Thought it might be nice to have a new thread for everyone's (mostly Grace's) stargazing/scientific news.  What's happening with the little Beagle today, Grace?

I'm not such a stargazer like Grace but on hot summers nights there is nothing like taking an old blanket out and laying it down on the lawn to watch the country sky come alive with stars with no hindrance of street lights.

I love doing that during the day, with the clouds (or is that smog where I live?). G and I did that yesterday in the park, making up stories for each cloud.

Kylie

Thanks Lou that you thought on me, and if you are further interested in my reports, I will gladly it do for you. During Christmas I had much time to think about my life. If someone stays alone on such "family days" inclines to recollections and mine are not so pleasant. My start in New Year was not overwhelming, honestly said I'm .....oversleeping it......after a few beers.... But on NYE I was creative and wrote one song... a sad song... On 1st January reached me bad news about my aunt, the younger sister of my mother, who had an accident shortly before Christmas, and she lost two vertebras of her spinal column, but she is not paralized. My mother only cryies... So quickly can change totaly ones life...

Next weekend I will drive with Martin and Nadine to Ramstein-Miesenbach to watch US Air Force. I'm looking forward to it. And I'm curious about my speak-talents (whether my English is good enough to a conversation?)
So, dearies, and here comes my first report in this year about Beagle 2.

MOTHER SHIP - MARS EXPRESS - ON LOOKOUT FOR BABY BEAGLE

Current Status: 31-Dec-2003: No signal from Beagle 2 received via Odyssey

Anxious scientists believe their best chance of getting in touch with Beagle 2 - the little British spacecraft so far stubbornly silent on the surface of Mars - is on 4 January, when its mother ship passes overhead.

Right now, the European Space Agency's Mars Express is in a huge elliptical orbit around the red planet. Its engines will fire for three minutes tomorrow and the craft should slip into a polar orbit, passing regularly over Beagle.

"We haven't yet played all our cards," said David Southwood, the agency's director of science. "With Mars Express we will be using a system we have fully tested and understand. At the moment, I am frustrated rather than concerned."

Beagle, the lander designed to search for signs of life on Mars, reached the planet on Christmas Day after a 402-million-kilometre journey, equipped with a transmitter about as powerful as a mobile phone. Since then it may have been fitfully trying to relay a message via a NASA spacecraft, Mars Odyssey, perhaps mistiming its call on each overhead pass.

Colin Pillinger, the scientist who spent six years and raised US $119 million to put Beagle on Mars, said: "We need to get Beagle 2 into a period when it can broadcast for a much longer period. This will happen around January 4 after the spacecraft has experienced a sufficient number of communication failures to switch to automatic transmission mode."

JANUARY 4 is also the day the full-scale assault on Mars begins. Mars Express itself carries a camera which will photograph the Martian landscape to a resolution of two metres and radar that can penetrate up to five kilometres below the Martian surface.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

Runs in the family Ruthkylie. There's nothing like looking into the vacant sky (that's how it is with someone who knows nothing about astronomy) and fantatising about (what could be out there) and just enjoying the beauty of what can be seen.

Being serious thoug for ONE (1) moment who has seen a naked sky without out street lights. Fantastic sight watching the satalites and just fantatising about what they MIGHT BE!

Hey Vroni, I never knew that you are such a dreamer.... but I'm too one... I love to watch the clouds at day and the stars in the night...

I have not all too much knowledge about astronomy, but I'm very exciting and passionate about it, and if I find any thing this concern on the net I promise to share it with you.

So dearies, here are the last infos about Beagle 2, before mother-ship, Mars Express, brings (hopefully!)tomorrow news - with me is still the 3 January.

Current Status of Beagle 2: NO SIGNAL RECEIVED !

Scientists assumes that Beagle 2 landed on a roch and perhaps therefore sends signals in the wrong direction or its batteries are too weak!

Anyhow, I found on the net an wonderful animation "Where is Mars Express now?" If someone interested here is the website:

www.onnachrichten.t-online.de/c/14/08/79/1408796.html

click: Animation: "Wo ist Mars Express jetzt?" (ESA)

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

Scientists assumes that Beagle 2 landed on a ROCK and perhaps therefore sends signals in the wrong direction or its batteries are too weak.

NO SIGNAL RECEIVED

"SPIRIT" from Earth Lands on Mars.

