Russian cosmonauts complete long spacewalk – Spaceflight Now

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STORY WRITTEN FORCBS NEWS& USED WITH PERMISSION

Two Russian cosmonauts floated outside the International Space Station Thursday, tossed five small science and technology satellites overboard and spent the rest of the excursion servicing external experiments and carrying out routine but time-consuming inspections and maintenance.

The work took longer than expected and Russian flight controllers extended the spacewalk beyond the planned six-hour mark to give the cosmonauts time to finish as many of their tasks as possible before calling it a day.

Finally, at 6:10 p.m. EDT (GMT-4), Expedition 52 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy closed the Pirs airlock hatch to officially end a seven-hour 34-minute spacewalk, the first in more than a year by Russian cosmonauts.

Mission managers said the spacewalkers accomplished all of their planned tasks except for one the installation of one handrail and that no specific problem put them behind schedule. Rather, the spacewalkers took their time and rested periodically at the insistence of Russian flight controllers.

Everything is good, so were insisting on your rest, a controller called up from Moscow in translated remarks. You should rest, guys. A few moments later: Is it enough for you to have a rest? How is the atmosphere inside your suits?

Well, if we could have some music, maybe, and girls to make massages it would of course be even better, but everything is fine, Ryazanskiy replied.

Its the request of the medical team. They are worrying about your health.

When we are back on the ground well discuss it, Ryazanskiy said.

Of course, Sergey, we will be looking forward to your landing and this conversation, the flight controller replied. So I would (not) like to bother you any more, please have a good rest.

The spacewalk got underway at 10:36 a.m. It was the ninth EVA overall for Yurchikhin and the fourth for Ryazanskiy.

Yurchikhin wore an upgraded Orlan MKS spacesuit with an improved temperature control system, a larger feed water bag, a new carbon dioxide measuring unit, improved biomedical sensors and an upgraded LCD display panel. The MKS suits will enable cosmonauts to carry out longer spacewalks than are possible with the standard MK-series like the one Ryazanskiy used.

After exiting the Pirs module, the cosmonauts retrieved a materials science sample pallet just outside the hatch before manually launching the five satellites one at a time, careful to aim then down and behind the station to prevent any future close encounters.

The first to be launched, known at Tomsk, is an 11-pound satellite built with a 3D printer to help engineers how such materials respond to the space environment. It also carries amateur radio gear.

Another satellite will test systems needed by small nanosats, two others will test networking and small-scale navigation technology and a fifth will serve as a passive target to help calibrate ground tracking systems. It also will help researchers study the density of the upper atmosphere as they monitor its eventual fall back to Earth in several months

After releasing the satellites, Yurchikhin and Ryazanskiy took photos of another experiment panel and an antenna boom before installing handrails and struts to help future spacewalkers move about the Russian segment of the space station.

They also installed 10 temperature sensors on the Poisk module and serviced another external experiment before returning to Pirs and ending the spacewalk.

But it was slow going throughout the day.

That is just a really interesting day because whenever we need something it is in a completely different location than we think, and if were moving somewhere, were moving in the wrong direction, one spacewalker complained. Just jinxed.

They insisted they could install the final handrail, but flight controllers told them to head back to Pirs.

This was the 202nd spacewalk devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began in 1998, the seventh so far this year and the first of 2017 by Russian cosmonauts. Total station spacewalk time now stands at 1,258 hours and 15 minutes, or 52.4 days.

Yurchikhin has now logged 59 hours and 28 minutes of spacewalk time during nine EVAs, moving him up to fourth on the list of most experienced spacewalkers, just behind crewmate Peggy Whitson. She has 60 hours and 21 minutes of spacewalk time during 10 excursions.

Ryazanskiys mark stands at 27 hours and 39 minutes outside the station during his four excursions.

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New Thruster Design Increases Efficiency for Future Spaceflight – Futurism

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Hall Thrusters

Hall thrusters (HTs) are used in earth-orbiting satellites, and also show promise to propel robotic spacecraft long distances, such as from Earth to Mars. The propellant in a HT, usually xenon, is accelerated by an electric field which strips electrons from neutral xenon atoms, creating a plasma. Plasma ejected from the exhaust end of the thruster can deliver great speeds, typically around 70,000 mph.

Cylindrical shaped Hall thrusters (CHTs) lend themselves to miniaturization and have a smaller surface-to-volume ratio that prevents erosion of thethrusterchannel. Investigators at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China have developed a new inlet design for CHTs that significantly increases thrust. Simulations and experimental tests of the new design are reported this week in the journalPhysics of Plasmas.

CHTs are designed for low-power operations. However, low propellant flow density can cause inadequate ionization, a key step in the creation of the plasma and the generation of thrust. In general, increasing thegas densityin thedischargechannel while lowering its axial velocity, i.e., the speed perpendicular to the thrust direction, will improve the thrusters performance.

The most practical way to alter the neutral flow dynamics in the discharge channel is by changing the gas injection method or the geometric morphology of the discharge channel, said Liqiu Wei, one of the lead authors of the paper.

The investigators tested a simple design change. The propellant is injected into the cylindrical chamber of the thruster by a number of nozzles that usually point straight in, toward the center of the cylinder. When the angle of the inlet nozzles is changed slightly, the propellant is sent into a rapid circular motion, creating a vortex in the channel.

