Sat, 27/11/2010 - 05:56 by harsheeb
Moscow -- Russia says it has approved the crews for a new mission to the International Space Station to launch Dec. 15 for a Dec. 17 docking with the station.
The launch will take place from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan, RIA Novosti reported Friday.
The main crew will include Russian Cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev, NASA Astronaut Catherine Coleman and European Space Agency Astronaut Paolo Nespoli.
Russian Cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin, NASA Astronaut Michael Fossum and Japan's Satoshi Furukawa will comprise a backup crew.
The new mission will see the crew occupy the ISS for 152 days.
Three astronauts returning from the ISS landed in north Kazakhstan Friday in a Soyuz-TMA-19 spacecraft, RIA Novosti reported.
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Wed, 24/11/2010 - 08:44 by harsheeb
London -- Common Earth bacteria could, in theory, survive in a dormant state in the harsh conditions on Mars for more than a million years, U.K. researchers say.
Scientists as University College London froze some Deinococcus radiodurans bacteria to minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the average temperature at Mars' mid-latitudes, then exposed it to Gamma radiation at a level it would receive under 11 inches of martian soil, NewScientist.com reported Tuesday.
The researchers estimate the bacteria could survive 1.2 million years under these conditions.
"The more we learn about Earth life, the more likely it appears that it could survive in other parts of the solar system," Cassie Conley of NASA says.
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Mon, 22/11/2010 - 11:36 by Anter Prakash Singh
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) released a press note saying that the Air Force has launched its spy satellite from Cape Canaveral station on Sunday at 5:58 p.m.
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Fri, 19/11/2010 - 11:11 by Anter Prakash Singh
European astronomers say that they have discovered a new planet orbiting a red star. Also, scientists claim that the planet is from another galaxy.
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Thu, 11/11/2010 - 09:41 by harsheeb
Cape Canaveral -- Two cracks discovered in space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank could jeopardize the orbiter's planned final launch set for Nov. 30, officials said.
Engineers beginning repair work on a crack in the tank's foam insulating layer Wednesday morning discovered the new cracks on the aluminum body of the tank.
NASA officials say they are evaluating the cracks to determine how to repair them as the orbiter remains on its launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"This is still really early on, so the exact repair method and schedule is still being figured out," NASA spokesman Allard Beutel told SPACE.com.
"It's just a matter of the repair method and how best to go about it.
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Thu, 11/11/2010 - 09:29 by harsheeb
Washington -- NASA's successor to the Hubble space telescope is $1.5 billion over budget and will launch at least a year late, an independent U.S. review board says.
The panel investigating the James Webb Space Telescope program, led by John Casani of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., prepared the report at the request of Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., USA Today reported Wednesday.
The $5 billion budget has ballooned to $6.5 billion, the panel said, because the 2008 budget for the project was initially set too low, and NASA headquarters did not catch escalating cost overruns.
Budget aside, the telescope was described by Mikulski as "technically sound."
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Tue, 09/11/2010 - 09:24 by harsheeb
Paris-- People in Earth's Northern Hemisphere will get assistance from space this winter to help them cope with harsh weather conditions, European space officials say.
Satellite information on snow cover is now available through ESA's GlobSnow project soon after it snows, and the one-year, near-real time demonstration service makes information about snow cover and snow amount publicly available online on the GlobSnow Web site, the European Space Agency said in a release.
In addition to posing a threat to communities through transportation shutdowns and floods, snow cover influences the planet's climate, its meteorology and its water supply.
Understanding snow conditions can help predict floods and can advance climate studies, the ESA says.
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Mon, 08/11/2010 - 23:34 by harsheeb
Beijing -- China has released pictures of the moon taken by its Chang'e-2 moon probe to mark the success of the country's second lunar mission, officials said.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao Monday unveiled an image of the moon's Sinus Iridium, or Bay of Rainbows, taken by the spacecraft, China's official state news agency Xinhua reported.
Wen unveiled the photograph as he visited scientists and staff who took part in the probe missions.
The Chang'e-2 lunar probe took the photograph from a height of 12 miles over the moon Oct. 28.
The photographed area has been considered as a possible landing site for China's future moon missions, Xinhua said.
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Sun, 07/11/2010 - 15:07 by Anter Prakash Singh
Discovery’s launch has again been delayed, this time after a hydrogen leak was detected in the space shuttle at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
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Fri, 05/11/2010 - 08:17 by harsheeb
Washington -- Two vocal critics of U.S. President Barack Obama's new direction for NASA will assume leadership of committees that oversee the space agency, observers say.
With Republicans gaining control of the House, Reps. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Ralph Hall, R-Texas, who are expected to assume leadership of key NASA oversight committees, have criticized the president's plans to cancel the nation's moon program and outsource crew transit to and from low-Earth orbit, SPACE.com reported Thursday.
Wolf is the ranking member of the powerful House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, and Science and Subcommittee, which oversees NASA spending, and will likely assume the panel's chairmanship come January.
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Fri, 05/11/2010 - 08:16 by harsheeb
London -- Five distant galaxies so shrouded in cosmic dust they are invisible at most wavelengths have been detected by a European space telescope, U.K. researchers say.
The dust is generated by young stars, suggesting the newly observed galaxies could give us clues to the universe's most active star-formation period, NewsScientist.com reports.
Researchers at the Open University in Britain say the galaxies appear to observers on Earth as they were when the universe was 2 billion to 4 billion years old, less than a third its present age, a time when stars formed at roughly 100 times their current rate.
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Fri, 05/11/2010 - 07:58 by harsheeb
Pasadena-- NASA's EPOXI spacecraft flew past it target, comet Hartley 2, Thursday morning and has begun returning images of the cosmic snowball, the space agency said.
Scientists and mission controllers were busy viewing never-before-seen images of Hartley 2's comet nucleus on their computer terminal screens, a NASA release said.
"The mission team and scientists have worked hard for this day," said Tim Larson, EPOXI project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's good to see Hartley 2 up close."
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