A traveling robotic geologist from NASA has landed on Mars. Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully sent a radio signal after the spacecraft had bounced and rolled for several minutes following its initial impact at 8:35 PST.

"This is a big night for NASA," said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. "We're back. I am very, very proud of this team, and we're on Mars."

Members of the mission's flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., cheered and clapped when they learned that NASA's Deep Space Network had received a post-landing signal from "Spirit".

"We've got many steps to go before this mission is over, but we've retired a lot of risk with this landing", said JPL's Pete Theisinger, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project.

"Spirit" traveled 487 million kilometers to reach Mars after its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on June 10, 2003.
Its twin, Mars Exploration Rover "Opportunity", was launched July, 2003, and is on course for a landing on the opposite side of Mars on 24 January, 2004, 9:05 p.m. PST.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

NASA Administrator Marks Successful Spirit On Mars

The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe regarding Saturday's successful landing of the first Mars Excursion Rover (MER), Spirit, on the Martian surface.

"Congratulations to the Mars Rover team on achieving a successful landing on the surface of Mars by the Rover Spirit. THIS AMAZING FEAT, coming so soon in the New Year, is a tribute to the dedication to the many men and women throughout NASA and our many partners who worked extremely hard to give our amazing rovers the best chance for success on their mission of exploration on the Red Planet."

"In a few weeks, "Spirit's" twin, "Opportunity",will be landing on the other side of the planet. The rovers will soon begin their mission to search the rocks of Mars for signs that water may have been present for long periods of time - signs that may tell us whether MARS could have been hospitable to life in the past."

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

So spirit and opportunity are doing well but poor little beagle is missing-in-action.  I do feel sorry for the guy who spent so long putting it all together, only to have his baby fail at the last minute.  Still, the little Beagle got there. That's got to count for something!

Keep up the reports, Grace.  I love them   And do let us know how your visit to the US base goes.

MARS EXPRESS: No signal from Beagle 2 so far.

Esa's Mars Express orbiter made its first attempt to establish contact with the Beagle 2 lander, after the two spacecraft separated on 19 December 2003.

The orbiter made its first pass over the Beagle 2 landing site today, but could not pick up any signal from the tiny lander. More attempts to contact Beagle 2 are planned in the days to come.

"We have not lost hope yet to contact Beagle 2, but we also know that it has landed on an unforgiving planet", said David Southwood, ESA's Director of Science. "There are still opportunities to make contact with Beagle in the days to come, and we are giving our best efforts. Nevertheless, our spacecraft Mars Express has now reached its operational orbit and is working well; I know the science community is eagerly waiting for its first results."

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

9-Jan-2004, 13:27 GMT

NO SIGNAL RECEIVED

GRACE

I must admit I'm not following the news on this much, but Grace's posts here are most interesting! Thanks Grace!

I am amused at the name, "Beagle II", especially as my baby is a beagle! Woof!

12-Jan-2004
No signal received


Do you believe it, that they find it anywhen ?
Fi, perhaps your beagle would've faster find the Beagle2, Lol.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

LOL I am trying to picture him in a cute little doggy spacesuit...

Yep if there is food onboard he would find it in a flash - he has an amazing sense of smell and is great at "tracking". Hehehehe

Where is the Beagle 2, anyone knows?

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

Lost in space .......

IT IS SEIZED BY THE ALIENS............

You never know whose watching

US space probe Spirit has sent its first close-up pictures from the surface of Mars, NASA said.

The blac and white images show the planet's surface in microscopic close-up, allowing scientists to see details as small as a grain of sand.

The microscope camera is attached to Spirit's robotic arm, which is about the same length as a human arm. Five joints in the mechanism allow great mobility.

Spirit is expected to stay near the landing platform for the next few days, taking more photographs and soil analysis.

Over the weekend it will analyse the mineral content of Martian soil using a German-built spectrometer, before setting off at the beginning of next week on its first reconnaissance tour of Mars.

Meanwhile NASA announced that it planned to stop maintaining of servicing the Hubble space telescope, as part of a new US space strategy.

NASA said Hubble should continue operating until 2008 without maintenance and would re-enter Earth's orbit in about 2011.

The shuttles used for maintenance trips to Hubble are to be retired in 2010 under a new space program that focuses on manned trips to the Moon and Mars.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

First spectacular results from Mars Express

ESA's Mars Express, successfully inserted into orbit around Mars on 25 December 2003, is about to reach its final operating orbit above the poles of the Red Planet. The scientific investigation has just started and the first results already look very promising.

