Potential Dark Matter Discovery a Win for Space Station Science

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If nature is kind, the first detection of dark matter might be credited to the International Space Station soon.

Today (April 3), researchers announced the first science results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion cosmic-ray particle detector mounted on the exterior of the football-field-size International Space Station. The instrument has observed a striking pattern of antimatter particles called positrons that may turn out to be a product of collisions between dark matter particles.

Though the findings are still uncertain, and the signal could also arise from a more mundane source, the data are, nonetheless, groundbreaking, experts said.

"I think it is fair to say that this is the most important physics result thus far to come from the International Space Station,"theoretical physicist Robert Garisto, who was not involved in the AMS project, wrote today on Twitter. [Photos: See the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in Space]

Garisto is editor of the physics journal Physical Review Letters, which published the AMS results in a paper released today.

No matter what the AMS measurements ultimately herald be it dark matter or something else the findings would not have been possible without the platform of the International Space Station, a $100 billion orbiting laboratory staffed full-time by teams of three to six astronauts. AMS collects cosmic-ray particles, which are abundant in space, though largely blocked on Earth by our planet's atmosphere.

In its first 18 months of operations, AMS detected about 30 billion cosmic rays, including 400,000 positrons a haul that allowed significantly more precise statistics than experiments conducted on Earth.

"It's a very major step forward by at least an order of magnitude in sensitivity," Brown University physicist Richard Gaitskell told SPACE.com. Gaitskell is a founding investigator on the Large Underground Xenon experiment, which aims to detect dark-matter particles directly underground in South Dakota.

Dark matter is an invisible substance thought to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe. The elusive stuff is difficult to detect because it very rarely interacts with normal matter, except through its gravitational pull.

One of the leading explanations for dark matter is that it is made up of particles called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which may produce a detectable signature when they collide and annihilate each other. This happens because WIMPs are thought to be their own antimatter partner particles. When matter and antimatter meet, they destroy each other, so if two WIMPs were to make contact, they would obliterate one another.

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Potential Dark Matter Discovery a Win for Space Station Science

Sensor On Space Station May Have Seen Hints Of Elusive Dark Matter

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Astronauts work to install the alpha magnetic spectrometer on the International Space Station on May 26, 2011.

Astronauts work to install the alpha magnetic spectrometer on the International Space Station on May 26, 2011.

An international team of researchers announced in Switzerland on Wednesday that an experiment on the International Space Station may have seen hints of something called dark matter. The finding could be a milestone in the decades-long search for the universe's missing material.

Only a tiny sliver of stuff in the universe is visible to scientists; the rest is dark matter. Researchers don't know what it is, but they know it's there. Its gravity pulls on the things we can see.

"We live in a sea of dark matter. Our galaxy is embedded in a huge roughly spherical halo of dark matter particles," says Michael Salamon, who is with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Salamon, who was part of the team behind Wednesday's announcement, says that dark matter is beyond anything predicted by current scientific theories.

"What that means is, if we detect dark matter and learn something about its nature, we will have made a major impact to our understanding of physics and nature itself," he says.

That's a big part of why scientists from 16 countries spent $2 billion building a detector designed to pick up any hint of this mystery material. Their Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was carried into space two years ago and bolted onto the side of the International Space Station.

Researchers announced Wednesday the AMS has detected a large number of high-energy particles, which could be coming from collisions of dark matter. Theories suggest that when dark matter particles smash together, they annihilate one another. The enormous energy released creates visible particles, and it's these particles that might be showing up in the detector.

Sam Ting, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is responsible for the AMS, says this is only the beginning. As the AMS collects more particles, it should be able to tell whether they are coming from dark matter collisions.

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Sensor On Space Station May Have Seen Hints Of Elusive Dark Matter

Space station ‘s antimatter detector finds its first evidence of dark matter

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NASA file

A fish-eye view of the International Space Station from July 2011 shows the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) in the foreground. A Russian Progress cargo ship and a Soyuz crew capsule are docked on the left end of the station. The structure extending to the left of the AMS is a thermal radiator. Off to the right, the shuttle Atlantis is docked to the station's Tranquility module.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Scientists say a $2 billion antimatter-hunting experiment on the International Space Station has detected its first hints of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up almost a quarter of the universe.

The evidence from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, revealed Wednesday at Europe's CERN particle physics lab, is based on an excess in the cosmic production of anti-electrons, also known as positrons. The AMS research team can't yet rule out other explanations for the excess, but the fresh findings provide the best clues yet as to the nature of dark matter.

"Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin," Samuel Ting, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who leads the international AMS collaboration, said in a CERN news release.

The results have been published in Physical Review Letters and were discussed during a NASA news conference.

Dark matter is so named because it hasn't been detected directly through electromagnetic emissions, but primarily through its gravitational effect. Precise measurements of the movements of galaxies and galaxy clusters, as well as studies of the big bang's afterglow, indicate that it accounts for 22.7 percent of the universe's content. Another mysterious factor known as dark energy makes up 72.8 percent, leaving just 4.5 percent for ordinary matter.

Scientists have theorized that ultra-high-energy collisions involving dark matter particles could produce more positrons than expected. The best places to detect such collisions are in huge underground experiments such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider or in outer space, where cosmic rays can be measured more easily than they are on Earth.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the most sensitive cosmic-ray detector ever put into orbit. Researchers from 16 countries worked for well more than a decade to get AMS ready for the space station, but it literally took an act of Congress to get the extra money needed for the launch. The bus-sized device was brought up on the shuttle Endeavour and installed in 2011, during the shuttle fleet's second-last mission.

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Space station 's antimatter detector finds its first evidence of dark matter

NASA team investigates complex chemistry at Saturn’s moon Titan

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Apr. 3, 2013 A laboratory experiment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., simulating the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought. The results now point out another region on the moon that could brew up prebiotic materials.

The paper was published in Nature Communications this week.

"Scientists previously thought that as we got closer to the surface of Titan, the moon's atmospheric chemistry was basically inert and dull," said Murthy Gudipati, the paper's lead author at JPL. "Our experiment shows that's not true. The same kind of light that drives biological chemistry on Earth's surface could also drive chemistry on Titan, even though Titan receives far less light from the sun and is much colder. Titan is not a sleeping giant in the lower atmosphere, but at least half awake in its chemical activity."

Scientists have known since NASA's Voyager mission flew by the Saturn system in the early 1980s that Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has a thick, hazy atmosphere with hydrocarbons, including methane and ethane. These simple organic molecules can develop into smog-like, airborne molecules with carbon-nitrogen-hydrogen bonds, which astronomer Carl Sagan called "tholins."

"We've known that Titan's upper atmosphere is hospitable to the formation of complex organic molecules," said co-author Mark Allen, principal investigator of the JPL Titan team that is a part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, headquartered at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "Now we know that sunlight in the Titan lower atmosphere can kick-start more complex organic chemistry in liquids and solids rather than just in gases."

The team examined an ice form of dicyanoacetylene -- a molecule detected on Titan that is related to a compound that turned brown after being exposed to ambient light in Allen's lab 40 years ago.

In this latest experiment, dicyanoacetylene was exposed to laser light at wavelengths as long as 355 nanometers. Light of that wavelength can filter down to Titan's lower atmosphere at a modest intensity, somewhat like the amount of light that comes through protective glasses when Earthlings view a solar eclipse, Gudipati said. The result was the formation of a brownish haze between the two panes of glass containing the experiment, confirming that organic-ice photochemistry at conditions like Titan's lower atmosphere could produce tholins.

The complex organics could coat the "rocks" of water ice at Titan's surface and they could possibly seep through the crust, to a liquid water layer under Titan's surface. In previous laboratory experiments, tholins like these were exposed to liquid water over time and developed into biologically significant molecules, such as amino acids and the nucleotide bases that form RNA.

"These results suggest that the volume of Titan's atmosphere involved in the production of more complex organic chemicals is much larger than previously believed," said Edward Goolish, acting director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute. "This new information makes Titan an even more interesting environment for astrobiological study."

The team included Isabelle Couturier of the University of Provence, Marseille, France; Ronen Jacovi, a NASA postdoctoral fellow from Israel; and Antti Lignell, a Finnish Academy of Science postdoctoral fellow from Helsinki at JPL.

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Has NASA ‘s Curiosity Rover Found Clues to Life’s Building Blocks on Mars?

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NASA's Mars rover Curiosity just might be the latest in a long line of Mars-exploring robots to discover the building blocks for primitive life on the Red Planet.

The Curiosity rover may have gathered evidence for the presence of perchlorates in Rocknest a sand patch inside the rover's Gale Crater landing site on the Red Planet, scientists say. If so, it shores up the case that the material may well be globally distributed on Mars.

