Soyuz Spacecraft Arrives and Docks to the International Space Station 11/07/13 – Video

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Soyuz Spacecraft Arrives and Docks to the International Space Station 11/07/13
After launching earlier in the day in their Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Expedition 38/39 Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of t...

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Soyuz Spacecraft Arrives and Docks to the International Space Station 11/07/13 - Video

Soyuz 37 to International Space Station. NASA Expedition 38/39. [IGEO.TV] – Video

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Soyuz 37 to International Space Station. NASA Expedition 38/39. [IGEO.TV]
A Russian government Soyuz rocket launched the manned Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station with members of the next Expedition crew. The capsu...

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Soyuz 37 to International Space Station. NASA Expedition 38/39. [IGEO.TV] - Video

No Stuxnet Infection, but Space Station is Vulnerable

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The International Space Station has its own isolated network of computers that run everything from critical life support systems to scientific experiments. Just because its isolated from the veritable electronic ecosystem that is the terrestrial Internet, however, it doesnt mean its safe from being attacked by malware or succumbing to a viral epidemic.

This was the shocking revelation revealed by anti-virus guru Eugene Kaspersky at the Press Club in Canberra, Australia, earlier this month. During his presentation, the outspoken Russian businessman discussed the cyber threats to global security and economy.

PHOTOS: Hackers Playbook: Common Tactics

The Kaspersky Lab founder discussed cyber crime, espionage and infrastructure attacks as the key elements of modern online security risks in descending frequency but ascending risk. He identified attacks on critical infrastructure as of most serious concern, despite there being only 2 or 3 a year. He used the attack on the financial system in Seoul, South Korea, as one recent example, but other examples included attacks on Middle East oil companies and rumors of an attack on a Brazilian nuclear reactor.

Focusing on the Stuxnet virus a malicious piece of code that was allegedly created by U.S. and Israeli programmers to attack Iranian nuclear reactors Kaspersky outlined a few examples as to how the virus has spread beyond its intended target, inadvertently infecting an unnamed Russian nuclear reactor.

Stuxnet is designed to be spread indiscriminately via Microsoft Windows networks and can be manually uploaded to isolated critical systems by infected USB drives, for example. The worm then gets to work targeting specific Siemens industrial control systems that monitor industrial processes. By design, Stuxnet is focused on Irans suspected uranium enrichment infrastructure, but according to Kaspersky, Stuxnet has spread into the wilds of the Internet and started to attack nuclear reactor systems in other nations, including Russia.

NEWS: Virus Attacks Japanese Space Agency Computer

However, he did not say that Stuxnet had infected the International Space Station, as some news outlets incorrectly assumed.

Using the International Space Station as an example of an isolated critical infrastructure, Kaspersky pointed out that despite being in space, it is still vulnerable to attack. In fact, on a number of occasions over the years the orbiting outposts computers have become infected by malware.

Scientists, from time to time, are coming to space with USBs which are infected. Im not kidding, he said. I was talking to Russian space guys and they said yes, from time to time there are virus epidemics in the space station.

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No Stuxnet Infection, but Space Station is Vulnerable

NASA Continues Workshop to Discuss Asteroid Initiative Ideas

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NASA has rescheduled its Asteroid Synthesis Workshop, a public forum to examine and synthesize 96 of the ideas submitted to a Request for Information (RFI) about the agency's asteroid initiative. The workshop will be held Nov. 20 - 22 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and is a continuation of the workshop originally scheduled for Sept. 30 - Oct. 2, which was ended early because of the government shutdown.

The workshop will feature discussions by experts from NASA, the agency's international partners, private industry and the public. Topics include how best to identify, capture and relocate a near-Earth asteroid for closer study, how to respond to asteroid threats, as well as partnership, crowdsourcing and citizen science ideas. Workshop results will be considered for future planning as NASA refines the details of its mission.

NASA's fiscal year 2014 budget proposes an asteroid initiative that includes a strategy to leverage human and robotic activities for a first-ever human mission to an asteroid, while also accelerating efforts to improve detection and characterization of asteroids. The work aligns the agency's ongoing efforts in science, new technology development and human exploration.

NASA received more than 400 ideas in response to the June RFI. The ideas were submitted by industry, universities, international organizations, and for the first time, individual members of the public. NASA's selection process involved agency scientists, engineers and mission planners who are formulating details of the asteroid initiative.