Although the seven scientific instruments on board Mars Express are still undergoing a thorough calibration phase, they have already started collecting amazing results. The first high-resolution images and spectra of Mars have already been acquired.

This first spectacular stereoscopic colour picture was taken on 14 January 2004 by ESA's Mars Express satellite from 275 km above the surface of Mars by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC).

The picture shows a portion of a 1700 km long and 65 km wide swath which was taken in south-north direction across the Grand Canyon of Mars, VALLES MARINERIS.

One looks at landscape which has been predominantly shaped by the erosional action of water. Millions of cubic kilometres of rock have been removed, and the surface features seen now such as mountain ranges, valleys, and mesas, have been formed.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

MARS ROVER FALLS SILENT, Fraying Nerves at NASA

Flight controllers were worried yesterday about their inability to have intelligible communication with the Mars rover SPIRIT since early Wednesday, an ominous radio silence that engineers could not explain but that they feared was caused by a software or hardware failure.

With each passing hour and no clear message, concern grew that the mission of the robotic spacecraft might have come to an abrupt end, just as it was getting started, on the 19th day of a planned three-month exploration of Mars's geological history. At the time communication ended, the rover was preparing for another day analyzing its first rock.

If communications are not restored, the loss of the Spirit will place an added burden of expectations on its twin rover, Opportunity, which is scheduled to land on the opposite side of Mars late Saturday night. The two rovers are part of the $820 million mission.

"We know we have had a very serious anomaly on the vehicle." Peter Theisinger, the project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said yesterday at a news conference.

In short, the Spirit seemed to have a voice and power but for some reason was left with nothing to say.....

"We don't know what is the state of the software," Mr.Cook said, explaining that some corruption of thr rover's operating instructions and memory system could be fixed by beaming corrections across more than 100 million miles to Mars. A hardware problem, he said, would be harder to resolve.

At first, weather on Earth was suspected culprit. On Wednesday, rain and thunderstorms at a deep-space antenna in Australia interrupted the transmission of a new set of instructions for the Spirit's next day of operations. The commands were for using a tool attached to the rover's mechanical arm to grind away a tiny area of a rock called Adirondack.

In such situations, the rover goes into what is known as the fault mode. Mr. Theisinger said at least some aspect of the rover's software was functioning and perhaps trying to restore order and operations.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, firstly Beagle 2 and now the Spirit........something to think about.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

The European probe Mars Express discovered ice on the Mars.

The newest spectacular pictures of Mars surface confirmes: There is really ICE on the Red Planet, says today the ESA's Flight Director, Michael McKay, in Darmstadt / Germany.

The ESA's scientist, professor Walter Flury:
"Today it's a great Day for the ESA. This find is very important for the aerospace. If in the future humans will go to the Mars, they must don't take the water from the Earth, and it changes the factual situation fundamentally."

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

The Mars rover Spirit called home on Friday morning, re-establishing contact after two days of garbled transmissions.

The rovers software has been crashing repeatedly, and the Spirit is unable to use its main antenna. It has also not shut itself down at night, draining batteries.

Even with dead batteries, the rover can still revive itself each morning with energy from its solar panels, and recharge the batteries.


Your Skywatcher

GRACE

Yay, Grace!  Keep up those reports.  I never get to watch the news so it's great to hear how they're going.  I'm emotionally invested in space exploration.  I think it's one of the best ways we Earthers can gain a wider perspective on our existence - to stop scrabbling around snatching resources of each other and think about how fragile our planet is and how necessary it is to protect it and get along with everyone else on our 'ship in space'.

Go NASA and the European space exploration organisations!

Scientists read last rites for Beagle.

Deeply disappointed British scientists read the last rites for their missing Mars lander Beagle 2 yesterday, and called for a new space mission to replace the Life-seeking probe.

"Under these circumstances we have to begin to accept that if Beagle 2 is on thee Martian surface, it is not active," Colin Pillinger, the probe's lead scientist, told a news conference. "But now is not the time to grieve. We must look to the future."

After a series of attempts to contact the lander, which should have parachuted onto the surface of the red planet on Christmas Day, one final attempt will be made to jolt it into life.

In the next few days the American Mars Odyssey orbiter, which monitors two probes on the Martian surface that landed this month sending back some startling pictures, will send a final signal telling Beagle 2 to shut down and reboot.

