"On Friday night I was imaging the same area that I was imaging Sunday night so I could tell pretty quickly when I saw this black mark coming into view that it was something that wasn't there when I last looked two days before," said amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, who discovered the crash site on July 19 from outside his home observatory near Murrumbateman NSW Australia.

Endeavour Arrives at Space Station

The space shuttle and space station hooked up Friday after a round-the-world chase, making for the biggest crowd ever gathered together in orbit - 13 Earthlings.

Endeavour docked at the International Space Station as the two craft soared 220 miles above the Australian coast.

Once the hatches popped open, the seven shuttle astronauts floated into the space station, one by one, and embraced their six station colleagues. It was a bit of a mob scene, a floating jumble of dark shirts, beige pants and shorts, and white socks.

"Welcome," said the station's skipper, Russian Gennady Padalka, positioned at the entrance.

"Thirteen is a pretty big number, but it's going to be an outstanding visit for us," said shuttle commander Mark Polansky. "We are just thrilled to be here."

Besides being the biggest space gathering ever, it was the most diverse: seven Americans, two Russians, two Canadians, one Japanese and one Belgian. Twelve men, one woman. Four medical doctors. And engineers and pilots galore.

Copies of Moon Landing Videos Restored

With the help of Hollywood, those historic, grainy images of the first men on the moon never looked better. NASA unveiled refurbished video Thursday of the July 20, 1969, moonwalk restored by the same company that sharpened up the movie Casablanca.

Watch the restored videos of the Apollo 11 moon mission on NASA TV

NASA lost its original moon landing videotapes and after a three-year search, officials have concluded they were probably erased. That original live video was ghostlike and grainy.

NASA and a Hollywood film restoration company took television video copies of what Apollo 11 moon landing beamed to Earth 40 years ago and made the pictures look sharper.

NASA emphasized the video isn't "new" -- just better quality.

"There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who's in charge of the project.

Asteroid Belt Loaded with Former Comets

Many of the primitive bodies wandering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are former comets, tossed out of orbit by a brutal ballet between the giant outer planets, said a team of astrophysicists.

A commonly accepted theory is that the asteroid belt is the rubble left over from a "proto-planetary disk," the dense ring of gas that surrounds a new-born star.

But the orbiting rocks have long been a source of deep curiosity. They are remarkably varied, ranging from mixtures of ice and rock to igneous rocks, which implies they have jumbled origins.

The answer to the mystery, according to a study published by the British journal Nature on Wednesday, is that a "significant fraction" of the asteroid population in fact comprises ex-comets.

Famously described as "dirty snowballs" of ice and dust, comets are lonely, long-distance wanderers of the solar system whose elliptical swing around the sun can take decades.