Each session will be webcast on NASA's UStream channel, and virtual participation is encouraged. Because of limited capacity, in person attendance is limited to invited, registered presenters. Selected sessions also will be broadcast on NASA Television. Virtual audience members can ask questions through the UStream chat function and via Twitter with session-specific hashtags. Complete schedule information, live webcasts, hashtags, and other details on how to participate virtually can be found at:

http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidworkshop

Media interested in attending the workshop in person should contact Rachel Kraft at rachel.h.kraft@nasa.gov or Sarah Ramsey at sarah.ramsey@nasa.gov.

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

NASA TV Live

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NASA Continues Workshop to Discuss Asteroid Initiative Ideas

NASA Making Satellite Data Available On Amazon’s Cloud

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November 12, 2013

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

NASA is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring Earth science satellite data to the cloud.

The space agency said it would be making a large collection of climate and Earth science satellite data available to research and educational users through the AWS cloud. The system enhances research and educational opportunities for the US geoscience community by promoting community-driven research, innovation and collaboration.

NASA continues to support and provide open public access to research data, and this collaboration is entirely consistent with that objective, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan at the agencys headquarters in Washington said in a press release. Earth science research is important to every person on the planet, and we welcome contributions from all researchers in improving our understanding of Earth and its climate.

NASA said this new project would experiment with a new way to provide data services, allowing users around the world to gain access to an integrated Earth science computational and data management system. The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), which is a research platform at NASAs Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

We are excited to grow an ecosystem of researchers and developers who can help us solve important environmental research problems, Rama Nemani, principal scientist for the NEX project at Ames, said in a press release. Our goal is that people can easily gain access to and use a multitude of data analysis services quickly through AWS to add knowledge and open source tools for others benefit.

NEX is a platform that combines state-of-the-art supercomputing, Earth system modeling, workflow management and NASA remote-sensing data. Users can use NEX to explore and analyze large Earth science data sets, run and share modeling algorithms, collaborate on new or existing projects and exchange workflows and results.

NASA said it has uploaded terabytes of data from three satellite and computer modeling datasets to the AWS platform and will upload more in the future. One of the data sets available helps provide high-resolution climate change projections for the 48 contiguous US states. The second set offers up a global view of Earths surface every one to two days. Landsat data available on the cloud provides the longest existing continuous space-based record of Earths land.

By bringing these NASA public data assets into the AWS cloud, we help NASA engage a larger community for global change impact modeling and analysis as well as data sciences innovation in general, Jamie Kinney, AWS senior manager for scientific computing, said in a press release. Together, NASA and AWS are delivering faster time to science and taking the complexity out of accessing this important climate data.

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NASA Making Satellite Data Available On Amazon’s Cloud

NASA Experts Available For Interviews About Quantum Computing

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As of Nov. 13, 2013, NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California's Silicon Valley will begin facilitating news media interviews about its new quantum computing efforts.

In a partnership with Google and independent, nonprofit research corporation Universities Space Research Association (USRA), Ames has established the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) at its NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility. The laboratory houses a 512-qubit D-Wave Two(TM) quantum computer.

Quantum computing is based on quantum bits or qubits. Unlike traditional computers, in which bits must have a value of either zero or one, a qubit can represent a zero, a one, or both values simultaneously. NASA researchers speculate that for certain types of problems, the quantum properties of a qubit will allow them to effectively try all possible solutions at once, arriving at a better solution - giving either a more accurate result than a classical supercomputer, finding an answer faster or identifying a completely new answer current supercomputers cannot find.

NASA researchers will use this system to investigate quantum algorithms that might someday dramatically improve the agency's ability to solve difficult optimization problems in aeronautics, Earth and space sciences, and space exploration. Applications relevant to NASA include machine learning, pattern recognition, mission planning and scheduling, distributed navigation and coordination, and system diagnostics and anomaly detection.

Ames is an agency leader in high-performance computing. Its NAS facility provides an integrated high-end computing environment to enable NASA to improve aerospace technology, safely conduct human and robotic space exploration, and advance knowledge of Earth and the universe. NAS houses Pleiades, a petaflop-scale supercomputer, which is ranked among the most powerful systems in the world. Pleiades is used by scientists and engineers throughout the U.S. to support NASA missions.

Interested reporters may contact jessica.culler@nasa.gov to arrange telephone interviews.

From Nov. 18-21, reporters may also interview a NASA expert in person about Ames' quantum computing and supercomputing research at the upcoming international Supercomputing Conference, SC13, in Denver. Interested reporters may contact jill.a.dunbar@nasa.gov to arrange interviews at the conference.