But Pillinger said the operation was highly risky and did not have a serious chance of success.

"It is a pretty drastic action. That is why we have left it to the last minute," he said. "It is pretty much a last resort. But we are not very hopeful it will work."

The failure is in stark contrast to the successful landing by the United States of the mobile probes Spirit and Opportunity and to the confirmation last week by Beagle 2's orbiting mothership Mars Express that there is water on Mars.

Pillinger congratulated both NASA and ESA but insisted the science on Beagle 2 was superior to that on the American probes and urged Europe to seriously consider mounting a new mission to Mars.

"We still believe that we were the only lander with experiments on board to find if there has been life.... and to take it further to find if there is still life on Mars," he said.

"We hope very much we will be back with Beagle 2 pups. We believe the next mission should be dedicated to landing. To capitalise on the expertise we should do it as soon as possible," he added.

He said the window of Opportunity was closing. Next year would be far too early given that a full inquiry had to be held into the loss of Beagle 2 to find out just what went wrong.

But in 2007 NASA was planning a mission carrying scientific equipment that would put it in direct competition with the Beagle 2 science.

Pillinger said the trouble was that Europe did not even have anything in preparation. Its Aurora deep space project had barely even got seed money and was therefore out of the question.

"We need to try something different - a completely new mission," he said.


Your Skywatcher

GRACE

SCIENTIFIC BREAK THROUGH: DOG DISCOVERS LIFE ON MARS!!!

Canine sleuth sniffs out a slice of heaven on earth.

History may record that TAMARIND the dog helped confirm there was once life on Mars. While five space probes, including two rovers, explore the Red Planet, a Sydney scientist's pet pooch may have found the evidence so many have been seeking.

When NASA announced in 1996 that a meteorite recovered from Antarctica appeared to contain fossils of ancient Martian bacteria, there were sceptics. The rock, blasted off Mars 16 million years ago, fell to Earth 13,000 years ago. Inside, scientists found chemical structures that looked like the work of organisms. But there was a problem. Sceptics argued one of the structures could only form at very high temperatures far too hot to life.

Now two Australians, Tony Taylor, of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation at Lucas Hights, and Queensland University's Professor John Barry, say they have discovered an identical structure in dozens of different bacteria thriving in the ooze around Queensland's Moreton Bay.

To find the earthly organisms, Dr Taylor ventured to Moreton Bay with TAMARIND, part dingo, part kelpie. "She's my research assistant," he said, explaining he had taught her to sniff out sediments where the right bacteria lived, "The stuff smells like sewage."

After setting Tamarind loose, she veered off the road, into the bush and five minutes later came back covered in mud.

When Dr Taylor examined 82 different bacteria from the spot Tamarind found, as well as two other nearby sites, one a golf course, he discovered they contained 11 characteristics also found in the Mars fossils, including the structure other scientists claimed could only form under scorching heat.

"That is an extraordinary match," he said, adding that the Mars fossils were now far more convincing than T-rex skeletons. "Our research shows that the structures found in the NASA meteorite were more than likely made by bacteria present on Mars 4 billion years ago, before life even started on Earth."

A biophysicist with the nuclear research centre, he said the problematic structure, resembling cartilage around tiny backbone discs and vertebra, had never been studied in fine detail in earthly bacteria because electron microscopes had insufficient resolution.

But he found a way, with the help of ultraviolet light, to steady the organisms. Dr Taylor predicted that while sceptics would not give up, they would go quiet.

The director of Macquarie University's Centre for Astrobiology, Malcolm Walter, remained a sceptic yesterday. "That's putting it mildly," he said, warning that just because something looked like life did not mean it was once alive. "It would be very interesting if they have seen these structures (in bacteria), but it would be far from convincing," said Professor Walter, who had not yet read the scientist's full report.

Their findings, crediting Tamarind's work, will be published today in the Journal of Microscopy.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

Mars Rover Spirit Restored To Health.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is healthy again, the result of recovery work by mission engineers since the robot developed computer-memory and communications problems 10 days ago.

"We have confirmed that Spirit is booting up normally. Tomorrow we'll be doing some preventive maintenance," Dr. Mark Adler, mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said Sunday morning.

Spirit's twin, Opportunity which drove off its lander platform early Saturday, will be commanded tonight to reach out with its robot arm early Monday, said JPL's Matt Wallace, mission manager. Opportunity will examine the soil in front of it over the next few days with a microscope and with a pair of spectrometer instruments for determining what elements and minerals are present.