Not only can perchlorates, which are a class of salts, serve as an energy source for potential Martian microorganisms, they are also a sensitive marker of past climate and can lead to the formation of liquid brines under current conditions on the planet.

The possibility that perchlorates are widespread on Mars was detailed in a March 19 presentation at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

Curiosity's possible detection

The possible detection of perchlorates at Curiositys Gale crater site was spotlighted by Doug Archer, a scientist with the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is focused on the habitability of various Martian environments over time. [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]

Archer pointed to the rovers Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite that recently ran four samples from Rocknest. That area was selected as the source of the first samples analyzed because it is representative of both windblown material in the Gale Crater and the planet's globally distributed dust, he said.

"When we heated this up, we saw a large oxygen release at the same time we saw the release of these chlorinated hydrocarbons," Archer said, thus making a strong case for the presence of perchlorate salts in Rocknest's soil.

Phoenix finding

Perchlorates were first identified on Mars in the polar region by the Wet Chemistry Laboratory on NASAs Phoenix lander in 2008.

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Has NASA 's Curiosity Rover Found Clues to Life's Building Blocks on Mars?

NASA satellite witnesses Arctic ice sheet being torn to shreds

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NASA's Suomi NPP polar-orbiting weather satellite captured dramatic footage of an 'extensive fracturing event' in the Arctic ice sheet this winter, and the scale of this event is causing some concern.

The time-lapse video compresses down over two months worth of observations into just over a minute, to show the full magnitude of the event.

[ Related: Arctic sea ice hits yearly max, but still dwindling ]

Suomi NPP view on February 23, 2013The fracturing started in late January, as a warm-weather system over Alaska fed an ocean current known as the Beaufort Gyre. This strengthened current picked away at the southwest corner of the ice sheet until a massive crack opened up north of central Alaska (at about 3 secs into the video), and then another crack, apparently around 1,000 kms long, opens up in late February (at around 30 sec in the video), leading to the collapse of the rest of the ice sheet, all the way east to Bank Island.

It took just seven days for the fractures to progress across the entire area from west to east, Trudy Wohlleben, senior ice forecaster at the Canadian Ice Service, told the National Post.

According to Walt Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), it's not unusual for this area to experience fracturing events. However, what is unusual is the extent of the fracturing and the scale (both length and width) of the cracks being seen, and it's the age of the ice that's being blamed.

The region is covered almost completely by seasonal or first-year ice ice that has formed since last September, said Meier, according to the NASA Earth Observatory article. This ice is thinner and weaker than the older, multi-year ice, so it responds more readily to winds and is more easily broken up.

Last September saw the lowest extent of Arctic sea ice since records began in 1979. The sea ice rebounded by record levels over the winter (only because it dropped to such a record low, though), reaching its maximum extent on March 15th. However, even that was still the sixth-lowest sea ice extent on record, and this year's melt has started nearly two weeks before last year's.

[ More Geekquinox: Ham press turns out to be a $5-million iron meteorite ]

With this much of the Arctic ice sheet fracturing this soon into the seasonal melt, it can't bode well for what minimum extent we'll see in the fall. The ice didn't disappear, of course, but with more dark ocean water being exposed this early, that will lead to higher Arctic ocean temperatures and more melting. So, we could set an even lower record minimum this year.

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NASA satellite witnesses Arctic ice sheet being torn to shreds

NASA Unveiling 1st Results from Antimatter-Hunting Experiment Wednesday

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UPDATE for April 3:The first official announcements for today's news have been released. See the latest story here: Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Station Experiment.

NASA will reveal the first discoveries from a $2 billion antimatter-hunting experiment on the International Space Station on Wednesday (April 2), and you can watch the announcement live online.

Scientists with NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy will unveil the new findings during a 1:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT) press conference that will focus on the first science results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).

You can watch the AMS discovery announcement live on SPACE.com, courtesy of NASA TV.

"AMS is a state-of-the-art cosmic ray particle physics detector located on the exterior of the International Space Station," NASA officials said in a statement. Scientists are using the spectrometer to delve deeper into the nature of antimatter, dark matter, an invisible substance thought to make up a quarter of the entire universe, and other space mysteries. [See photos of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in space]

Scientists know that every matter particle has an antimatter partner particle with opposite charge; for instance, the antimatter counterpart of an electron is a positron. When matter meets its antimatter counterpart, the two annihilate each other. That annihilation has led to the puzzling prevalence of matter over antimatter in the universe.