For more information about QuAIL, visit:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/

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NASA Cassini spacecraft provides new view of Saturn and Earth

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Nov. 12, 2013 NASA has released a natural-color image of Saturn from space, the first in which Saturn, its moons and rings, and Earth, Venus and Mars, all are visible.

The new panoramic mosaic of the majestic Saturn system taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which shows the view as it would be seen by human eyes, was unveiled at the Newseum in Washington on Tuesday.

Cassini's imaging team processed 141 wide-angle images to create the panorama. The image sweeps 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across Saturn and its inner ring system, including all of Saturn's rings out to the E ring, which is Saturn's second outermost ring. For perspective, the distance between Earth and our moon would fit comfortably inside the span of the E ring.

"In this one magnificent view, Cassini has delivered to us a universe of marvels," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "And it did so on a day people all over the world, in unison, smiled in celebration at the sheer joy of being alive on a pale blue dot."

The mosaic is part of Cassini's "Wave at Saturn" campaign, where on July 19, people for the first time had advance notice a spacecraft was taking their picture from planetary distances. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet.

An annotated version of the Saturn system mosaic labels points of interest. Earth is a bright blue dot to the lower right of Saturn. Venus is a bright dot to Saturn's upper left. Mars also appears, as a faint red dot, above and to the left of Venus. Seven Saturnian moons are visible, including Enceladus on the left side of the image. Zooming into the image reveals the moon and the icy plume emanating from its south pole, supplying fine, powder-sized icy particles that make up the E ring.

The E ring shines like a halo around Saturn and the inner rings. Because it is so tenuous, it is best seen with light shining from behind it, when the tiny particles are outlined with light because of the phenomenon of diffraction. Scientists who focus on Saturn's rings look for patterns in optical bonanzas like these. They use computers to increase dramatically the contrast of the images and change the color balance, for example, to see evidence for material tracing out the full orbits of the tiny moons Anthe and Methone for the first time.

"This mosaic provides a remarkable amount of high-quality data on Saturn's diffuse rings, revealing all sorts of intriguing structures we are currently trying to understand," said Matt Hedman, a Cassini participating scientist at the University of Idaho in Moscow. "The E ring in particular shows patterns that likely reflect disturbances from such diverse sources as sunlight and Enceladus' gravity."

Cassini does not attempt many images of Earth because the sun is so close to our planet that an unobstructed view would damage the spacecraft's sensitive detectors. Cassini team members looked for an opportunity when the sun would slip behind Saturn from Cassini's point of view. A good opportunity came on July 19, when Cassini was able to capture a picture of Earth and its moon, and this multi-image, backlit panorama of the Saturn system.

"With a long, intricate dance around the Saturn system, Cassini aims to study the Saturn system from as many angles as possible," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Beyond showing us the beauty of the Ringed Planet, data like these also improve our understanding of the history of the faint rings around Saturn and the way disks around planets form -- clues to how our own solar system formed around the sun."

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NASA Cassini spacecraft provides new view of Saturn and Earth

NASA Community Announcement on Astrophysics Explorer AO – NNH14ZDA002J

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is releasing this Community Announcement concerning its intention to solicit investigations for the Astrophysics Explorer Program. The Astrophysics Explorer Program conducts Principal Investigator (PI)-led space science investigations to advance NASA's strategic goals in astrophysics, which are to discover the origin, structure, evolution, and destiny of the Universe and search for Earth-like planets. Additional information concerning these areas of investigation is provided through appropriate links found on the SMD homepage at http://science.nasa.gov/.

The current state of planning calls for NASA SMD to release an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) in the late summer/early fall of 2014 that will solicit proposals for Small Explorer (SMEX) missions to accomplish Astrophysics Explorer Program science objectives. NASA also plans to release simultaneously a solicitation for Astrophysics Explorer Missions of Opportunity (MO) through the NASA Announcement of Opportunity NNH12ZDA006O, Second Stand Alone Missions of Opportunity Notice (SALMON-2). A draft SMEX AO and draft SALMON-2 amendment are expected to be ready for release for comment in Spring 2014.

