NASA mission to Europa takes small step toward reality

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NASA's 2015 budget includes a small down payment on a potential mission to Europa, a moon of Saturn and one of the solar system's potentially most habitable spots.

Europa or bust?

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In its fiscal 2015 budget, NASA has included a small deposit on a possible mission to one of the solar system's potentially most habitable spots: Jupiter's ice-sheathed moon Europa.

The agency is asking Congress for $15 million to officially begin identifying affordable concepts for a Europa mission, noted Elizabeth Robinson, NASA's chief financial officer, at a briefing on Tuesday.

At the moment, the agency has no official cost estimate for such a mission and a launch date no more specific than sometime in the mid-2020s. But a 2012 study commissioned by NASA highlighted three approaches that carried price tags ranging from $1.8 billion to $3 billion. Of those, the study team identified a $2.1 billion mission as the one that would return the most science for the best price. It consisted of a spacecraft performing multiple flybys of Europa.

While $15 million may seem like chump change against a potential price tag of $2 billion, give or take, putting the figure in the budget "is significant, it means we're getting serious," says James Green, who heads NASA's planetary science division.

Congress has already delivered $80 million to NASA to begin spadework on a mission to Europa in mind. Now, by putting the mission in the budget, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is giving the program a new level of concreteness, since it must include spending estimates for an additional four years beyond fiscal 2015.

"The fact that OMB put it in as line item by name says that administration finally got the message that Congress was going to insist on this and they might as well go ahead and put it in the budget," says Scott Hubbard, former head of NASA's Mars exploration program and now a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

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NASA mission to Europa takes small step toward reality

Is NASA really going to send a probe to Europa? [Updated w/NASA response]

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NASA said Tuesday that it wants to plan a robotic mission to Jupiters watery moon Europa, where astronomers speculate there might be life. (1996 photo of Europa/AP Photo/NASA)

Whats NASA really up to? Sometimes its hard to know for sure. For a number of years NASA has developed various programs and missions that did not survive the erosional forces of constricting budgets and strategic changes. The agency has a dilemma: It takes at least a decade to do anything significant in space, but our political cycle is faster than that. Thus there are these phantom programs that exist on paper, that look like real plans, but which may never become physical, tangible realities. As a reporter covering NASA programs, you want to add a stipulation somewhere in your story that says, in effect, This may not actually happen.

Even programs where the metal has already been cut can wind up in the trash heap. The Constellation Program of Bush 43 was a major effort to return astronauts to the moon, but it never felt 100 percent real, because the plan lacked any sense of political urgency or public buy-in. It felt vulnerable to shifting winds. And such a wind came along the zephyr known as Barack Obama. Obama killed Constellation. That meant the demise of the Ares 1 rocket after it had already burned through billions of dollars. And what were they going to do with that $500 million, brand-new mobile launcher at the Cape that was designed for the Ares 1? (Answer: They can probably re-purpose it for another rocket, but space hardware is so customized that its not like adjusting the height knob on a workout machine at the gym.)

Surviving from Constellation is the Orion capsule, but where will you go with it, if not back to the moon? NASA last year proposed the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which would involve astronauts in Orion visiting a captured asteroid in lunar orbit. In the new FY2015 budget request, the Obama administration wants to boost funding for the ARM, to $133 million in 2015, but you can expect political rancor on that front. The ARM is hardly a slam dunk, in part because they havent found a target rock. Republicans dont like it because it has Obamas imprimatur, and they took the rare step last year of trying to prevent NASA from spending any money on it. The ARM has no international partners. It is not essential to the hopes and dreams and bottom lines of the huge aerospace corporations (although a captured rock would give Orion and the SLS rocket a destination in the relatively near term other than points in space or interesting orbits around the moon). So the ARM lives, but its precisely the kind of program that a subsequent Congress or Republican administration would take delight in killing.

