Toothbrush-wielding, spacewalking astronauts repair space station

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A stubborn bolt on the International Space Station finally cooperated, thanks to a pair of spacewalking astronauts with improvised tools.

A pair of spacewalking astronauts cleaned, greased and finally coaxed a jammed bolt into position on Wednesday, restoring the International Space Station's power system.

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The spacewalk by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide was the second in a week to replace a key part of the station's power system.

The astronauts were able to remove the faulty 220-pound (100-kg) device, known as a main bus switching unit, during a spacewalk last Thursday, but were unable to bolt a replacement into position.

While engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston mulled over repair options, Williams and Hoshide spent the weekend fashioning tools to clean the bolt and its receptacle of metal shavings and other debris believed to be causing the problem.

The homemade tools included a wire brush formed from a spare cable and another fashioned out of a toothbrush.

Toting their makeshift brushes and bags of tools, Williams and Hoshide left the station's airlock shortly after 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) and headed to where they had tethered the new power distributor into position on the station's metal framework.

They used puffs of compressed nitrogen gas to blow away debris, brushed the bolt clean and wiped it with greased cloths. Hoshide also practiced with a spare bolt to get a feel for how much force would be needed to drive the real one into its receptacle.

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Toothbrush-wielding, spacewalking astronauts repair space station

The Toothbrush: It's In The Space Station's Toolbox. How About Yours?

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When we heard that astronauts aboard the International Space Station took a spare toothbrush along on a spacewalk today and used it to help clean debris from around some bolts they needed to secure in order to install a power unit, it got us thinking.

Just how versatile are old toothbrushs? We know we've used them to:

Clean bike gears.

Get grime out of our hubcaps.

Get at the crust around a car battery's terminals.

Polish jewelry.

Reach into aquarium filters.

There must be, though, many other ways they've been used. Please put on your "Hints from Heloise" hats and share in the comments thread.

By the way, NPR's Joe Palca tells our Newscast Desk that the two astronauts' spacewalk was a success. He says that:

"The space station gets its power from an array of solar panels. Four boxes, called main bus switching units, deliver that power to the electrical system on board the station. One of those units had stopped working properly. The station has a spare, so NASA decided to replace the malfunctioning unit.

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The Toothbrush: It's In The Space Station's Toolbox. How About Yours?

Spacewalkers leave station to attempt power system repair

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By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Toting homemade brushes and bags of tools, two astronauts left the International Space Station on Wednesday for a second spacewalk to try and install a new power system unit.

Lead spacewalker Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide floated outside the station for the second time in a week, hoping to resolve a problem that left a replacement power router tethered to its attachment plate.

The astronauts attempted to install the 220-pound (100-kg)device, known as a main bus switching unit, to the station's framework during a spacewalk last Thursday, but were stymied by a jammed bolt.

The unit is one of four needed to route power from eight solar array wings to transformers that distribute electricity to run the $100 billion orbital outpost.

Williams, who is making her sixth spacewalk, and Hoshide, on his second, left the station for another try shortly after 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT). Their gear included an assortment of brushes including one they fashioned out of a toothbrush.

NASA hopes that a thorough cleaning of the bolts and their housings will resolve the problem, though engineers came up with 15 pages of options and procedures.

If the new unit cannot be plugged into the station's power grid within four hours of the planned 6.5-hour spacewalk, Williams and Hoshide plan to bring it into the airlock with them for additional assessments inside the station, said NASA spokesman Josh Byerly from Mission Control in Houston.

Replacing the main bus switching unit was the primary goal of last week's spacewalk. The old unit was routing power but could not be commanded. Without the new unit installed, the station cannot get power from two of its eight solar panel wings.

An unrelated problem on Sunday took out power from a third wing.

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Spacewalkers leave station to attempt power system repair

NASA's 'Mighty Eagle' robotic prototype lander aces major exam

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2012) Completing this round of flight test objectives, the "Mighty Eagle," a NASA robotic prototype lander, flew to an altitude of 100 feet and descended gently to a controlled landing during a successful free flight Sept. 5 at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Guided by autonomous rendezvous and capture software, the vehicle located an on-the-ground target using its onboard camera and flew to it. Last week's flight followed a preprogrammed flight profile, but today's operated "closed loop," with the vehicle seeking and finding its target using the onboard software to guide the flight.

"The 'Mighty Eagle' had a great flight, fulfilling the objectives we had for this test -- finding and landing on its target using a closed-loop system," said Greg Chavers, test lead for the project. "Given this is one of our last tests in this series, it is a worthy finale of a lot of people's hard work -- including our young engineers. They did a remarkable job running today's flight."