For Spirit, part of the cure has been deleting thousands of files from the rover's flash memory - a type of rewritable electronic memory that retains information even when power is off. Many of the deleted files were left over from the seven-month flight from Florida to Mars. Onboard software was having difficulty managing the flash memory, triggering Spirit's computer to reset itself about once an hour.

Two days after the problem arose, engineers began using a temporary workaround of sending commands every day to put Spirit into an operations mode that avoided use of flash memory. Now, however, the computer is stable even when operating in the normal mode, which uses the flash memory.

Spirit will resume examination of a rock nicknamed Adirondack later this week and possibly move on to a lighter-colored rock by week's end.

Each Martian Day, or "sol" lasts about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, Spirit begins its 30th sol on Mars at 12:44 a.m. Monday,PST. Opportunity begins its 10th sol on Mars at 1:05 p.m., Monday, PST. The two rovers are halfway around Mars from each other.

The main task for both Spirit and Opportunity in comming weeks and months is to find geological clues about past environmental conditions at their landing sites, particularly about whether the areas were ever watery and possibly suitable for sustaining life.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

MISSION ROSETTA & PHILAE

The international mission Rosetta has comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it target. For the first time in space history a spacecraft will enter orbit around a comet. The Rosetta timetable foressees a launch at February 26, 2004, arrival at the comet in August 2004, Lander release in November 2014, and close comet observations until end 2015.

The Rosetta spacecraft will be launched on an Ariane-5 launch vehicle from Kourou, French Guiana. The control of the Rosetta mission will take place from a single control centre, Rosetta Operations Centre at ESOC, Germany, in conjunction with the ESA deep space antenna located in NEW NORCIA near Perth, Western Australia. The operations aim is to acquire scientific data during the planet and asteroid fly-bys, the comet acquisition/approach, the near comet phase, the comet orbit phase, and in particular during the Lander delivery and relay.

Around the enormous distance of five billion kilometers to make, the drive of the booster rocket Ariane-5 is not however even sufficient. Therefore Rosetta must put a daring centrifuge route down by the universe: The probe gets gravity assist once by Mars and three times by Earth (Swing-by-Manoeuvre).

Rosetta is to explain origin of the solar system. The "cosmic freezes" are as it were windows into the past. They contain remnants of that subject, from which approximately 4,5 billion years ago our solar system originated in. With their tete-a-tete with the comet will Rosetta suspend the lander "Philae", which is to examine the comet surface. In addition the astronomers expect an answer to the question whether comets played a role with the emergence of lives on Earth.

"We have still no notion, as the underground of the comet is constituted. Whether the surface is rocky or sandy, must find Rosetta find out only. The problem is not however the landing, because "Philae" is in such a way designed that he can land on differently constituted soil. The difficulty consists of landing thus that the probe does not "reflect like a jumping ball." Since the force of gravity of the straight once four kilometers long nucleus is not sufficient, in order to hold the landing-gadget, the lander must itself firmly clamp at the core of the comet with the help of a harpoon."

The international Rosetta mission was approved in November 1993 by ESA's Science Programme Committee as the planetary cornerstone mission in ESA's long-term space science programme. ESA's next cometary mission takes its name from the Rosetta Stone, which was the key that unlocked the secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Rosetta will study the fabric of a comet, and data are expected to provide vital insight into the origins of the solar system itself.

Philae is the island in the river Nile on which an obelisk was found that had a bilingual inscription including the names of Cleopatra and Ptalemy in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This provided the French historian Jean-Francois-Champollion with the final clues that enabled him to decipher the hieroglyphs of thr Rosetta Stone and unlock the secrets of the civilisation of ancient Egypt.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

The US space robot Opportunity, which landed of Mars about three weeks ago, is investigating mysterious round granules scattered in the Martian soil LIKE BLUEBERRIES IN A MUFFIN, NASA says.

"Scientists are highly intrigued by these objects and may investigate them further, said the Mars mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"The question is: What is the distribution of these things within the soil?" said mission scientist Steve Squyers. "At the surface it is easy. But we have no idea what lies underneath."

To learn what is underneath, the robot used one of its six wheels earlier this week to dig a small, shallow trench in the Martian soil.

"The idea was to dig a hole and to see what lies down below," said Dr Squyres. "Are we going to see granules below the surface or are they just distributed across the top? Are we going to see a dense concentration of granules all the way down?"