Which finally brings up the issue of a Europa mission. Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press wrote about the Europa proposal Tuesday. (Could be fish under the ice there!) Theres $15 million in the Obama budget request for a Europa mission (heres my news article that touches on the NASA budget its mostly about the United States and Russia being roommates in space). But a Europa mission would be a Flagship class mission, meaning $1 billion-plus in cost. NASA Administrator CharlesBolden said a few months ago that the space agency couldnt afford new Flagships in the near future (other than ones already underway). Other officials confirmed that: Theres no money in the tight NASA budget for Flagships right now. Any plausible mission to Europa is definitely Flagship-class, as I reported in December in the final installment of the Destination Unknown series.

Initial estimates for a Europa orbiter put the cost at $4.7 billion. Thats expensive even by flagship-mission standards. Getting a spacecraft into orbit around Europa is tricky, because its close to Jupiter and at the bottom of the planets deep gravity well. Jupiter also emits intense radiation, and the spacecrafts instruments would need to be covered in costly lead shielding.

So engineers went to a Plan B. Rather than orbiting Europa, the spacecraft would go into an orbit around Jupiter, spending most of its time outside the planets radiation field, and then swoop in repeatedly, with 34 flybys of Europa and nine of the moon Ganymede.

At this point the Europa Clipper is just a concept under study, and it is not clear when or if it will graduate and become a real mission.

So, does NASA intend to do a Flagship-class Europa mission? What do we make of the $15 million in the budget request? Reporters on the NASA budget teleconference Tuesday pressed Bolden to clarify the issue. He didnt. Finally, NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said the Europa mission is in the early pre-formulation stage and said of the future scale of the mission, Were frankly just not sure at this point.

One likely outcome is that Congress will see the $15 million request from the administration and raise it substantially. That was suggested to me by Rep. Adam Schiff , the Democrat who represents Pasadena (home base of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and who is a big booster of the NASA planetary program.

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Is NASA really going to send a probe to Europa? [Updated w/NASA response]

NASA's Quest for Green Rocket Fuel Passes Big Test

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A greener fuel "less toxic than caffeine" could replace NASA's dangerous hydrazine rocket propellant

Ball Aerospace

For decades, NASA has relied on an efficient but highly toxic fuel known as hydrazine to power satellites and manned spacecraft. Now the agency is laying the groundwork to replace that propellant with a safer, cleaner alternative.

NASA's Green Propellant Infusion Mission, or GPIM, has passed its first thruster pulsing test, a major milestone that paves the way for a planned test flight in 2015, agency officials said. NASA unveiled the rocket thruster success Tuesday (July 9) in Washington, D.C., during a briefing with aerospace industry officials and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO).

The GPIM initiative aims to demonstrate that a green fuel with nearly 50 percent better performance than hydrazine could power Earth-circling satellites and eventually deep space missions.

Hydrazine has powered satellites and manned spacecraft for years, but it is highly flammable and corrosive, making it dangerous and expensive to transport. Since the fuel can be extremely harmful if it is inhaled or touches the skin, it is handled by workers wearing inflatable suits.

The new rocket fuel, dubbed AF-M315E, is far more benign; it is stored in glass jars and has been described as less toxic than caffeine.

The propellant is an energetic ionic liquid that evaporates more slowly and requires more heat to ignite than hydrazine, making it more stable and much less flammable.Its main ingredient is hydroxyl ammonium nitrate, and when it burns, it gives off nontoxic gasses like water vapor, hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Importantly, M315E is safe enough to be loaded into a spacecraft before it goes to the launch pad, which would cut the time and cost of ground processing for a vehicle headed for space.

"In today's world you cannot and do not want to load a spacecraft with hydrazine and ship it," said Michael Gazarik, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).

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NASA's Quest for Green Rocket Fuel Passes Big Test

NASA says it wants to go to Jupiter's crazy moon, Europa

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In its latest budget request, the space agency asks for a little coin for a trip to one of the other places in our solar system with the best chance of harboring life.

NASA wants to put its money where the crazy subsurface alien ocean is.