New for this test, the "Mighty Eagle" project managers turned over the vehicle's keys to three young Marshall engineers, Adam Lacock, flight manager; Jake Parton, test conductor; and Logan Kennedy, systems engineer.

Nicknamed the "Mighty Eagle" after one of the characters in the popular "Angry Birds" game, the vehicle is a three-legged prototype that resembles an actual flight lander design. It is 4 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter and, when fueled, weighs 700 pounds. It is a "green" vehicle, fueled by 90 percent pure hydrogen peroxide, and is guided by an onboard computer that activates the thrusters to power the craft's movements.

"We've surpassed our expectations and flew the most challenging run to date," said Mike Hannan, a controls engineer in Marshall's Engineering Directorate. "It was an overcast, extremely humid day, and we were concerned steam might block the vehicle's camera. We didn't see that, and the lander sought and found its target successfully."

"It was an invaluable experience managing today's test," added Lacock. "This is the kind of experience young engineers, like myself, need to learn more about flight mechanics, vehicle hardware and project management. It was a good day for our team."

NASA will use the "Mighty Eagle" to mature the technology needed to develop a new generation of small, smart, versatile robotic landers capable of achieving scientific and exploration goals on the surface of the moon, asteroids or other airless bodies.

The "Mighty Eagle" was developed by the Marshall Center and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., for NASA's Planetary Sciences Division, Headquarters Science Mission Directorate. Key partners in this project include the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation, which includes the Science Applications International Corporation, Dynetics Corp., and Teledyne Brown Engineering Inc., all of Huntsville.

For more information on NASA's robotic landers, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/lunarquest/robotic/index.html

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NASA's 'Mighty Eagle' robotic prototype lander aces major exam

NASA sees Tropical Storm Leslie was causing a problem for itself

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Public release date: 5-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Rob Gutro robert.j.gutro@nasa.gov 443-858-1779 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite shows that Tropical Storm Leslie has been causing problems for itself.

Tropical Storm Leslie has been on a slow track in the Atlantic, and because of that, the storm is kicking up cooler waters from below the ocean surface. Those cooler waters were seen in infrared imagery on Sept. 5 at 0611 UTC (2:11 a.m. EDT) taken by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. The cooler waters are responsible for Leslie's slow strengthening. Sea surface temperatures need to be at least as warm as 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26.6 Celsius) to maintain a tropical cyclone. When a tropical cyclone moves slowly, however, it churns up the waters below the surface, which are cooler. That cooler water saps the tropical cyclone's strength.

Infrared satellite data from NASA's AIRS instrument has often seen a "cold water wake" trailing behind a tropical cyclone. That's the cold water drawn up to the ocean's surface as the tropical cyclone passes by. If there's another tropical cyclone behind the one that stirs up the deeper, cooler, ocean water, the second storm tends to weaken in the cold water wake.

Other than cool sea surface temperatures, Leslie has been battling wind shear, which has kept the storm below hurricane strength so far. That's changing, though, as the vertical shear has been gradually decreasing today, Sept. 5. As a result of the weaker wind shear, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center noticed a "banding eye feature" in visible satellite imagery. The AIRS data of Tropical Storm Leslie confirmed the visible imagery. AIRS infrared data showed the strongest convection (rising air that forms thunderstorms) and coldest cloud top temperatures were in a large area surrounding the center of circulation and in a band of thunderstorms to the east of the center.

On Sept. 5 at 11 a.m. EDT, Leslie was close to hurricane strength with maximum sustained winds near 70 mph (110 kmh). Leslie is expected to reach hurricane status later in the day as the wind shear eases. Leslie's center was about 470 miles (760 km) south-southeast of Bermuda, near latitude 25.7 north and longitude 62.8 west. Leslie is moving toward the north near 2 mph (4 kmh). Leslie is expected to continue crawling and wobbling to the north and north-northwest over the next couple of days because it is being blocked by a ridge (elongated area) of high pressure to the north and east of the storm. A strong trough (elongated area) of low pressure is expected to move out of southern Canada toward the southeastern U.S. and is expected to push Leslie northward in a couple of days.

The National Hurricane Center noted that Leslie will continue bring rough surf to Bermuda and the U.S. east coast from central Florida northward, the Northern Leeward islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands over the next couple of days.