NASA officials provided little detail on the exact discoveries to be unveiled on Wednesday, but AMS principal investigator Samuel Ting has dropped some tantalizing clues.

In February, Ting said the first results from the AMS experiment were just weeks away from being released, hinting that scientists would announce a substantial science finding. Ting is a physicist at MIT who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976.

"It will not be a minor paper," Ting said on Feb. 17 during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Ting did not go into detail about the nature of the results, but did say they represent a "small step" toward understanding the true nature of dark matter, even if it is not the final answer.

Several NASA scientists and administrators will take part in tomorrow's briefing. They include:

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NASA Unveiling 1st Results from Antimatter-Hunting Experiment Wednesday

NASA asks coders to make robot astronaut more helpful

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Space technology advancements such as NASA's Robonaut 2 (left) can help humanity launch more ambitious space exploration missions.

By Miriam KramerSpace.com

NASA is asking software coders on Earth to help a robotic astronaut helper on the International Space Station use its cold mechanical eyes to see better.

Robonaut 2 a humanoid robot being tested by astronauts on the space station is designed to perform mundane and complex tasks to help make life on the orbiting lab easier for human crew members. So far, the robot (which NASA affectionately calls R2 for short) has carried out a series of routine tasks on the space station, performed sign language and learned how to shake hands with human crewmates.

But NASA thinks the robot can do more and launched two new contests under the $10,000 Robonaut Challenge on Mondayto make it happen.

The new competitions, managed for NASA by the group TopCoder under the agency's NASA Tournament Lab, will give 470,000 software developers, digital creators and algorithmists the chance to help the robot butler "see" and interact with the station in a new way.

Each of the competitions will run for three weeks, and $10,000 in prize money will be awarded. As of this article's publication, 533 people have registered for the first competition, and 10 have submitted final algorithms. [Robonaut 2: NASA's Space Droid (Photos)]

NASA

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NASA Climate Scientist James Hansen Quits to Fight Global Warming

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Climate scientist James Hansen is retiring from NASA this week to devote himself to the fight against global warming.

Hansen's retirement concludes a 46-year career at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, but he plans to use his time to take up legal challenges to the federal and state governments over limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

In recent years, Hansen, 72, has become an activist for climate change, which didn't sit well with NASA headquarters in Washington. "As a government employee, you can't testify against the government," Hansen told The New York Times.

Supporting his "moral obligation" to step up to the fight now, Hansen adds in the Times article that burning a substantial fraction of Earth's fossil fuels guarantees "unstoppable changes" in the planet's climate, leaving an unfixable problem for future generations.

The distinguished NASA scientist has spent his career at the Goddard Institute on the campus of Columbia University. He has testified in Congress dozens of times, and has issued warnings and published papers that drew criticism from climate-change skeptics. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Hansen was arrested in February while protesting the proposed construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline that would carry heavy crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. "We have reached a fork in the road," he told the Washington Post at the time, adding that politicians must understand they can "go down this road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic but the science tells us we can't do that without creating a situation where our children and grandchildren will have no control over, which is the climate system."

With his departure from NASA, Hansen told the Times he plans to lobby European leaders to institute a tax on oil derived from tar sands, whose extraction leads to more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. He could not have done these things as a government employee, he said.

Hansen will probably work in a converted barn on his farm in Pennsylvania, but may possibly set up a small institute or take an academic appointment, according to the Times. He will continue to publish papers in academic journals, but will not run the powerful computers and other resources NASA provided for tracking and forecasting global warming and its effects.

Raised in a small town in Iowa, Hansen initially studied the planet Venus, but switched to studying the effect of human greenhouse gas emissions on Earth during the 1970s.

He was one of the first scientists to raise alarm about global warming and its effects on climate and the environment. After testifying at a Congressional committee in 1988that man-made global warming has begun, Hansen was quoted widely as saying, "It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."

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Hey Coders! NASA Wants You to Help Robot Astronaut See

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NASA is asking software coders on Earth to help a robotic astronaut helper on the International Space Station use its cold mechanical eyes to see better.

Robonaut 2 a humanoid robot being tested by astronauts on the space station is designed to perform mundane and complex tasks to help make life on the orbiting lab easier for human crewmembers. So far, the robot (which NASA affectionately calls R2 for short) has carried out a series of routine tasks on the space station, performed sign language and learned how to shake hands with human crewmates.