The PI-managed mission cost cap for an Astrophysics SMEX mission is expected to be no greater than $125M in Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 dollars, not including the cost of any contributions or of the NASA provided launch services, either an Expendable Launch Vehicle (ELV) or transportation to the International Space Station (ISS). Standard launch services to the ISS or on an ELV will be provided for SMEX missions at no charge against the mission cost cap. The standard ELV launch services offered will be similar to the "ELV Launch Service Class Option B" described in the Explorer Program Library's launch services document (see http://explorers.larc.nasa.gov/EX). There will be a charge against the mission cost cap for mission unique and special launch services beyond the standard launch services offered. The Explorer Program Library's launch services document will be updated for the 2014 Astrophysics SMEX AO.

The PI-managed mission cost cap for an Astrophysics Explorer MO is expected to be no greater than $65M or $35M in Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 dollars. NASA expects to solicit MO science investigations that are defined in the SALMON-2 AO as Partner MOs, New Missions using Existing Spacecraft MOs, or Small Complete Mission MOs, including investigations requiring flight on the International Space Station. Suborbital-class MOs have a $35M PI-managed mission cost cap; this includes missions on ultra-long duration balloons, suborbital reusable launch vehicles (RLVs), and CubeSats. Other (not suborbital-class) MOs will have a $65M PI-managed mission cost cap.

The currently approved Astrophysics Explorer Program planning budget is sufficient to select and execute one SMEX mission and one MO.

The current planning is for the selection process to be done in two stages. In Step 1, it is anticipated that two or three SMEX missions and one to three MO missions may be selected for one-year Phase A concept studies. Each SMEX concept study would be funded up to $1M in real year dollars, and each MO concept study would be funded up to $250K in real year dollars. For Step 2, NASA will conduct a detailed review of the Phase A concept study reports. As a result of this second evaluation, NASA expects to select one SMEX mission and one MO mission to proceed into Phase B and subsequent mission phases. NASA desires to launch the SMEX mission by the end of 2020.

Proposals in response to this AO will be due 90 days after its formal release. Participation will be open to all categories of U.S. and non-U.S. organizations, including educational institutions, industry, not-for-profit organizations, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, NASA Centers, and other Government agencies.

The schedule for the solicitation is intended to be:

The Astrophysics Explorer Program SMEX AO and SALMON-2 amendment may contain provisions that differ substantially from this preliminary notice, in which case the provisions in the AO and SALMON-2 amendment will take precedence. The Astrophysics Explorer AO will be based on the Standard PI-led Mission AO Template available at http://soma.larc.nasa.gov/standardao/sao_templates.html. Proposers should read the Draft Astrophysics SMEX AO and SALMON-2 amendment carefully when they are released.

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NASA Community Announcement on Astrophysics Explorer AO - NNH14ZDA002J

Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine Established

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Newswise The Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine, a collaborative initiative among Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Boston Childrens Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has been established to create precision medicine treatment pathways for patients with advanced cancers and to speed the development of personalized therapies.

The Joint Center brings together expertise and resources in state-of-the-art capabilities including DNA sequencing and other tumor molecular profiling technologies, pathology, radiology, surgery, computational interpretation, and new tumor model systems; and reinforces the joint commitment to pursue advances in cancer genetics to improve patient care. It will be headquartered at Dana-Farber.

This center will allow us to be optimally positioned to answer the big questions in cancer genetics, especially as they affect clinical decision-making, said Levi Garraway, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Dana-Farber and the new centers director. We seek to understand which genetic and other molecular alterations predict how tumors will respond to targeted drugs, why some patients become resistant to drugs, and what that means about the treatments that should be tried next.

Our mission is to accelerate the development of personalized therapies that achieve long-term disease control and, eventually, the cure of many patients with advanced cancer, Garraway said. The terms precision and personalized both refer to an emerging form of cancer care that identifies genetic changes within a patients tumor that can be used to predict how it will behave and which drugs will be most effective against it.

The center is creating a new capability to use these huge resources in sequencing and pathology and making sure the data gets to caregivers to help customize treatment, said Edward Benz, Jr., MD, president of Dana-Farber.

This exciting collaboration will allow the life-giving breakthrough of advanced genetic analysis of cancer to be translated into clinical care, said Betsy Nabel, MD, president of Brigham and Womens Hospital (BWH). Patients will benefit from having the latest genetic discoveries applied to an individual treatment plan that will make a difference in their care.

This is an extraordinary moment in biomedicine, said Eric Lander, PhD, president and director of the Broad Institute. By learning from genomic information obtained in the course of clinical care of patients, this remarkable new center will be poised to make critical discoveries, and to ensure that those discoveries get translated back to the clinic.

