Earth to Mars rover, Curiosity: Have you landed?

Earth to Mars rover, Curiosity: Have you landed? - On Sunday night, millions of miles away, a nail-biter of a landing will be executed — or not — on Mars. The Mars rover, Curiosity, which has been traveling to the distant planet for the past eight-and-a-half months, will land on the red planet by remote control.

To stick the landing, the car-size rover must successfully slow down from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, or "Seven Minutes of Terror," as the wildly popular video from NASA explains—which you can watch above.

Due to the long-distance signal from Mars to Earth, researchers won't know for an agonizing 14 minutes if the landing, programmed from Earth, is a success or an epic fail. The event has gotten so much attention that it will be broadcast live in Times Square.

During the short but tense wait, a sequence of events must fall into place for the landing of the 1,982-pound spacecraft to be successful, including using a parachute to slow it down, firing rockets to prepare for the landing, and carefully setting it in a crater to avoid a dust cloud. If all goes well, the craft will send out a signal that its landing was successful.

The Mars rover has already become somewhat of a celebrity, with its own Facebook page, and messages posted on its wall like this one from Issam Motawaj: "Very excited. We hope you will be a safe landing. Good Luck." And from Jeff Baber "I'm be watching!!! Love it!!!"

But the landing is just the beginning of what's hoped to be a two-year mission to explore signs of life on the planet. The rover, essentially a moving science lab, cost NASA $2.5 billion to build and comes equipped with 17 cameras, a 7-foot-long robot arm, and state-of-the-art science experiments and sensors weighing 125 pounds.

Bing Quock, assistant director of Morrison Planetarium at California Academy of Sciences, calls this "exciting times." He wrote in an email to Yahoo! News, "There are so many things that could go wrong, but it's not like NASA's engineers haven't thought it through. They have a way of performing the impossible, so I'll be watching the feed on the Internet that night with fingers crossed, hoping for the best. " ( The Sideshow  )

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Day After Day, Her Voice Takes Listeners to the Stars

Day After Day, Her Voice Takes Listeners to the Stars — On a clear, cool night in the early 1960s, a father drove his young, pajama-clad daughter to one of the T-head piers on Corpus Christi Bay to marvel at an object in the sky.

The girl who peered up at the sky was Sandy Wood, and this year marked her 20th anniversary as the voice of the nationally syndicated radio program “StarDate.” Speaking in her distinctive warm and soothing tone over synthesized tinkling chimes, Ms. Wood provides a daily two-minute peek into the world of astronomy, expounding on topics as varied as newly discovered quasars and the best place to watch a meteor shower.

The show, which is heard every day by some 2.2 million listeners on more than 300 radio stations around the country, has inspired an untold number to go out to their backyards to gaze at the stars.

Some of that owes to Ms. Wood’s almost otherworldly voice. Over the years she has received many letters, a number from men who try to envision what she looks like. “Invariably they imagine me as some voluptuous brunette, very, very tall with long hair and long fingernails,” said Ms. Wood, 63. In reality, she is just shy of five feet tall. “I’m not a babe; I’m a grandma,” she added.

“StarDate,” on the radio nationwide since 1978, is produced by the McDonald Observatory

People also often assume from Ms. Wood’s authoritative delivery that she is an astronomer, she said. But she is not — although she describes herself as a “science addict” — and the bulk of the scripts are written by Damond Benningfield, a science journalist who has been the show’s producer since 1991. To gather material, Mr. Benningfield reads research journals, goes to conferences and interviews prominent astronomers. He tries to cover all aspects of astronomy, from the Big Bang to magnetars to how various cultures have viewed the stars through the ages.

“One of the things I love about astronomy is that there’s always something new,” Mr. Benningfield said. “With the improvements in technology in just the time I’ve been doing ‘StarDate,’ there are more big telescopes, there are more space telescopes and what people are discovering just seems to increase exponentially.”

In 1976, Deborah Byrd, a science journalist, founded the astronomy hot line that would become “StarDate.” The hot line attracted the notice of a producer at KLBJ-FM in Austin, who turned it into a radio show that was broadcast for a year under the name “Have You Seen the Stars Tonight?” — a reference to the song co-written by Paul Kantner of Jefferson Starship.

“StarDate” made its nationwide debut in 1978, after Ms. Byrd secured a grant from the National Science Foundation. (Ms. Byrd left “StarDate” in 1991 and founded “EarthSky,” another successful science radio program.) Today, the show is produced by the McDonald Observatory, part of the University of Texas at Austin.