But NASA thinks the robot can do more and launched two new contests under the $10,000 Robonaut Challenge on Monday (April 1) to make it happen.

The new competitions, managed for NASA by the group TopCoder under the agency's NASA Tournament Lab, will give 470,000 software developers, digital creators and algorithmists the chance to help the robot butler "see" and interact with the station in a new way.

Each of the competitions will run for three weeks, and $10,000 in prize money will be awarded. As of this article's publication, 533 people have registered for the first competition, and 10 have submitted final algorithms. [Robonaut 2: NASA's Space Droid (Photos)]

"Do you think your code and your solutions can help advance humankind by advancing a humanoid kind?" a promotional video for the competition exclaims.

Contest participants in the two Robonaut competitions may eventually enable Robonaut 2 to better perform "repetitive, monotonous tasks" so that astronauts won't have to, according to a statement issued by TopCoder.

Robonaut vision showdown

The first contest involves writing an algorithm that will make Robonaut 2 locate and understand whether buttons and switches on a dashboard are turned off or on. NASA has provided images of the boards on the station, in a laboratory and in a simulator. Every setting has a different set of circumstances that the robot would need to work within.

"The successful algorithm application must work with each of several different camera systems and varying lighting conditions within each environment," TopCoder officials said.

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Hey Coders! NASA Wants You to Help Robot Astronaut See

NASA to Announce Major Astrophysics Discovery Today

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UPDATE for 11 a.m. ET:The first official announcements for today's news have been released. See the latest story here:Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Station Experiment.

NASA will unveil the first discoveries from a powerful $2 billion particle physics experiment on the International Space Station in what could be a major vindication for the science tool, which almost never made it into space.

The space agency will hold a press conference at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT) today, April 3, to reveal the first science results from the experiment, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. You can watch the AMS science results live on SPACE.com, via NASA TV.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is an advanced cosmic-ray detector designed to seek out signs of antimatter and elusive dark matter from its perch on the backbone-like main truss of the International Space Station. More than 200 scientists representing 16 countries and 56 institutions are part of the science team, which is led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist at MIT.

"AMS is a state-of-the-art cosmic ray particle physics detector located on the exterior of the International Space Station," NASA officials said in an announcement Tuesday (April 2). [See photos of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in space]

NASA and the AMS team have not revealed exactly what the first science results from AMS will be, but Ting has assured that it will be a significant announcement.

"It will not be a minor paper," Ting said on Feb. 17 during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, adding that it would represent a "small step" toward understanding the true nature of dark matter, even if it is not the final answer.

The spectrometer consists of a huge, 3-foot wide magnet that bends the paths of cosmic particles and steers them into special detectors designed to measure particles' charge, energy and other properties. The complicated space experiment was 16 years in the making, but despite its lofty mission, the 7-ton AMS almost never flew.

In fact, NASA canceled the space shuttle mission originally slated to launch AMS to the space station in 2005. At the time, the space agency cited safety concerns following the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident an event that led directly to the space shuttle fleet's retirement in 2011.

But NASA's decision to cancel the AMS mission did not sit well with the science community. Scientists launched a persistent campaign to resurrect the AMS launch, including an intense lobbying effort to sway lawmakers in Congress to their side.

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NASA Mega-Rocket Could Lead to Skylab 2 Deep Space Station

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NASA's first manned outpost in deep space may be a repurposed rocket part, just like the agency's first-ever astronaut abode in Earth orbit.

With a little tinkering, the upper-stage hydrogen propellant tank of NASA's huge Space Launch System rocket would make a nice and relatively cheap deep-space habitat, some researchers say. They call the proposed craft "Skylab II," an homage to the 1970s Skylab space station that was a modified third stage of a Saturn V moon rocket.

"This idea is not challenging technology," said Brand Griffin, an engineer with Gray Research, Inc., who works with the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"It's just trying to say, 'Is this the time to be able to look at existing assets, planned assets and incorporate those into what we have as a destination of getting humans beyond LEO [low-Earth orbit]?'" Griffin said Wednesday (March 27) during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group. [Gallery: Visions of Deep-Space Stations]

A roomy home in deep space

NASA is developing the Space Launch System (SLS) to launch astronauts toward distant destinations such as near-Earth asteroids and Mars. The rocket's first test flight is slated for 2017, and NASA wants it to start lofting crews by 2021.