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NASA sees Tropical Storm Leslie was causing a problem for itself

NASA's "Mighty Eagle" takes flight

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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. While Curiosity is busy exploring the surface of Mars, NASA's "Mighty Eagle" rover is blazing the way for future missions.

Holding their breath with anticipation, engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center watched their brain child skyrocket hundreds of feet into the air. Completing this round of flight test objectives, the "Mighty Eagle," a NASA robotic prototype lander, flew to an altitude of 100 feet and descended gently to a controlled landing during a successful free flight Wednesday morning. Guided by state-of-the-art autonomous rendezvous and capture software, the vehicle located an on-the-ground target using its onboard camera and flew to it. Previous tests have followed a preprogrammed flight profile. But today the rover operated "closed loop," meaning the vehicle sought out and found its target completely independently.

"The Mighty Eagle had a great flight, fulfilling the objectives we had for this test -- finding and landing on its target using a closed-loop system, says Greg Chavers, test lead for the project. "Given this is one of our last tests in this series, it is a worthy finale of a lot of peoples hard work - including our young engineers. They did a remarkable job running todays flight."

New for this test, the "Mighty Eagle" project managers turned over the vehicles keys to three young Marshall engineers, Adam Lacock, flight manager; Jake Parton, test conductor; and Logan Kennedy, systems engineer.

Nicknamed the "Mighty Eagle" after one of the characters in the popular "Angry Birds" game, the vehicle is a three-legged prototype that resembles an actual flight lander design. It is 4 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter and, when fueled, weighs 700 pounds. It is a green vehicle, fueled by 90 percent pure hydrogen peroxide, and is guided by an onboard computer that activates the thrusters to power the crafts movements.

"Weve surpassed our expectations and flew the most challenging run to date," saidMike Hannan, a controls engineer in Marshall's Engineering Directorate. "Itwas an overcast, extremely humid day, and we were concerned steam might block the vehicles camera. We didnt see that, and the lander sought and found its target successfully."

"It was an invaluable experience managing todays test, added Lacock. "This is the kind of experience young engineers, like myself, need to learn more about flight mechanics, vehicle hardware and project management. It was a good day for our team."

NASA will use the "Mighty Eagle" to mature the technology needed to develop a new generation of small, smart, versatile robotic landers capable of achieving scientific and exploration goals on the surface of the moon, asteroids or other airless bodies.

The "Mighty Eagle" was developed by the Marshall Center and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., for NASAs Planetary Sciences Division, Headquarters Science Mission Directorate.

Keep up with the vehicle's progress on Twitter by following @NASAMightyEagle

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NASA's "Mighty Eagle" takes flight

NASA | Magnificent Eruption in Full HD – Video

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05-09-2012 14:54 On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 pm EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled away from the sun at over 900 miles per second. This movie shows the ejection from a variety of viewpoints as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: : Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast: Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Facebook: Or find us on Twitter:

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NASA | Magnificent Eruption in Full HD - Video

NASA Serving Up Space Food and Shuttle Tiles to Museums

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NASA is now offering museums a choice of freeze-dried and heat-resistant artifacts for their space shuttle-themed displays.

The space agency on Tuesday (Sept. 4) expanded its offer of surplus space food and space shuttle heat shield tiles, which had earlier been open only to educational organizations. Now, museums located across the nation can request the same pieces of space history that U.S. schools and universities have received since the end of the space agency's shuttle program in 2011.

For 30 years, NASA stocked its shuttle pantry with shrimp cocktail and spaghetti with meat sauce, among a variety of other dishes. Dessert selections on the shuttle included freeze-dried strawberries and off-the-shelf sweets such as candy-coated chocolates (otherwise known as M&Ms).

To drink, crew members could choose from coffee or tea, as well as powdered juices (Tang, in its many flavors).

The astronaut food was precooked or processed so as not to need refrigeration and was ready to eat. Meals could be prepared simply by adding water or by heating. [Space Food Photos: What Astronauts Eat]

That said, the food being offered is for demonstration and display use only. "Not for consumption," NASA warned on its website.

The other artifacts NASA is offering, lightweight thermal tiles, protected the shuttle orbiters from the extreme heat encountered during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

More than 20,000 tiles were installed on each shuttle and each tile was designed to survive 100 trips to space and back. Varying in thickness from 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) to 5 inches (12.7 cm), the tiles shielded the orbiter against temperatures as high as 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Both the space food and the tiles are available to eligible institutions on a first-come, first-served basis. Museums and schools must have the proper credentials from their state or federal agencies to qualify.