“StarDate” is “a charming little program that people appreciate,” said Sandra Preston, the assistant director for education and outreach at the observatory, who has been with the show since its beginning. Joel Block narrated the program for its first 13 years, and Ms. Preston and Mr. Benningfield selected Ms. Wood as his successor. “Her voice was very friendly and very clear,” Ms. Preston said.

Ms. Wood made her debut on Sept. 16, 1991, with a show about the Moon’s apparent proximity to Uranus and Neptune. “Tomorrow, you’ll also need a telescope to see Uranus. It will appear so close to the Moon that it will become lost in the Moon’s glare,” she said.

More than 7,300 shows later, Ms. Wood has no plans to stop. “I hope to do it until my voice completely fades out or I get too senile to read,” she said.

Ms. Wood, who was born in San Antonio and grew up in Corpus Christi, has no professional voice training. She started in radio in 1968 while studying drama at Texas A&I University in Kingsville, where her future husband had a summer job at a local AM station. The station manager, looking for a female voice, asked her to record a spot for a local department store. Impressed, he invited Ms. Wood to become a D.J.

“It was something very novel, because women were not on the air at that point pretty much at all,” Ms. Wood said. “I was one of the first female disc jockeys in the Southwest.”

In the ’70s she moved around South Texas with her husband, setting up FM stations in towns from Alice to Brownsville to Del Rio. He handled the business side while she wrote copy and recorded announcements.

Ms. Wood now lives in San Antonio and commutes to Austin twice a month to record “StarDate.” She is also the announcer for the local public television station and does one or two commercials a month.

Ms. Wood said she has a natural awe for astronomy. “I think that sometimes comes through in my delivery,” she said.

Being the voice of “StarDate” is “a great way to be anonymously, partially famous,” Ms. Wood said. Several times a year, after hearing her name, people will recognize her as the program’s narrator — but only once has a person picked her out by her voice alone.

“Of all places, I was in Las Vegas,” she said. “I was in a dress shop buying something, and someone said, ‘Gosh, your voice is familiar.’ We talked a lot, and as the conversation went on, she said, ‘Are you the woman on the radio who talks about the stars?’ ” ( nytimes.com )

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'Doomsday' Comet Elenin Is Dead

'Doomsday' Comet Elenin Is Dead, NASA Says - The wimpy comet Elenin, which vaulted into the public spotlight as a so-called harbinger of doom, has met its own demise, and its remains won't be back for 12,000 years, NASA scientists say.

The comet made a swing through the inner solar system in recent months, coming closest to Earth on Oct. 16, but by that time all that was left were crumbs. The fate of comet Elenin, it seems, was sealed in September during its closest approach to the sun.

"Elenin did as new comets passing close by the sun do about two percent of the time: It broke apart," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement Monday (Oct. 25). "Elenin's remnants will also act as other broken-up comets act. They will trail along in a debris cloud that will follow a well-understood path out of the inner solar system. After that, we won't see the scraps of comet Elenin around these parts for almost 12 millennia."

Yeomans called Elenin an "ex-comet," one that should soon be forgotten.

"Comet Elenin is still dead," JPL officials wrote in a Twitter post.

On Sept. 10, comet Elenin flew within 45 million miles (75 million kilometers) of the sun and broke apart into pieces. By October, when the comet came within 22 million miles (35.4 million km) of Earth — its nearest pass with our planet — only a cloud of debris was visible in telescopes.

"Comets are made up of ice, rock, dust and organic compounds and can be several miles in diameter, but they are fragile and loosely held together like dust balls," Yeomans said. "So it doesn't take much to get a comet to disintegrate, and with comets, once they break up, there is no hope of reconciliation."

The object became an Internet sensation when doomsayersproclaimed that comet Elenin would bring disaster to Earth. Some scenarios claimed comet Elenin would trigger catastrophic earthquakes due to its gravitational interactions with Earth. Another claim speculated that Elenin wasn't a comet at all, but actually a rogue planet called Nibiru that would also wreak havoc on Earth.

A NASA photo taken of where Elenin should have been on Oct. 14, just days before it reached its nearest point to Earth, revealed nothing but a stray meteor and a distant spiral galaxy.

"The meteor and the galaxy were purely coincidental, as it is what is not visible in the image that is important," NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke wrote in a blog post. "Two telescopes operated by astronomers at the Marshall Space Flight Center just stopped scanning the skies for Comet Elenin, which began fading and breaking apart back in August."

Comet Elenin was discovered in December by astronomer Leonid Elenin of Lyubertsy, Russia, who used a remotely operated observatory in the United States to make the find. The comet, also known as C/2010 X1, was about 1.2 miles (2 km) wide when it was still in one piece.

