Imagine the anticipation of a countdown before rocket engines roar to life.  Smoke billows, and it’s three G’s and eight-and-a-half minutes to space.

After you slip the surly bonds, you float over to the window and gaze wide-eyed at the majesty of Planet Earth.  Perhaps you’d spot the Great Wall of China, or even a big hurricane.  I’d have Bowie’s “Ground Control to Major Tom” playing on my iPod.

Spaceflight tickles the imagination.  It’s the stuff of heroes and explorers.  We remain in awe of the cosmos, and amazed at each incremental step toward the infinite.

Source: NASA

Now take a look at this photo.  The folks at Johnson Space Center in Houston sent this picture to me today.  Not exactly what you imagine while reading Jules Verne or Arthur Clarke.  It might be the NASA equivalent of witnessing hot dogs in the making.

You’re looking at a test chamber scaled to be the size of the Orion crew capsule.  Orion, of course, is NASA’s next-gen exploration vehicle.  It will carry crew and cargo to the space station and on to the moon.

The umbrella name for the entire program is Constellation, and the space agency is hoping to launch the first manned mission by 2015.

The chamber is the size of a walk-in closet - about 570 cubic feet - and the people sitting inside are volunteers recruited to test a lunar breathing system called CAMRAS.  (NASA likes its acronyms!)  It stands for Carbon-dioxide and Moisture Removal Amine Swing-bed.  Go figure.

But imagine sitting for eight hours in this thing with five other people you just met?  Twenty-three volunteers did just that for a series of tests over a three-week period last month.  The point: to breathe and sweat.  Sounds like the perfect job for an executive producer!

Seriously though, NASA has to measure the amount of moisture and carbon dioxide absorbed by the system so Orion crews can breathe easily and live comfortably in space.  Volunteers were asked to sleep, eat and exercise in the chamber.  Some test sessions lasted a few hours and others were overnight.

CAMRAS uses very little energy.  An organic compound called amine absorbs the CO2 and water vapor from the cabin.  And when the system vents the waste overboard, the vacuum of space regenerates the amine. Think of the venting as wringing out a dirty sponge.

For more on the test and NASA’s Constellation Program, visit www.nasa.gov/constellation.

– Alex Walker, Producer, CNN Science & Technology

Just before the sun dips below the horizon, sometimes a brilliant green or blue flash appears at the edge of the fiery ball. To see it, you have to be somewhere with an unobstructed view of the sun and a very stable atmosphere.

Image courtesy and copyright Stéphane Guisard, www.astrosurf.com/sguisard

The perfect spot is the Cerro Paranal Observatory in Chile, perched on a 2,635-meter (8,645-foot) mountain in the Atacama Desert, where they get an average of 300 cloudless days per year. Check out these images, as well as another solar phenomenon called a “Gegenschein.”

The observatory, which is operated by the 13-nation European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), is home to the Very Large Telescope (yes, that’s the official name), which ESO describes as the world’s most advanced optical instrument.

The green and blue flashes happen when Earth’s atmosphere acts as a giant prism, refracting certain colors from the setting sun’s rays. It’s a tradition at Paranal for the staff to gather at sunset every day to watch for the flashes before settling down for a night of astronomical observations, according to the ESO Web site.

But kids, don’t try this at home - at least not without proper eye protection. The ESO site emphasizes that looking at the sun with the naked eye is dangerous, and looking at it through a camera, binoculars, or telescope is even worse. “Do not attempt to observe the Sun unless you know what you are doing,” the site warns repeatedly.

–Kate King, Writer, cnn.com

]]> http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/07/astronomers-get-a-green-light/feed/ http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/07/astronomers-get-a-green-light/ http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_scitech/~3/284650934/ http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/06/oldest-tree-in-world/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 13:40:26 +0000 elandau http://cnnscitech.wordpress.com/?p=138

The world’s oldest living tree has been found in Sweden, along with remnants of several other generations of it. A ripe 9,550 years old, this special spruce tree in Fulu Mountain, Dalarna, has profound implications for climate change.

The tree is single-stemmed and stands 5 meters — about 16.4 feet – tall. Researchers at Umeå University found decaying wood remnants in the soil that date back 375, 5,660, 9,000 and 9550 years, representing generations of the same genetic individual.

For thousands of years, the spruce appeared in a shrub formation called krummholz. But with warming in the last century, the tree changed its growth and became the single-stem spruce seen in this photo.

“The fact that we can see this spruce as a tree today is a consequence of recent climate warming since about 1915,” said Leif Kullman, Professor of Physical Geography at Umeå University.

Kullman and colleagues study how tree lines, or the edges of tree habitats, respond to climate change. They have shown that trees of different species have advanced into the alpine tundra by more than 650 feet during the past century, Kullman said, suggesting that there is less tundra area than there has been for 7,000 years.