The tiles are available in three types: black coated, white coated and uncoated. Institutions may request up to three tiles, one of each type, while supplies last. The tiles are free but the schools and museums are responsible for the shipping and handling fees, $23.40 per tile.

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NASA Serving Up Space Food and Shuttle Tiles to Museums

NASA to explore link between sea saltiness, climate

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2012) A NASA-sponsored expedition is set to sail to the North Atlantic's saltiest spot to get a detailed, 3-D picture of how salt content fluctuates in the ocean's upper layers and how these variations are related to shifts in rainfall patterns around the planet.

The research voyage is part of a multi-year mission, dubbed the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), which will deploy multiple instruments in different regions of the ocean. The new data also will help calibrate the salinity measurements NASA's Aquarius instrument has been collecting from space since August 2011. Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

SPURS scientists aboard the research vessel Knorr leave Sept. 6 from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., and head toward a spot known as the Atlantic surface salinity maximum, located halfway between the Bahamas and the western coast of North Africa. The expedition also is supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

The researchers will spend about three weeks on site deploying instruments and taking salinity, temperature and other measurements, before sailing to the Azores to complete the voyage on Oct. 9.

They will return with new data to aid in understanding one of the most worrisome effects of climate change -- the acceleration of Earth's water cycle. As global temperatures go up, evaporation increases, altering the frequency, strength and distribution of rainfall around the planet, with far-reaching implications for life on Earth.

"What if the drought in the U.S. Midwest became permanent? To understand whether that could happen we must understand the water cycle and how it will change as the climate continues to warm," said Raymond Schmitt, a physical oceanographer at Woods Hole and principal investigator for SPURS. "Getting that right is going to involve understanding the ocean, because the ocean is the source of most of the water."

Oceanographers believe the ocean retains a better record of changes in precipitation than land, and translates these changes into variations in the salt concentration of its surface waters. Scientists studying the salinity records of the past 50 years say they already see the footprint of an increase in the speed of the water cycle. The places in the ocean where evaporation has increased and rain has become scarcer have turned saltier over time, while the spots that now receive more rain have become fresher. This acceleration ultimately may exacerbate droughts and floods around the planet. Some climate models, however, predict less dramatic changes in the global water cycle.

"With SPURS we hope to find out why these climate models do not track our observations of changing salinities," said Eric Lindstrom, physical oceanography program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We will investigate to what extent the observed salinity trends are a signature of a change in evaporation and precipitation over the ocean versus the ocean's own processes, such as the mixing of salty surface waters with deeper and fresher waters or the sideways transport of salt."

To learn more about what drives salinity, the SPURS researchers will deploy an array of instruments and platforms, including autonomous gliders, sensor-laden buoys and unmanned underwater vehicles. Some will be collected before the research vessel heads to the Azores, but others will remain in place for a year or more, providing scientists with data on seasonal variations of salinity.

Some of the devices used during SPURS to explore the Atlantic's saltiest spot will focus on the outer edges of the study area, traveling for hundreds of miles and studying the broadest salinity features. Other instruments will explore smaller areas nested inside the research site, focusing on smaller fluxes of salt in the waters. The suite of ocean instruments will complement data from NASA's salinity-sensing instrument aboard the Aquarius/SAC-D (Satelite de Aplicaciones Cientificas-D) observatory, and be integrated into real-time computer models that will help guide researchers to the most interesting phenomena in the cruise area.

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Where's NASA Going Now?

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One asteroid down, one to go.

After spending a year gazing at Vesta, NASA's Dawn spacecraft was set to cruise toward the most massive space rock in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter -- a voyage that will take nearly three years.

Firing its ion propulsion thrusters, Dawn had been slowly spiraling away from Vesta for more than a month until it was to pop free from its gravitational grip. Since its antenna was pointed away from Earth during this last maneuver, engineers would not know until Wednesday how it went.

The departure was considered ho-hum compared with other recent missions -- think Curiosity's white-knuckle "seven minutes of terror" dive into Mars' atmosphere.

"It's not a sudden event. There's no whiplash-inducing maneuver. There's no tension, no anxiety," said chief engineer Marc Rayman of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $466 million mission. "It's all very gentle and very graceful."

Launched in 2007, the Dawn mission is on track to become the first spacecraft to rendezvous with two celestial bodies in a bid to learn about the solar system's evolution.

- Chief scientist Christopher Russell

Dawn slipped into orbit last year around Vesta -- about the size of Arizona -- and beamed back stunning close-ups of the lumpy surface. Its next destination is the Texas-size Ceres, also known as a dwarf planet.