Despite the hype, all of the outlandish comet Elenin doomsday claims were completely unfounded, NASA said repeatedly. But then NASA's official responses to quell the wild speculation were taken as attempts to hide the truth about comet Elenin, the space agency said.

"I cannot begin to guess why this little comet became such a big Internet sensation," Yeomans said. "The scientific reality is this modest-sized icy dirtball's influence upon our planet is so incredibly miniscule that my subcompact automobile exerts a greater gravitational influence on Earth than the comet ever would."

Still, Yeomans expects some die-hard conspiracy theorists will maintain that comet Elenin still exists.

"Perhaps a little homage to a classic Monty Python dead parrot sketch is in order," Yeomans said. "Comet Elenin has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-comet." ( space.com )

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Hawaii astronomer captures image of forming planet

Hawaii astronomer captures image of forming planet — Astronomers have captured the first direct image of a planet being born.

Adam Kraus, of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, said the planet is being formed out of dust and gas circling a 2-milion-year-old star about 450 light years from Earth.

The planet itself, based on scientific models of how planets form, is estimated to have started taking shape about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Called LkCa 15 b, it's the youngest planet ever observed. The previous record holder was about five times older.

Kraus and his colleague, Michael Ireland from Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, used Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea to find the planet.

University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, Karen L. Teramura - n this undated artists rendering provided by the University of Hawaii, a new planet forming around a star is seen. The Institute for Astronomyy said in a statement Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, Adam Kraus and his colleague Michael Ireland from Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory used Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea to find the planet. LkCa 15 b is 450 light years away from Earth and is being built by dust and gas. It’s the youngest planet ever found. (AP Photo/ University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, Karen L. Teramura)

"We're catching this object at the perfect time. We see this young star, it has a disc around it that planets are probably forming out of and we see something right in the middle of a gap in the disc," Kraus said in a telephone interview.

Kraus presented the discovery Wednesday at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Kraus and Ireland's research paper on the discovery is due to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Observing planets while they're forming can help scientists answer questions like whether planets form early in the life of a star or later, and whether they form relatively close to stars or farther away.

Planets can change orbits after forming, so it's difficult to answer such questions by studying older planets.

"These very basic questions of when and where are best answered when you can actually see the planet forming, as the process is happening right now," Kraus said.

Other planets may also be forming around the same star. Kraus said he'll continue to observe the star and hopefully will see other planets if there are in fact more.

Scientists hadn't been able to see such young planets before because the bright light of the stars they're orbiting outshines them.

Kraus and Ireland used two techniques to overcome this obstacle.

One method, which is also used by other astronomers, was to change the shape of their mirror to remove light distortions created by the Earth's atmosphere.

The other, unique method they used was to put masks over most of the telescope mirror. The combination of these two techniques allowed the astronomers to obtain high-resolution images that let them see the faint planet next to the bright star.

The astronomers found the planet while surveying 150 young dusty stars. This led to a more concentrated study of a dozen stars.

The star LkCa 15 — the planet is named after its star — was the team's second target. They immediately knew they were seeing something new, so they gathered more data on the star a year later. ( Associated Press )

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Alien Plants Get New Twist in World of 'Avatar'

Alien Plants Get New Twist in World of 'Avatar'. The film "Avatar" takes viewers to a fictional moon, where the plants glow, shoot poison leaf tips and communicate. None of this fits exactly with our definition of "plant," but one botanist has pieced together an ecological back-story for how plants may have evolved on this strange world.

The moon Pandora is depicted as a lush rainforest that may remind some of Hawaii or Borneo. But the Earthlings who venture onto this exomoon are confronted with plants (not to mention animals) that behave in surprising ways.

"There's a balance of familiar and fanciful," says Jodie Holt, a plant physiologist from the University of California, Riverside. "I think if the organisms had been too bizarre, viewers would have dismissed them as unreal."

The plants were designed by director James Cameron and his graphic artists. However, during production, Holt was asked to provide some scientific justification for the imaginary world they were creating.

"The plants are fake, but the science is real," she says.

Besides advising the actress Sigourney Weaver on how to portray a botanist, Holt gave scientific names and descriptions to 55 of the most bizarre plants in the film. This catalog is included in a companion resource called "Pandorapedia."

What's in a name

One the most captivating Pandoran flora is the "helicoradian" – an orange, spiraled plant that folds up and disappears when touched. Plants on Earth do have touch sensitivity, says Holt, but here it has been greatly exaggerated.

"We usually only call something a plant if we poke it and it doesn't move away," she says.

In fact, Cameron invented his own term "plananimal" (or Zooplantae) for Pandoran life forms that blur the line between plant and animal.