NASA and the White House are asking Congress to bankroll a new intrastellar road trip to a destination that's sort of like the extraterrestrial Atlantis of our solar system -- Jupiter's intriguing moon, Europa.

On its surface, Europa appears to be an iced-over rock orbiting the biggest planet in our neighborhood and often getting nuked by Jupiter's radiation belt. However, it's believed that a subsurface ocean exists beneath the ice, kept liquid by a phenomenon called tidal flexing. Just last month, Hubble spotted evidence of a plume of water vapor at the moon's south pole.

This makes Europa, or at least its hidden ocean, one of the better places for finding evidence of life elsewhere in our solar system, be they microbes or the alien antagonist in the highly underrated "Europa Report."

On Tuesday, NASA released an overview of its $17 billion budget request for fiscal year 2015, which includes funds "for the formulation for a mission to Jupiter's moon, Europa," according to a statement from administrator Charles Bolden.

In recent years, NASA has been developing concepts for exploring Europa that include the launch of "clipper" that would flyby and gather data from above the moon, as well as a possible lander. The cost of the clipper mission was estimated (PDF) in 2012 at just under $2 billion, while the cost of a landing on Europa was pegged at $2.8 billion.

While the exact amount NASA is requesting Congress to approve for moving forward on a trip to Europa won't be known for a few more days, it's not likely to be anywhere near the full amount needed to launch the mission. The part of the budget request that includes the Europa mission is a $1.2 billion chunk for planetary science that includes other efforts to explore planetary bodies in our solar system, and it's not likely that Europa will get a big share of that amount, given the recent (not unjustified) fascination with Mars and asteroids.

But the fact that Europa is part of NASA's official pitch for its approach to the future of space exploration is progress for anyone interested in getting to know what might be swimming around below those layers of radiation, ice, and who knows what else. Still, if NASA wants to reach Europa first, they may want to hurry, because the son of famed explorer and diver Jacques Cousteau is also eager to take a dip in those alien waters. No, seriously.

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NASA says it wants to go to Jupiter's crazy moon, Europa

Nanotechnology site at Electronics Park will move forward

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Salina, N.Y. A proposed nanotechnology facility in Salina that remains vacant 3 1/2 years after it was announced will eventually open despite a new project in the field announced yesterday for DeWitt.

New York said in 2010 it would invest $28 million to transform a former General Electric lab at the park into a facility that will employ up to 250 people.

Those plans haven't changed, said Alain Kaloyeros, CEO of the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany. The focus will be on defense-related work involving nanotechnology, the science of manipulating individual atoms and molecules.

The Nanoscale College is involved in the Electronics Park facility and the new project Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday at Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney's State of the County address.

Cuomo said the state will spend $15 million to create a nanotech hub at the Collamer Crossings Business Park that will eventually employ 350 people. Its first tenant will be the Film House, a film production company.

The Electronics Park facility should be up and running in 2014, Kaloyeros said.

The building was neglected over the years, which meant it needed major rehab, said Kevin Schwab, a spokesman for CenterState CEO, which manages Electronics Park.

"That process is complete now," he said. "We are ready for construction and development."

Schwab said the governor's announcement of the DeWitt hub shouldn't hurt the Electronics Park site.

"Nanotechnology is a platform that can be applied across a wide range of industries and I think that's what you're seeing here," he said.

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Nanotechnology site at Electronics Park will move forward

Can nanotechnology make better movies?

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DEWITT, N.Y. - If you're looking to blow something up for a major Hollywood blockbuster these days, you might need a dose of science.

Some of the materials used to contain those explosions, and ensure they only blow up the things they're supposed to, are based on nanotechnology.

That's the science of manipulating individual atoms and molecules, said Alain Kaloyeros, CEO of the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.

Those materials and other innovations will take center stage at a new nanotech-focused hub planned for Collamer Crossings Business Park in DeWitt. Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the project Tuesday.