Vesta and Ceres are the largest bodies in the asteroid belt littered with chunks of rocks that never quite bloomed into full-fledged planets. As cosmic time capsules, they're ideal for scientists trying to piece together how Earth and the other planets formed and evolved.

During its yearlong stay at Vesta, Dawn used its cameras, infrared spectrometer, and gamma ray and neutron detector to explore the asteroid from varying altitudes, getting as close as 130 miles above the surface.

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Where's NASA Going Now?

NASA’s Key to Efficient Mars Landings: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle | The Crux

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Amy Shira Teitel is a freelance space writer whose work appears regularly on Discovery News Space and Motherboard among many others. She blogs, mainly about the history of spaceflight, at Vintage Space, and tweets at @astVintageSpace.

Last week, NASA announced its next planetary mission. In 2016 the agency is going back to the surface of Mars with a spacecraft called InSight. The missions selection irked some who were hoping to see approval for one of the other, more ambitious missions up for funding:either a hopping probe sent to a comet or a sailing probe sent to the methane seas of Saturns moon Titan. Others were irked by NASAs ambiguity over the missions cost during the press announcement.

An artists rendition of InSight deploying its seismometer and heat-flow experiments on Mars.

InSight is part of NASAs Discovery program, a series of low-cost missions each designed to answer one specific question. For InSight, that question is why Mars evolved into such a different terrestrial planet than the Earth, a mystery it will investigate by probing a few meters into the Martian surface. The agency says InSights selection was based on its low costcurrently capped at $425 million excluding launch costsand relatively low risk. It has, in short, fewer known unknowns than the other proposals.

But while InSight costs less than half a billion itself, the total value of the mission by the time it launches will be closer to $2 billion. How can NASA get that much zoom for so few bucks? By harnessing technologies developed for and proven on previous missions. The research, development, and testing that has gone into every previous lander take a lot of guesswork out of this mission, helping it fly for (relatively) cheap.

Aside from the Moon, Mars is the only body in the solar system that NASA has landed on more than once. With every mission, the agency learns a little more, and by recycling the technology and methods that work, its able to limit expensive test programs. This has played no small part in NASAs success on the Red Planet thus far. When it comes to the vital task of getting landers safely to the surface, NASA has been reusing the same method for decades. It has its roots way back in the Apollo days.

Amosaic of Mars Chryse Planitia created from images taken by Viking 1.

NASA first demonstrated how to make effective Mars landings with the Viking missions, a pair of twin landers that reached the surface in 1976. Each was sent to Mars with an elaborate, three-stage system for slowing the craft down for a gentle landing. The first stage was an aeroshell, a case designed to create enough drag to slow the landers descent without building up too much heat from atmospheric friction that it melted the instruments inside. For the second braking mechanism, NASA took advantage of the fact that Mars, unlike the Moon, has an atmospherethey used a parachute. And the final descent was made with the help of retrorockets, which fire opposite a landers direction of travel. They slowed the landers to a gentle touchdown, at which point a sensor in the leg shut the rockets down.

This approach seemed sound, but it required a lot of real-world testing to make sure it would work. One particular challenge was that Mars thin atmosphere meant that the lander would still be falling faster than the speed of sound when the chute needs to deploy. To test parachutes in a hypersonic, low-atmosphere environment, engineers put plentiful Apollo-era funding to good use. They ran a series of tests that sent a payload into Earths thin upper atmosphere with a balloon, accelerated it past the speed of sound, then deployed the parachute. It was an expensive test NASA hasnt repeated since 1968, but it worked and did offer a good stand in for the Martian environment.

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NASA’s Key to Efficient Mars Landings: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle | The Crux

NASA Selects Science Teams for Astrobiology Institute

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NASA has awarded five-year grants totaling almost $40 million to five research teams to study the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.

The newly selected teams are from the University of Washington; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University of Southern California. Average funding to the teams is almost $8 million each. The interdisciplinary teams will become members of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI), headquartered at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

"These research teams join the NASA Astrobiology Institute at an exciting time for NASA's exploration programs," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "With the Curiosity rover preparing to investigate the potential habitability of Mars and the Kepler mission discovering planets outside our solar system, these research teams will help provide the critical interdisciplinary expertise needed to interpret data from these missions and plan future astrobiology-focused missions."

The University of Washington's "Virtual Planetary Laboratory," led by Victoria Meadows, will integrate computer modeling with laboratory and field-work across a range of disciplines to extend knowledge of planetary habitability and astronomical biosignatures in support of NASA missions to study extrasolar planets.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team, led by Roger Summons, will focus on how signs of life are preserved in ancient rocks on Earth, with a focus on the origin and evolution of complex life, and how this knowledge can be applied to studies of Mars using the Curiosity rover.