A key part of the center will be a program to obtain and characterize new biopsies of patients tumors during their treatment. Scientists will study the DNA, RNA, and protein in the biopsy samples to understand better how cancers respond or become resistant to drugs. In addition, some of the specimens will be used to generate cancer cell lines in the laboratory.

This center will allow us to learn which genetic changes are driving each patients cancers, how the changes occur, and when in the course of each patient's cancer care these genetic changes exert their effects, said Neal Lindeman, MD, director of the Center for Advanced Molecular Diagnostics laboratory in the BWH Department of Pathology. All of this information can be used to design treatments that are more effective from the beginning and can be used to anticipate the changes each cancer will make during treatment, in the hopes of staying one step ahead of the disease over time.

The new center represents an exciting step forward on the path toward developing more treatments tailored to the particular characteristics of a childs cancer, said Katherine A. Janeway, MD, MMSc, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Childrens Cancer and Blood Disorders Center (BCH). Pediatric cancers often differ substantially from adult cancers, and the new center advances our ability to understand the genetic profile of childhood malignancies and ultimately better serve our young patients.

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Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine Established

Is there more than one path to medical school?

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Theres a feeling among premeds that were on an assembly line for medical schoolthat college is just a series of classes to take in preparation for the basic science years of medical school, that clinical volunteering and research are the only valuable extracurriculars, and that if were not the best within this set of parameters, then we wont be able to get into medical school. But where does this feeling come from? Its misinformationa prescriptive standard of medical admissions taken from the Student Doctor Network (and other online repositories of applicants with 4.0 GPAs and a thousand community service hours) and passed around by word-of-mouth until it became the standard that we aspire to.

In all reality, medical school admissions officers are more understanding than we give them credit for. Are GPA, MCAT scores, and certain extracurriculars important? Absolutely. Clinical volunteering, for example, proves that we looked inside of medicine and liked what we saw. But arent we more than just medical school applications? Is there more than one path to medical school? What we as premeds sometimes forget is that the answer to that question is a loud and resounding Yes.

This forgetfulness fosters the kind of competitive attitude that makes people dislike premeds. It makes many of us feel like we need to be the best in every class because all an admissions committee will see is a letter grade on an application, and its easy to feel like thats all that matters. That feeling, that focus on grades, makes it very easy to forget where we are. We forget that were members of a community, a community that could lend a helping hand to someone who needs it, that could band together through the difficult path to medical school instead of dividing over a bell curve.

When we isolate ourselves from this community, we remove ourselves from a support network, and the path to medical school becomes a solitary march, forced and grueling, instead of the road trip it should be. Its a corny metaphor, but it works: The path to medical school should not consist of a series of classes taken because they are required, or of a group of extracurriculars that we cram in because they look good on an application. Premed groups on campus should not be a way of padding our rsums, but instead a place for us to band together, help each other, and figure out who we want to be as doctors. We should be willing to meander sometimes, to take a risk, to take a class thats just interesting, not to worry about which Global Core is an easy A, and to participate in extracurriculars that are just fun. We should be willing to hang out with friends on a Friday night. This is what should happenbut its not what is going on.

Recently, while speaking in Hamilton Hall, the dean of admissions of Dukes School of Medicine said that she was looking for students who were willing to fail, students who could get up after they stumbled. Admittedly, many of us already stumble and fall in our basic premed sciencesbut too many of us are afraid to get back up.

This doesnt mean that we should go and fail a class intentionally just so we can show how awesome we are when we get an A in it the next semester. Instead, this means that we need to be willing to take risks. If you want to be a music major, be a music major. If you want to take that internship with an advertising company downtown, do it! And if you want to do research in a lab, be a bio major, or do anything that we call traditional, the more power to you.

Its become somewhat of a clich to say that admissions processes are holisticI went on a lot of college tours, and not a single one told me, We only look at your GPA and SAT scores. However, holism is something that we as premeds too often forget about: We compartmentalize learning biology and taking Art Hum, but theyre not so different. All of these classes that were taking develops the same ability to analyze, to communicate, and to do all of the things that, hopefully, will make us good doctors someday. Not just competent doctors, not just knowledgeable, but doctors able to communicate effectively with patients and share a connection with them. And thats something every doctor should be able to do.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in art history.

To respond to this column, or to submit an op-ed, contact opinion@columbiaspectator.com.

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Is there more than one path to medical school?