“As we see it, that is the most interesting aspect of this and similar trees,” he said. “That this may also be the oldest tree in the world is more of a curiosity from a scientific point of view.”

The tree has been named Old Tjikko after Kullman’s late dog.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

In North America, we have tornadoes — a nearly unheard-of weather phenomenon in much of the rest of the world. Last week, CNN Meteorologist Rob Marciano and Producer Marsha Walton reported on them here, reminding us why the rest of the world should be grateful. One year ago last weekend, the mile-wide town of Greensburg, Kansas was obliterated by a mile and a half wide tornado.

An Aqua satellite image of a dust storm in Taklimakan Desert, Western China. Source: NASA

But there are some things that the rest of the world gets that most of us in North America never see. It’s sandstorm season in the Middle East. This week, a blustery weather system — common for April — caused problems from the Mediterranean to Kazakhstan, and just about everywhere in between.

NASA’s MODIS website features a remarkable gallery of near-real-time satellite photography from the agency’s AQUA and TERRA satellites. On Wednesday, each pass of the two satellites over the normally cloud-free Middle East and North Africa showed a parade of dust plumes — blowing sand moving away from the arid region.

Here are the best of the images:

A dust storm in Kazakhstan, blowing eastward over the Aral Sea;

A Gulf of Aden dust storm;

Persian Gulf ( at the bottom of frame);

The lower Red sea and Gulf of Aden;

Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Persian Gulf (at the top of the frame);

Saharan sand blowing into the Mediterranean off of Libya.

Another image from China, taken on April 26, shows another of the world’s dust storm hot spots: The Gobi Desert. Expanding due to drought and poor farming practices, the Gobi routinely blows dust into the populated areas of Eastern China, and offshore — some of it reaching North America, accompanied by China’s legendary air pollution.

Dust or sand storms can impact aircraft — weather forecasters pay special attention to that. Commercial and military aircraft can incur a double risk from the storms — both visibility and engines can be affected. And it may be stating the obvious, but trying to live and breathe in a cloud of micro-particles can have a major respiratory impact for people as well.

If you’re really, really eager to see an American-made dust storm, they’re most common in the Southwest in mid-summer. Meteorologists call it a haboob, a name borrowed from the Sahara. They’re intense, fast-forming storms caused by a downdraft of high winds. Last July, a haboob brought traffic in Phoenix to a standstill with 50 mile-an-hour winds. The National Weather Service reported a dramatic temperature drop of 18 degrees in less than an hour. Since we’re talking about Arizona in July, that means it dropped to 91 degrees.

–Peter Dykstra Executive Producer CNN Sci-Tech & Weather

A federal judge says enough is enough — no more delay.  The Interior Department now has just 16 days to issue a decision on whether to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act because of global warming.

 The government was supposed to announce that decision by January 9.  But the Fish and Wildlife Service said it needed another month to make the complex listing more easily understood.  However, that month came and went, and environmental groups sued, leading to yesterday’s court ruling.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken agreed with the conservation groups — the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace — that Interior missed the deadline.  And she disagreed with a government request for another delay, ordering a decision be announced by May 15.

Judge Wilken ruled that Interior has been violating the Endangered Species Act for four months by missing the Jan. 9 deadline, and said the government has not offered sufficient justification for that delay, much less further delay. Interior has said it needed until June 30 to finish a legal and policy review of the proposed listing.

Environmentalists say they think the government is delaying the decision to make it easier for oil companies to get offshore oil leases in the Chukchi Sea, prime polar bear habitat.

The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed the ESA listing in December of 2006 because climate change is shrinking polar bear habitat.  Some scientists predict summer sea ice in the Arctic will disappear by 2030.  A U.S. Geological Survey study estimated that polar bears in Alaska could disappear by 2050.

Diane Hawkins-Cox    Senior Producer  CNN Sci-Tech

Not everyone in the animal kingdom needs to have sex to reproduce, but asexual species tend not to last as long as sexuals because, as the theory goes, asexuals are more susceptible to accumulating harmful mutations over many generations. That is why scientists are so fascinated by the Amazon molly fish, whose longevity has mysteriously defied evolutionary expectations.

This fish species consists of only females and, in fact, was the first unisexual vertebrate species ever discovered. The Amazon molly lives in a small range from the Nueces River in southeast Texas to the mouth of the Rio Tuxpan in Mexico. There are well over 100,000 alive today, and there are no signs that their fertility is less than that of their sexual sister species, said biologist Laurence Loewe at the University of Edinburgh.

While Amazon mollies do not reproduce sexually, their eggs can only begin developing when triggered by sperm from males of related species. Scientists think the Amazon molly probably evolved as an asexual species about 70,000 years ago.