The University of Wisconsin team, led by Clark Johnson, will study how to detect life in modern and ancient environments on Earth and other planetary bodies.

The University of Illinois team, led by Nigel Goldenfeld, seeks to define a "universal biology," or fundamental principles underlying the origin and evolution of life anywhere, through an interdisciplinary study of how life began and evolved on Earth.

The University of Southern California team, led by Jan Amend, will study life in the subsurface, a potentially habitable environment on other worlds. They will use field, laboratory, and modeling approaches to detect and characterize Earth's subsurface microbial life.

"The intellectual scope of astrobiology is breathtaking, from understanding how our planet went from lifeless to living, to understanding how life has adapted to Earth's harshest environments, to exploring other worlds with the most advanced technologies to search for signs of life," NAI Director Carl Pilcher said. "The new teams cover that breadth of astrobiology, and by coming together in the NAI, they will make the connections between disciplines and organizations that stimulate fundamental scientific advances."

These five new teams join 10 other teams led by the University of Hawaii; Arizona State University, Tempe; The Carnegie Institution of Washington; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.; Pennsylvania State University; Georgia Institute of Technology; and teams at Ames; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and two teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

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Penn Medicine's Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Named President of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

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PHILADELPHIA Stanley Goldfarb, MD, professor of Medicine and associate dean for Curriculum at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named the 61st president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Founded in 1787, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia is the oldest private medical society in the United States. Throughout its 225 year history, the College has provided a place for both medical professionals and the general public to learn about medicine as both a science and as an art. During his two-year term as president, Dr. Goldfarb will serve as the volunteer Chairman of the Board of Trustees and oversee issues of governance for the society.

At the Perelman School of Medicine, he supervises all aspects of the medical student curriculum, chairs the curriculum committee, supervises the medical student scholarly pursuit program in clinical investigation, and serves on the Student Standards Committee and chairs the School of Medicine Teaching Awards Committee. As a professor of Medicine in the Renal-Electrolyte and Hypertension Division at Penn Medicine, his research has primarily focused on the management of fluid and electrolyte, metabolism and diabetic nephropathy.

Goldfarb has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Laureate Award from the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American College of Physicians and the Christian and Mary Lindback award for distinguished teaching from Penn. He is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Rochester School of Medicine.

For more information, please see the College of Physicians of Philadelphia web site.

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Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.

The Perelman School of Medicine is currently ranked #2 in U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $479.3 million awarded in the 2011 fiscal year.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; and Pennsylvania Hospital the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Penn Medicine also includes additional patient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region.

Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2011, Penn Medicine provided $854 million to benefit our community.

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Penn Medicine's Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Named President of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

New Egg Donation Program, "Ovatures," Launched By Reproductive Medicine Associates Of New Jersey

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BASKING RIDGE, N.J., Sept. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey today announced the launch of its new egg donation program, Ovatures, to assist women who require donated oocytes (eggs) to become pregnant and have a family.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120402/NY80340LOGO)

"At RMANJ, we understand that for some women the path to pregnancy and a positive fertility experience sometimes requires a little help. For many, the option of egg donation can help make the dreams of family come true," said Thomas J. Kim, MD, FACOG, medical director of Ovatures. "With donor egg success rates well above the national average, RMANJ's Ovatures Egg Donation Program anonymously provides potential donors the opportunity to help another woman. We invite women who are considering becoming egg donors to learn more about the process, and to find out if giving this priceless gift is right for them."

Women ages 21 to 31 may qualify to become anonymous egg donors following a comprehensive health assessment. Donors are compensated for their time and effort to complete a full cycle. Application materials, plus additional background information, are available at http://www.ovatures-eggdonation.com.

"Ovatures is unique because it is built on RMANJ's track record of successful live births, clinical excellence and innovation in fertility medicine, such as our pioneering single-embryo transfer techniques that reduce financial and health risks of multiple births," said Shefali Shastri, MD, FACOG, RMANJ. "For many of our donors, the gift of egg donation aligns well with their support for organizations that focus on women's issues. New donors will find comfort in RMANJ's commitment to providing world-class, patient-centered care."

Live birth rates for egg donor cycles at RMANJ were 68.8 percent in 2010 (fresh all ages), compared to the national average of 55.6 percent, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. Nationwide, there were more than 15,000 egg donor cycles in 2010.