However, no single characteristic distinguishes plants from other life kingdoms. We generally think of photosynthesis as the epitome of "plant-hood," but there are parasitic plants that don't photosynthesize their food and some non-plant bacteria that do.

Holt admits that the definition of plant has some wiggle room for whatever plant-like organisms may exist on other planets, but she herself is a novice to the imaginings of "exobotanists."

"If I had made up the plants, I would have been too constrained by what I know," she says.

Evolution solution

Holt didn't invent any new vegetation for the film, but she provided the film makers with scientific "cred."

"When describing a plant's appearance and characteristics, the overriding theme is plant evolution, so I asked for everything they had on the moon's environment that might select for certain traits," she says.

It turned out Cameron had thought through a lot of this already. He told her what the Pandoran soil and atmosphere contained and about the weak gravity but high magnetic fields.

From this, she was able to provide plausible explanations for the plant life. For example, the gigantism—exhibited by the humongous "Hometrees"—is likely the result of higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and lower gravitational pull on Pandora in comparison to Earth.

The glowing—or bioluminescence—of some plants might have been an adaption to long periods of darkness on Pandora, Holt reasoned. This light signal could attract pollinators.

However, Holt didn't think everything that the film makers dreamed up was credible. She was told early on that the Pandoran plants communicated with each other through nerves.

"I said no way," Holt recounts.

She advised them that a better explanation would be "signal transduction," which is seen in terrestrial plants when—for example—a root lacking water "tells" the leaves above to wilt. How this message is sent is unknown, but it may involve electrical signals or biochemical reactions involving small molecules.

"We don't know enough yet about signal transduction to say that Pandora's plants aren't using it," Holt says.

The film makers adopted this quasi-explanation: at one point in the movie Sigourney Weaver's character uses the term "signal transduction."

"That was my one line," Holt jokes.

Go green

But for all its botanical inventiveness, the film didn't break any new ground with the color palette.

Nancy Kiang of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies does research on the pigments that alien plants might use to best absorb a different spectrum of light coming from a star unlike our Sun. Her research shows that while plants on alien worlds could be green like they were in the movie, they could also be yellow, orange, black, or even near-infrared colors we couldn't see.

"Plants on Earth are already so diverse, beautiful, and weird -- carnivorous plants, cacti, basketball-size seed pods, bioluminescent algae -- Pandora did not actually look all that exotic to me, especially, of course, since the plants were largely green," says Kiang.

Plants look green to us because they reflect rather than absorb that light wavelength. Holt saw some early drawings that showed the plants being all blue, but she thinks that green was later adopted to make Pandora more appealing.

Kiang says that alien plants would probably not be blue, since plants prefer to absorb blue wavelengths. The exception to this rule might be if they are bombarded with a lot of light. In that situation, a plant might use sunscreen pigments to prevent its light-harvesting apparatus from getting overloaded, and excess blue light would be reflected.

"I suppose it would have been hard to watch the movie if it were shot in the light of a sun having a different spectral quality, so Cameron had to make an aesthetic decision," Kiang says. "I'm glad he at least has provoked thought about how life might evolve differently on another planet." ( sapce.com )

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Moon Tourism by 2020, Entrepreneurs Predict

Moon Tourism by 2020, Entrepreneurs Predict. Leading space entrepreneurs said they are ready, willing and able to fill the U.S. spaceflight gap after NASA retires its space shuttles this year.

They confidently predicted that commercial spaceships could fly both cargo and humans into low-Earth orbit for lower cost and by about 2014, or at least sooner than NASA's original plan based on the now-canceled Constellation program.

The space industry executives hailed the Obama administration's proposal to devote $6 billion over the next five years toward commercial spaceflight. It opens the door for potential trips to the moon on commercial vehicles, they added.

That "historic decision" could create an estimated 5,000 jobs in the United States and help NASA avoid paying billions of dollars to Russia for rides to the space station, said Bretton Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, during a Monday teleconference.

Still, Alexander and others took time to address one of the main doubts in the minds of critics — whether commercial spaceflight can provide safe access to space.

Safety first

Some critics and members of Congress have expressed their own concerns about the safety of untried commercial spaceflight.

But space industry executives said safety is of the utmost importance to them.

Elon Musk, founder of the commercial spaceflight venture Space Exploration TechnologiesSpaceX), likened the issue to how airline travelers fly today on Southwest Airlines or Virgin America without a second thought because safety has become a universal standard for airlines. He and other space entrepreneurs said that they too must hold to the highest safety standards lest they lose out to competitors. (

"Safety-wise, we are the least able to afford mishaps," said Robert Bigelow, head of the Las Vegas, Nev.-based firm Bigelow Aerospace, which is building inflatable space habitats and has already launched two prototypes.