Loewe and collaborator Dunja Lamatsch at the University of Wuerzburg, now at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, applied mathematical models to the Amazon molly’s genetic history, and found that the species should exist for less than 20,000 years before becoming extinct. The models examined a concept called Muller’s ratchet, which assumes asexual populations tend to accumulate harmful mutations over time that lead to extinction. They recently published their findings in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

Since the species is probably much older than 20,000 years, this creates what scientists call a genomic decay paradox. How, then, could the species have defied evolutionary models, and survived so long?

One mechanism at work to help the fish survive may be what is called “paternal leakage” of undamaged DNA. In other words, when sperm from males of other species trigger egg development in the Amazon molly, DNA may occasionally leak to the female and repair or restore genes gone awry through mutations. Further research is needed to determine if this or still other processes slow down the extinction predicted by Muller’s ratchet.

The results could have implications for the conservation of other so-called ancient asexuals, which include one species closely related to the Amazon molly.

Amazon mollies are also at a disadvantage because sailfin mollies, their parental species, prefer to mate with females of their own species rather than giving sperm to the Amazon mollies, research from Texas State University shows. Sailfin mollies also produce more sperm before mating with sailfin females than with Amazon mollies.

“Our results suggest that Amazon mollies have it doubly hard; they both have limited genetic variation (as per the paper above) and males of their parental species generally avoid mating with them and providing them with sperm,” said Caitlin Gabor, associate professor of biology. “Yet, they clearly have persisted for a long time and possibly longer than any other vertebrate asexual species.”

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

You probably know X-rays from the doctor’s office, where the high-energy radiation helps create snapshots of bones.

This artist’s impression of a broad absorption line quasar shows material spewing out along the polar axes.

Far out in the depths of space, scientists have discovered a rare type of quasar emitting more X-rays than previously thought possible. The XMM-Newton, the biggest science satellite constructed in Europe, has recently given new insight into these mysterious phenomena.

Quasars are energy-pumping celestial objects thought to be powered by massive black holes. Scientists think the black hole that drives a quasar’s energy production is the center of a distant galaxy.

Here’s how quasars work: Matter that falls into the black hole gathers in a reservoir known as the “accretion disk,” which gets very hot. Some of this gas gets thrown back out into space because of the radiation and magnetic fields, escaping the pull of the black hole, according to computer simulations.

This outgoing gas can massively impact the surrounding galaxy, and even stop stars from forming.

Broad Absorption Line quasars, or BAL for short, seem to have a thick cover of gas around them. BAL quasars constitute about 10-20% of all quasars. They generally don’t seem to give off many X-rays, perhaps because the gas flowing out in the direction of the disc’s equator absorbs that radiation. Watch an animation of a BAL quasar from the European Space Agency.

But two of the quasars that the XMM-Newton observed in 2006 and 2007 emitted more X-rays than they expected, suggesting that these quasars do not have absorbing gas around them.

The telescope’s observations also show that, unusually, some quasars seem to eject material out along their polar axes, perpendicular to the accretion disc. Computer simulations also show that these outflows also consist of material falling in and then spewing back out because of the strong radiation, turned away before getting close to the black hole.

These surprising results may mean that BAL quasars are more complex than scientists expected. The researchers, who published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, hope to keep track of BAL quasars over a longer time period.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

NASA’s remarkable Earth Observatory site has posted a series of photos taken from the International Space station. These pics, taken from a camera designed by former ISS astronaut Don Pettit during his stay aboard the Station in 2002-2003, show some of the brightest spots on the planet.

Tokyo, the U.S. East Coast, the major cities of the U. K. and Ireland, the Loop in Chicago, and the brightly-lit docks of Long Beach, CA are among the bright spot. But NASA awards the dubious distinction of the Brightest Spot on Earth to the Las Vegas Strip. Why am I not surprised?

But (you knew this line was coming) what’s lit in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.

Light Pollution is an aesthetic problem. If you live in an urban area, chances are it’s been a while since you’ve seen a star-filled sky, a planet, or a meteor. But so much of our outdoor lighting is pointed up toward the sky — where it does no good — that light pollution has a direct link to what goes into your lungs.

The International Dark-Sky Association, a two-decade-old, Tucson-based nonprofit, has petitioned the US EPA to recognize light pollution as an “official” pollutant. They estimate that Americans spend several billion dollars a year, and generate an extra 38 million tons of carbon dioxide, in addition to the other pollutants associated with generating power, through wasteful lighting pointed at the heavens.

IDA advocates a switch to more efficient lighting: The kind that directs the light toward the things that need to be lit. Not only would it be one more little piece in the puzzle for reducing global warming, but it might make you see stars.