M.S.'s StoryM.S. went to her regular annual gynecologist appointment, and her doctor just mentioned it that there are a lot of people in need, and that she was young and healthy. She said that RMANJ accepted egg donors, and that they had several locations. It seemed to M.S. that this was a valuable thing to do, a gift she could give someone.

So I looked them up, and saw that the staff was world-classand I wouldn't even have to take any bridges or tunnels to get there. I filled out a donor application, and spoke to them about it. There was absolutely never any pressure whatsoever, and their friendliness and expertise were outstanding. They answered every single question I had practically before I asked it, and their testing was very thorough, to make sure I was biologically and genetically suitable, checking my estrogen levels, everything. My whole actual donation time was two weeks. Most important to me, I was able to help a mom, well, get to be a mom! It is a simply amazing feeling."

- M.S., Donor

About Reproductive Medicine Associates of New JerseyReproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey have pioneered and successfully implemented a cutting-edge technology, known as Comprehensive Chromosome Screening (CCS) to more accurately detect healthy embryos that will lead to successful pregnancies and ultimately healthy babies. Other centers have attempted similar testing methods, but RMANJ is the only fertility center in the world to have developed a system of unprecedented accuracy, fully validated through years of rigorous clinical research. RMANJ's Comprehensive Chromosome Screening offers advanced embryo selection with extreme accuracy by detecting and avoiding use of embryos with chromosomal abnormalities prior to transfer and pregnancy.

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New Egg Donation Program, "Ovatures," Launched By Reproductive Medicine Associates Of New Jersey

Department of Agriculture Assesses HMS Lab Protocols

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A facility responsible for the Harvard Medical Schools laboratory animals has been cited by the United States Department of Agriculture for failing to review exemptions that allowed it to house primates alone.

The new report reveals the findings of a July 31 inspection, which cited the Harvard School for Comparative Medicine for housing the rhesus macaques alone. The Animal Welfare Act, overseen by the USDAs Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service states that primates, as social creatures, should not be housed alone in order to prevent potential harm that could result from the stress of living alone.

The Animal Welfare Act regulations state that dealers, exhibitors ,and research facilities using primates must develop an environment enhancement plan that addresses the social needs of nonhuman primates of species known to exist in social groups in nature.

David Sacks, a spokesperson for the USDA, said that the Harvard School for Comparative Medicine was granted exemptions allowing them to house the rhesus macaques alone.

Paula S. Gladue, a veterinary medical officer inspector, cited the center for failing to review these exemptions every 30 days.

The Harvard Medical School said in a prepared statement that the Center for Comparative Medicine has revised the system of documentation for social housing.

This citation follows a string of citations for facilities affiliated with the Harvard Medical School over the past two years. The New England Primate Research Center, in Southborough, Mass. has seen four primates deaths in less than two years.

Most recently, a cotton-top tamarin monkey died of thirst in February as a result of not having a water bottle in its cage. Other incidents at the NEPRC include a primate that died after being overdosed with anesthetics in July 2011. The animal could not be saved after it experienced kidney failure and was later euthanized. In Oct. 2011 a marmoset died after escaping from its cage, being caught, and undergoing an imaging procedure. In June 2010 a primate was found dead after allegedly going through a mechanical cage washer.

Staff writer Nathalie R. Miraval can be reached at nmiraval@college.harvard.edu.

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Department of Agriculture Assesses HMS Lab Protocols

UMASS Medical School faculty annotate human genome for ENCODE project

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Public release date: 5-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Jim Fessenden james.fessenden@umassmed.edu 508-856-2000 University of Massachusetts Medical School

WORCESTER, MA The first comprehensive decoding and annotation of the human genome is being published today by the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, an international consortium of scientists from 32 institutions, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The groundbreaking ENCODE discovery appears in a set of 30 papers in Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology.

Using data generated from 1,649 experiments with prominent contributions from the labs of UMMS professors Job Dekker and Zhiping Weng the group has assigned biochemical functions for an astounding 80 percent of the human genome. These findings promise to fundamentally change our understanding of how the tens of thousands of genes and hundreds of thousands of gene regulatory elements, or switches, contained in the human genome, interact in an overlapping regulatory network to determine human biology and disease.

As little as a decade ago, the human genome was viewed by scientists as a collection of independent genes that contained the instructions for making the proteins that carried out the basic biological functions necessary for life. Driven by this premise, most researchers focused on understanding the relatively small portion of the genome that made up protein-coding genes while the non-coding portion of the genome often referred to as "junk DNA" received little attention. The sequencing of the human genome in 2003 and more recent efforts by the ENCODE consortium, which is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and others over the last decade, has begun to fundamentally change researchers' views on the importance of the non-coding portion of the genome.