Other nanotechnology-related advances that could come into play in the movie business include:

The DeWitt hub's first tenant is a film production company called The Film House that will make use of nano-powered moviemaking technology.

The Film House will focus on making movies. Other companies that populate the facility will concentrate on research and development of new technologies, Kaloyeros said.

In addition to the film industry, the hub will try to attract tenants in energy and the medical device sector.

The site will employ 350 people, according to Cuomo. The Nanoscale College will own and manage the facility.

Nanotechnology allows researchers to design new materials from the ground up and imbue them with specific characteristics by altering them at the atomic level, Kaloyeros said.

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Can nanotechnology make better movies?

Nano innovation could mean eye injections are a thing of the past

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Drugs used to treat blindness-causing disorders could be successfully administered by eye drops rather than unpleasant and expensive eye injections, according to new research led by UCL scientists that could be a breakthrough for the millions worldwide suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and other eye disorders.

1 in 5 people over 75 have AMD with well-known sufferers including actress Dame Judi Dench and author Stephen King. The research findings are significant due to growing patient numbers and an increasing demand for the eye injections that halt the progression of the disease.

The research, demonstrated in animal models and published today in nanotechnology journal Small, demonstrates that it is possible to create formulations of tiny nanoparticles loaded with the AMD drug Avastin and deliver significant concentrations to the back of the eye. Lead author Professor Francesca Cordeiro (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology) said: "The development of eye drops that can be safely and effectively used in patients would be a magic bullet a huge breakthrough in the treatment of AMD and other debilitating eye disorders.

"The current treatment of injecting drugs into the eye is uncomfortable, detested by patients and often needs repeated monthly injections in hospital for as long as 24 consecutive months. It's impossible to exaggerate the relief patients would feel at not having to experience injections into their eyes."

The NHS is currently overburdened with patients who need repeat eye injections and the numbers are set to rise exponentially over the next ten years. Demand is so high that injections are difficult to administer, time-consuming and very expensive. The treatment also carries a risk of infection and bleeding, increased by the frequency of recurrent injections into the eyes. In the USA, well over one million ocular injections were given in 2010. In the UK, 30,500 injections were estimated to have been given in 2008 a 150-fold increase in 10 years.

Effective delivery of drugs to the retina of the eye is considered one of the most challenging areas in drug development in ophthalmology, due to the presence of anatomical barriers. It was previously thought that drugs used to treat AMD such as Avastin and Lucentis have molecules that are simply too large to be effectively transported in an eye drop.

First author Dr Ben Davis (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology) added: "There is significant interest in the development of minimally invasive systems to deliver large drug molecules across biological barriers including the cornea of the eye.

"We have shown in experimental models a formulation system to get substances including Avastin across the barriers in the eye and transport them across the cells of the cornea. In theory, you could customise the technology for different drugs such as Lucentis, commonly used for AMD treatment in the UK, as it is a smaller molecule than Avastin so likely to be delivered effectively via this method.

"All the components we used are safe and well established in the field, meaning we could potentially move quite quickly to get the technology into trials in patients but the timescales are dependent on funding." The paper includes functional data showing that the avastin administered stops the blood vessels from leaking and forming new blood vessels, the basis for wet AMD.

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Nano innovation could mean eye injections are a thing of the past

Cuomo: DeWitt hub for nano industries will create at least 350 high-tech jobs

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SYRACUSE New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday night announced plans for a facility in DeWitt that will serve as a hub for emerging nano industries in Onondaga County and its first tenant.

Cuomo made the announcement during his visit for Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoneys State of the County address at the Carnegie Library in downtown Syracuse.

The DeWitt facility will specialize in providing advanced visual-production research and education to support upstate New Yorks rapidly growing film and television industry, the governors office said in a news release.

The State University of New York (SUNY) College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) will lead the operation. It will focus on the use of nanotechnology to drive innovations in the computer-generation imagery, animation, and motion-capture technology used in film and television production, Cuomos office said.