–Peter Dykstra Executive Producer CNN Science and Tech

As Romeo and Juliet disputed whether they heard a lark or a nightingale singing on the pomegranate tree, they probably did not ponder the biological underpinnings of why birds sing in springtime.

In fact, the precise mechanisms for springtime bird singing have always been mysterious to scientists. But a recent study breaks new ground in the biology of bird songs.

A group of researchers has discovered a hormone that sets off neural activity that causes birds to sing when the days get longer. The study, led by Takashi Yoshimura of the Nagoya University, Japan, was reported in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

The scientists studied 38,000 genes of male Japanese quails under both long and short days. They found that some genes were only switched on 14 hours after dawn on the first long day.

These particular genes were found only in cells on the surface of the hypothalamus, and produced a thyroid-stimulating hormone, said Peter Sharp, a collaborator on the study at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. This hormone sets off the release of another hormone which stimulates spring breeding, he said in an e-mail.

The pituitary gland gets a boost from the hormone, pumping out other hormones that make the birds’ testes grow, the study said. This process makes birds sing.

But it’s not just our fowl friends that could benefit from this study. Human conditions such as seasonal affective disorder and poor fertility could be connected to a malfunction of the very same cells studied in the birds, Sharp said.

“Discoveries in basic biology increase the chances of developing new ways of improving animal and human well being,” he said.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

Actually, neither Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko nor Expedition 16 Commander Peggy Whitson uttered those words as their spacecraft plunged through the atmosphere toward a rougher-than-expected landing in Kazakhstan last weekend.

But details are beginning to trickle out suggesting they DID have several problems, though exactly what went wrong and how serious it was is still unclear. NASA Associate Administrator for Space Operations Bill Gerstenmaier held a teleconference with reporters Tuesday afternoon to share what he does know about the incident.

Malenchenko, Whitson and South Korean space tourist So-yeon Yi were returning to Earth from the International Space Station on Saturday when some sort of malfunction triggered a so-called “ballistic” re-entry scenario. The spacecraft re-entered at a much steeper angle than planned, bringing it down a couple hundred miles short of its target landing zone near the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The crew members inside were subjected to far more extreme G forces than normal during the drop through the atmosphere - approximately eight 8 G’s for up to two minutes. There were Russian media reports of 10.5 to 11 G’s at peak, but Gerstenmaier was unable to confirm that.

There is some evidence to suggest that one or more pyrotechnic bolts that hold the crew cabin to the instrumentation/propulsion section didn’t “blow” as designed at the appropriate point in the descent. Those two sections need to separate so that the crew cabin’s heat shield is properly oriented during the hottest, most fiery parts of atmospheric reentry. Crew members reported abnormal levels of buffeting and jostling during decent, and there are anecdotal reports by people who saw the spacecraft on the ground that it was more singed than usual. The hypothetical worst case scenario in this case would be that the unshielded parts of the Soyuz would be exposed to searing hot temperatures for too long and they could burn through. This obviously didn’t happen, and there is no evidence so far to suggest it was even close. But after a breached heat shield brought down the shuttle Columbia back in 2003, NASA is very aware of the potential for disaster.

Yuri Malenchenko smelled smoke in the cockpit near the end of the flight, shortly after the parachutes deployed. He switched off the display panel for a time, and the burning smell went away.

Russian mission control was out of contact with the spacecraft for a significant period of time, and communications were not reestablished until after the crew climbed out of the downed spacecraft and Malenchenko called in on a satellite phone. There is more anecdotal evidence suggesting the communications antenna burned off during the descent, though Gerstenmaier was keeping an open mind as to whether or not there could be other explanations for the loss of comm.

And making the whole situation even more worrisome: this is the second time in a row that some of these anomalies have happened. The ballistic reentry and the crew cabin separation problem both occurred last fall when the Expedition 15 cosmonauts returned to Earth. An investigation fingered a shorted out cable as the culprit in the ballistic reentry. Malenchenko and Whitson inspected that cable in their Soyuz prior to deorbiting, and it appeared fine.

ROSCOSMOS, the Russian space agency, is appointing a commission to investigate what when wrong with this latest landing, and how it relates it to the Expedition 15 malfunctions. Gerstenmaier says NASA has full confidence that the Russians grasp the seriousness of getting to the root cause of what’s going on.

But this is clearly another headache for the folks at NASA, who will be relying on the Soyuz to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station for years to come, especially after the space shuttle fleet is retired at the end of 2010.

The next astronaut slated to fly aboard a Soyuz is Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke, in the fall of this year. NASA hopes to hear the results of the Russian investigation in a few months, and decide by August or September if the problem has been diagnosed and fixed.

–Kate Tobin, Sr. Producer, CNN Science & Technology