Scientists now know that the protein-coding portions of the genome make up only one part of our genetic picture. Of equal importance are those areas of the genome that regulate genes. These elements, such as regulatory DNA elements and non-coding RNA, control when a gene is turned on and off and can also amplify or curtail expression of a gene. Even a small change in when a gene is turned on can have a huge biological impact, or in specific circumstances, contribute to disease.

Taken together, genes and their regulatory elements create a vast network of overlapping systems that carry out the basic biological processes necessary for life, a system that scientists are only now beginning to understand. Using a wide variety of experimental and computational approaches, members of the ENCODE consortium have generated comprehensive information about the identities, locations and characteristics of human genes and regulatory switches throughout the genome. This data represents an expansive resource that biomedical researchers can use to begin unraveling how this system works and how it contributes to disease.

"This work provides a critical map of tens of thousands of genes and hundreds of thousands of regulatory switches that are scattered all over the 3 billion nucleotides of the genome," said Dr. Dekker, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology and co-director of the Program in Systems Biology at UMMS. "As a group, we've identified more than 4 million sites that through binding specific proteins affect biological function."

Three dimensional wiring of the genome

What this map doesn't tell scientists, though, is which switches or elements regulate which genes. That is where the work of Dekker, the lead author on one of the six ENCODE papers that appear in Nature, provides unique insights. Over the last decade, Dekker has pioneered the development of chromosome conformation capture technologies (3C) and combined it with next-generation sequencing technologies (5C) to create three-dimensional models of folded chromosomes. In turn, these models can be used to determine which parts of the genome, when folded, come in physical contact.

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UMASS Medical School faculty annotate human genome for ENCODE project

Liberty football notes: Sigmon update and more

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Some quick hitters from todays Liberty football press conference:

* As was noted Monday, Liberty coach Turner Gill is not with the team this week as he mourns the death of his mother with family in Texas. Gill will return to Lynchburg in time for Saturdays game against Norfolk State. Carl Torbush, Libertys assistant head coach, handled the Tuesday presser and will take care of any other media obligations this week.

Though Gill will be missed, his absence wont have a huge affect on the Flames game prep for the Spartans, Torbush said.

Itll go on business as usual when we get out on the field, Torbush said. Weve got a practice schedule. We know exactly where to be. During practice, its not that big a deal. I think its the camaraderie, the leadership that Turner brings dealing with the issues you deal with as a head football coach. But like I said, well be fine during practice.

* Liberty linebacker Nick Sigmon, who took a full-speed knee to the ear hole in the second quarter of Saturdays loss at Wake Forest, will be game-time decision for Saturdays game. Sigmon desperately wanted back into the game Saturday but the training staff said no. Concussion symptoms often arent immediately evident after taking a hit like that. Sometimes, its two or three days before the symptoms truly show. Im not saying thats the case with Sigmon; players have Monday off, so the coaches werent sure of his status as of noon Tuesday.

If Sigmon cant go, the Flames will go with a mix of Marques Jenkins and Scott Hyland at the Mike against Norfolk State. Jenkins came in and played extremely well in Sigmons place at Wake Forest, intercepting a pass and making three tackles. Hes preparing for Saturdays game as if hell be the starter. Even if he doesnt start, Jenkins will still get plenty of playing time as the Flames like to roll six linebackers in and out of the game.

If youre one or two in a two-deep, you have to prepare like that, Jenkins said. Its way better to be in there prepared in what youre doing, compared to thinking youre not going to play too much. Its just better to be prepared well for every situation.

Jenkins bounced around at various linebacker spots since transferring to Liberty after a year at Ole Miss, where he was a member of the scout team. Jenkins had 22 career tackles in three seasons coming into the season.

* Defensive tackle Francis Bah is also dinged, Torbush said, and defensive coordinator Robert Wimberly said Bah has a leg injury that will be worth watching as the week progresses. If I had to bet, Id say Bah plays. That injury will be more about Bahs pain tolerance than a head injury like Sigmons.

* Under the previous coaching staff, the Flames took Sunday off and began the week with a Monday evening practice. Under Gill, the Flames meet on Sunday to break down the film of the previous days game. Torbush said the goal is to kill the game, before taking a day off so the players are fresh and ready to go for the next weeks game prep on Tuesday.

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Liberty football notes: Sigmon update and more