Cuomo also announced that The Film House, a Los Angelesbased film and television company, will be the facilitys first tenant. Itll move its headquarters, production, post-production, and distribution operations to DeWitt.

The project will create at least 350 new high-tech jobs and 150 construction jobs, according to the governors office.

The film industry and nanotech sectors are emerging industries, and New York is going to reap the rewards of innovation and high-tech jobs, Cuomo said in the news release.

Were bringing the industries of the future to New York, and Upstate is going to lead the way. The new innovation hub in Onondaga County will be a hotspot for research and education, bringing hundreds of new jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to Central New York, Cuomo said.

The project is based on a seven-year growth plan that includes a minimum private investment of over $150 million over the seven years, with an initial 125 jobs that will eventually grow to at least 350.

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Cuomo: DeWitt hub for nano industries will create at least 350 high-tech jobs

Carbon Emerges as New Solar Power Material

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Carbon-based photovoltaic devices might one day replace silicon solar cells

Flickr/Jeremy Levine

Researchers are investigating how carbon can harness the sun's light, potentially replacing more expensive and toxic materials used in conventional photovoltaic technologies.

Now a team at Stanford University has developed a solar cell whose components are made solely from carbon. The scientists published their findings last month in the journal ACS Nano.

"We were interested in forming basically a new type of solar cell in which the materials being used are all carbon materials," said Michael Vosgueritchian, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at Stanford and a co-author.

He explained that carbon materials have several traits that make them appealing to energy developers. "There's no fear of running out of carbon," Vosgueritchian said. "These materials, since they are nanomaterials, they are solution processable. They can be deposited by spraying and coating without high temperatures or vacuums."

Contrast this with typical silicon-based solar panels: Manufacturers need very pure silicon and have to heat it to high temperatures. The devices' electrodes often consist of expensive, rare or dangerous elements like cadmium, tellurium and indium. When a photovoltaic panel wears out, these chemicals also create a disposal hazard.

Working under Zhenan Bao at Stanford, Vosgueritchian said, the research team used several flavors of carbon to construct its device. Graphene, a carbon structure in which the atoms lie in thin sheets of hexagons, formed the anode.

If graphene is rolled into a cylinder, it becomes a carbon nanotube. Nanotubes made up part of the device's active layer, which converts light to electricity. On top was a layer of 60-carbon fullerenes, soccer-ball-shaped arrangements of atoms. The final layer was a cathode composed of nanotubes.

'A long way to go' before practical use Michael Strano, a professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained that this junction between nanotubes and fullerenes "represents a fundamentally new kind of solar cell." His team developed a device using this system and published its work in Advanced Materials in June.

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Carbon Emerges as New Solar Power Material

Enroll now to vote in this election! Here's how

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The last date is March 9, 2014. HURRY!

First-time voters or those who don't have their names on the voters' list or electoral rolls yet, you have time till March 9, 2014 to register yourself with the Election Commission of India and exercise your right to vote in the forthcoming general and assembly elections that begin April 7, 2014.

A step-by-step guide to register as a first time general voter as mentioned on the Election Commission of India Web site.

While you can opt for the traditional offline method of registering as a voter, the Election Commission of India now also offers you an opportunity to register online.

How to register online

You can now register online here: http://eci-citizenservices.nic.in/frmmobileverification.aspx?type=FORM6

Once you proceed with details like your mobile number and e-mail ID, you get a verification code on your mobile phone. After you submit the code you go to Form 6 (see here to get an idea: http://eci.nic.in/eci_main/forms/FORM6.pdf), fill it up online and submit it.

Form 6 answers all the questions first-time voters would have along with a list of documents required you need to scan and upload.

Once you file and upload Form 6 online along with a scanned copy of your photographs, necessary documents to prove your birth date and residential address, the Election Registration Officer will send a booth level officer to check and verify the authenticity of your documents.

After this verification id done without any hitch your name will get registered as a voter in the electoral list.

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Enroll now to vote in this election! Here's how