NASA geologists notices similar granules in a rocky outcropping examined by Opportunity early in its mission.

"Where did these spherules that are embedded in the outcrop come from?" asked Dr Squyres."Did they grow in place? What is the composition of the outcrop? What does it tell us about the possibility that water is involved?"

In the coming days, Opportunity will be investigating an area of rocky outcroppings dubbed El Capitan whose unique strata have intrigued NASA geologists.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

NASA's Spirit rover has found evidence of past water activity in a volcanic rock on the opposite side of Mars to where its twin, Opportunity, discovered signs that the ground there had once been drenched.

The amount of water at Spirit's site in Gusev Crater would have been much less than that indicated at Opportunity's site in Meridiani Planum, deputy principal investigator of the rover mission Ray Arvidson said.

The findings came from the study of a rock dubbed Humphrey that Spirit came across on its way from its landing site to a big crater named Bonneville.

Spirit used its abrasion tool to grind below the rock's surface and reveal cracks apparently filled with minerals, an indicator of water action familiar to geologists studying Earth rocks.

Your Skywatcher

Grace

What is bigger than an asteroid, smaller than a planet, red all over and far, far away? The answer - a mysterious planet - like body orbiting our Sun - has been discovered by NASA founded researchers led by an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

The object named Sedna - after the Inuit Goddess of the Sea - with diameter less than 1700 km (smaller than Pluto), is three times farther away than Pluto, making it the most distant known in the solar system - 13 million kilometers (8 billion miles) away from Earth. That is 900 times Earth distance from the Sun.

Sedna lies extremely far from the Sun, in the coldest known region of our solar system, where the temperature never rises above minus 240 degrees Celsius (minus 400 Fahrenheit).

"Half red rocks, half ice" - says Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology. He expected still more of such objects in our solar system to discover. The discovery of Sedna proves the theory that the Sun is originated of congeries of stars.

Since the discovery of Pluto 74 years before is Sedna the biggest found of the astronomers.

Your Skywatcher

GRACE

The Sumerians knew about this planet & called it Nibiru.

Sk.

Ah! That's the same planet! I thought that is an another! Thank you for your message.

ISS crew focuses on science.

This week on the International Space Station, the Expedition 8 crew devoted most of its time to science. Commander and NASA ISS Science Officer, Michael Foale,worked on crystal and fluid physics experiments. Flight Engineer, Alexander Kaleri, tended pea plants in the Zwiezda Service Module's greenhouse.

Space travelers living on Mars for extended periods will need to grow plants, which provide food and generate oxygen. But the decreased gravity and low atmospheric pressure environment will stress the plants and make them hard to grow.

Greenhouses in the Station's Destiny Laboratory and in the Zwezda Service Module grow plants in a controlled environment. Station crews tend the plants, photograph them and harvest samples for return to Earth. Researchers can use the resulting data to develop new techniques for successfully growing plants in space.

Your Skywatcher

Grace

Cosmos resembles a gigantic trumpet

About the form of the universe astronomers argue with verve. In the autumn 2003 provided a new theory for attention:"the universe same football" came from a French-American researcher team. But now is also the "football theory" of the table. Ulmer researchers, Germany, are convinced that the universe has the form of an enormous medieval trumpet, as that "Geo" Hamburg magazine reports in his current expenditure.

No escaping for spaceships

On this form on a simple funnel conclude the physicists around Frank Steiner of the University Ulm, Germany, from observations of the Big Bang echo. This "cosmic background radiation" in such a way specified still today the measurable afterglow of the ur-fire-ball is and comes from the time scarcely 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The picture of the funnel-form-universe is according to Steiner a simplyfication, because a negatively curved three-dimensional space exceeds the imaginative power of mathematically untrained ones. The universe would actually fill only the wall of the trumpet, not their cavity. In a trumpet-form-universe there would be strange phenomena: so no spaceship could leave the horn. If it flies on the external wall over the end of the funnel, it returns on the inner wall again.

Football form is out

On the pointedly approaching funnel from the researchers came, because there are no temperature fluctuations, which exceed a certain spatial size in the background radiation, reported "Geo". In addition this form can explain the observed elliptical shape some to the heat marks in the background radiation. These characteristics of the Big Bang echo could not being brought to the football universe suggested recently by a researcher team with other models like in agreement.

Your Skywatcher

Grace

www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/index.cgi


Grace