By contrast, he said that NASA's government program has been able to shrug off disasters more easily throughout its history.

The space industry firms represented in the teleconference have all aimed for the highest human safety standards set by NASA or Russia's Soyuz program — the latter arguably having a better track record than the space shuttle, they said. Since shuttle flights began in 1981, NASA has suffered two disasters that have killed 14 astronauts.

"I think that for people to say that we here in the U.S. have done a great job on safety with the old way is just wrong," said computer game developer and entrepreneur Richard Garriott, who paid $30 million to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz as a space tourist.

That spacecraft, he said, has a "100-fold difference" in its safety record compared to the space shuttle. Garriott is also the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who flew on the Skylab space station and an early space shuttle flight.

SpaceX and its competitors touted that, with appropriate funding, they could start flying U.S. astronauts into space around 2014. It would cost less than NASA pays to fly astronauts aboard Russia's Soyuz craft to the space station.

NASA currently pays about $51 million a seat to send astronauts to space on Russian spacecraft. But first the companies want to establish a safety record with many unmanned launches.

Moon or Mars in the next decade

The space entrepreneurs all painted an optimistic picture of how commercial spaceflight could look by the year 2020. They envisioned a number of companies providing commercial crew transport to low-Earth orbit, and a "really well-used ISS" that is taken advantage of as a government lab, according to Musk of SpaceX.

Bigelow noted that his space hotel company plans to pursue an "aggressive schedule" that would launch several private space stations within the next decade.

But the group also looked forward to commercial spaceflight beyond the confines of low-Earth orbit.

"By 2020 you'll have seen private citizens circumnavigate the moon," said Eric Anderson of Space Adventures, the only company currently selling space tourist flights to orbit.

If that still sounds dreamy, consider that Space Adventures has already booked its first clients for the $100 million moon ride.

Commercial spaceflight could even realize one of the most cherished dreams of humans setting foot on another planet, if the space industry drives down costs and boosts innovation hand-in-hand with NASA.

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say that by 2020 there will be serious plans to go to Mars with people," Musk said. ( space.com )

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Infrared telescope to detect dim, dusty objects

Infrared telescope to detect dim, dusty objectsTue Nov 17, 2009 10:20pm EST - NASA plans next month to launch a space telescope that will scan the heavens for the infrared glow of celestial objects never seen because they are too dim, dusty or distant, scientists said on Tuesday.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is expected to reveal hundreds of thousands of dark asteroids lurking undetected in the solar system, and millions of elusive stars and galaxies farther out in space.

The spacecraft, to be carried into orbit by a Delta 2 rocket, will roll out to its launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Friday for a liftoff slated for as early as December 9, managers of the $320 million project said at a news briefing in Washington, D.C.

Its six-month mission is to survey the entire sky for infrared radiation, a form of light invisible to the human eye but emitted from the coldest of objects, including those overlooked by telescopes sensitive only to visible light.

"We expect certainly to see many asteroids, stars and galaxies," said Edward Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mission's principal investigator. "But really I'll be surprised if I'm not surprised ... because we're going to find things that nobody has imagined yet."

The telescope sits in a tank filled with frozen hydrogen that chills it to just slightly above absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically attainable, thus preventing the instrument from picking up its own infrared heat.

Among the phenomena WISE is likely to uncover is a large number of failed stars called brown dwarfs -- balls of gas many times smaller than the sun that lack sufficient mass to trigger their own internal stellar engines. Optically invisible, they glow in the infrared spectrum.

Brown dwarfs are believed to be more numerous than actual stars in the nearby universe, and some may reside even closer to Earth than the nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, about 4 light years away, said Peter Eisenhardt, chief project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Both theories are likely to be confirmed by WISE.

Infrared light also penetrates dust, enabling WISE to both illuminate and peer through the dense, invisible haze that obscures some of the most distant galaxies in the cosmos.

A class of such objects called ultra-luminous galaxies, thought to be super-incubators of new stars, shine with more than a trillion times the light of the sun. But most of that light is emitted as infrared, Eisenhardt said.

"So we're going to find the most super-duper, hyper ultra-luminous galaxies in the universe and find just how extreme these galaxy-forming processes can get," he said.

Scientists say the spacecraft's detectors are about 500 times more sensitive than those of the last infrared sky survey in 1983, a joint European-NASA mission.

Closer to home, WISE will likely add several hundred hidden asteroids and comets to the known inventory of "near-Earth objects" whose orbits come perilously close to Earth's orbit, while telling scientists more about their composition. ( reuters.com )

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