The SLS will stand 384 feet tall (117 meters) in its biggest ("evolved") incarnation, which will be capable of blasting 130 metric tons of payload to orbit. Its upper-stage hydrogen tank is big, too, measuring 36.1 feet tall by 27.6 feet wide (11.15 m by 8.5 m).

The tank's dimensions yield an internal volume of 17,481 cubic feet (495 cubic m) roughly equivalent to a two-story house. That's much roomier than a potential deep-space habitat derived from modules of the International Space Station (ISS), which are just 14.8 feet (4.5 m) wide, Griffin said.

The tank-based Skylab II could accommodate a crew of four comfortably and carry enough gear and food to last for several years at a time without requiring a resupply, he added. Further, it would launch aboard the SLS in a single piece, whereas ISS-derived habitatswould need to link up multiple components in space.

Because of this, SkylabII would require relatively few launches to establish and maintain, Griffin said. That and the use of existing SLS-manufacturing infrastructure would translate into big cost savings a key selling point in today's tough fiscal climate.

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Pfizer inks deal with nanotechnology drugmaker

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) BIND Therapeutics said Wednesday that Pfizer Inc. has agreed to pay at least $160 million per drug as part of a collaboration to develop targeted medicines using nanotechnology which use particles measured in billionths of a meter.

BIND is developing an experimental group of targeted, programmable medicines called Accurins to treat cancer, heart disease and inflammatory disorders. The privately held companys technology comes from two laboratories that specialize in nanotechnology at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pfizer will make initial payments of roughly $50 million, plus $160 million in regulatory and milestone payments for each targeted drug, according to an announcement from BIND.

Both companies will work on early-stage research for the drugs, and Pfizer will have the exclusive option to develop and market any products produced from the collaboration.

BIND has one product in early-stage clinical testing called Bind-014, a targeted Accurin that contains the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. The product is designed to attach itself to a protein that is expressed in some cancer cells and new blood vessels that feed tumors.

In an unrelated announcement Wednesday, the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia said it will collaborate with Pfizer on therapies for children. Pfizer has research relationships with 21 academic hospitals throughout the U.S. with the aim of developing new products.

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Pfizer inks deal with nanotechnology drugmaker

Pfizer to Pay Bind Up to $210 Million in Nanotechnology Deal

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Pfizer Inc. (PFE), the worlds biggest drugmaker, will pay closely held Bind Therapeutics Inc. as much as $200 million per potential drug to develop medicines using its nanotechnology platform.

The companies will collaborate on preclinical work and New York-based Pfizer will have the option to pursue development of compounds it selects, Bind said in a statement today. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company may receive as much as $50 million in upfront and development payments and is eligible for $160 million more per compound tied to regulatory and sales goals.

The deal is the second this year for Bind, which uses nanotechnology to selectively reach disease sites in the body in treating cancer, inflammatory ailments and cardiovascular disorders without affecting healthy tissue. In January, Amgen Inc. said it would pay as much as $180.5 million for the right to develop cancer drugs using Binds technology.

The pharmaceutical industry is reaching an inflection point in terms of adopting this as a major strategic technology for the industry, Bind Chief Executive Officer Scott Minick said in an interview.

Binds technology comes from the laboratories of Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Omid Farokhzad, of Harvard Medical School. Its nanoparticles, which it calls Accurins, can travel through the body without being detected or destroyed by the immune system, Minick said. Carrying potent drugs, the particles home in on specific disease cells and avoid poisoning healthy ones.

In addition to partnerships with Pfizer and Thousand Oaks, California-based Amgen, Bind is developing a slate of potential drugs in-house. The companys leading therapy is BIND-014, which targets tumors with the cancer drug docetaxel. Bind said last week it will present results from a first-stage study of the treatment at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting on April 9.

Pfizer partnered with Bind because these delivery systems are a unique approach that potentially offer highly precise targeted therapeutics increasing the window for broader patient treatment options, said Lauren Starr, a spokeswoman for the drugmaker.

Pfizer declined less than 1 percent to $29.03 at the close in New York. The shares have increased 16 percent this year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Drew Armstrong in New York at darmstrong17@bloomberg.net; Meg Tirrell in New York at mtirrell@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net

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Pfizer to Pay Bind Up to $210 Million in Nanotechnology Deal