Wei and his coworkers simulated the motion of the plasma in the channel for both nozzle angles using modeling and analysis software (COMSOL) that uses a finite element approach to modeling molecular flow. The results showed that the gas density near the periphery of the channel is higher when the nozzles are tilted and the thruster is run in vortex mode. In this mode, gas density is significantly higher and more uniform, which also helps improve thruster performance.

The investigators verified their simulations predictions experimentally, and the vortex inlet mode successfully produced higher thrust values, especially when a low discharge voltage was used. In particular, the specific impulse of the thruster increased by 1.1 to 53.5 percent when the discharge voltage was in the range of 100 to 200 Volts.

The work we report here only verified the practicability of this gas inlet design. We still need to study the effect of nozzle angle, diameter, the ratio of depth to diameter and the length of the dischargechannel, Wei said. He went on to predict that the vortex design will be tested in flight-type HTs soon and may eventually be used in spaceflight.

This article was provided byAmerican Institute of Physics. Materials may have been edited for clarity and brevity.

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New Thruster Design Increases Efficiency for Future Spaceflight - Futurism

Station crew captures Dragon supply ship, gets early start on unpacking – Spaceflight Now

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SpaceXs Dragon cargo craft on final approach to the space station Monday. Credit: Sergey Ryazanskiy/Roscosmos

Two days after departing from a launch pad on Floridas Space Coast, a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday with more than 6,400 pounds of experiments and supplies after concluding an automated laser-guided approach.

Astronaut Jack Fischer aboard the space station used the labs Canadian-built robotic arm to snare the robotic cargo craft at 6:52 a.m. EDT (1052 GMT) Wednesday as they sailed about 250 miles (400 kilometers) over the Pacific Ocean north of New Zealand.

Around two hours later, ground controllers finished the installation of Dragon on the stations Harmony module, commanding 16 bolts to close and create a firm seal between the two vehicles.

The station crew opened hatches between the Harmony module and Dragons pressurized compartment later Wednesday, a day earlier than planned.

Flying under contract to NASA, the SpaceX supply ship ferried mostly research hardware, but also carried computer equipment, clothing, fresh food, ice cream and other treats for the crew.

Weve loaded Dragon with 6,400 pounds of cargo, and Im happy to say 75 percent of that total mass is headed toward our research community, and our continued expansion of the research envelope on-board the International Space Station, said Dan Hartman, NASAs deputy space station program manager, before the mission launched. So with the internal and external payloads going up, it sets a new bar for the amount of research that we were able to get on this flight.

The cargo mission marked SpaceXs 11th successful operational supply delivery in 12 tries.

NASA inked a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX in 2008 for 12 logistics flights to the station. This mission wraps up work under the original resupply contract, but NASA extended the agreement for eight additional cargo launches through 2019. SpaceX also has a separate, follow-on contract with NASA for at least flights of upgraded Dragon cargo capsules to the station from 2019 through 2024.

Orbital ATK is NASAs other cargo transportation provider, using Cygnus supply ships launched on Antares or Atlas 5 rockets. Sierra Nevada Corp. is developing its own cargo vehicle, called the Dream Chaser, which will return landings on a runway like the space shuttle when it begins flying as soon as 2020.

The gumdrop-shaped Dragon cargo freighter, powered by two extendable solar array panels, lifted off Monday on top of a Falcon 9 rocket from NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The stations six-person crew will unload the payloads inside, overseeing a multitude of biological experiments before the ships departure and return to Earth next month.

Twenty mice riding inside Dragon will be examined after their return to the ground to aid researchers studying how spaceflight affects vision and movement.

Were looking at two different biomedical issues, said Michael Delp, principal investigator for the rodent research experiment from Florida State University. The first is visual impairment that occurs in some of the astronauts. To date, it only occurs in male astronauts, so were looking at a couple of different aspects of how visual impairment may occur.

The mice will come back to Earth inside the Dragon capsule alive, and SpaceX will hand over their transporters to scientists upon return to port in Southern California.

Researchers will examine the blood vessels inside animals eyes and the blood-brain barrier that regulates fluid movement inside the skull.

The second thing that well be doing is really looking at the brain circulation, and how that affects blood pressure within the skull, Delp said.

Part of the rodent research team will look at how an extended stay in the space stations weightless environment affects movement.

In microgravity, you have a fairly severe physical inactivity, and that can affect a number of the organ systems, such as muscle and bone loss, Delp said.

One focus of the study will be on how much cartilage in joints degrade after spending time in microgravity. Mice have an accelerated metabolism and undergo changes faster than humans, so a month on the space station is roughly equivalent to a three-year expedition by an astronaut, according to Delp.

The space station cargo mission will also help biologists investigating Parkinsons disease, a chronic neurological disorder that affects a million people in the United States, and about five million worldwide.

Although there are medications that ammeliorate the symptoms, we dont have any therapies that reverse or slow down the progression of the disease, said Marco Baptista, director of research and grants at the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which funded the station-bound experiment.

Scientists are sending a protein that causes Parkinsons to the station to measure how it grows without the influence of gravity. The protein, named LRRK2, could be targeted with drugs and therapies in Parkinsons patients if doctors understand it better.

The next breakthrough we need is the solving of the crystal structure of LRRK2, Baptista said. This is important for two reasons. First, it will allow us a better understanding of the biology of LRRK2 and secondly may help industry optimizing LRRK2 kinase inhibitors or develop novel ways to target LRRK2.

Growing the protein in microgravity will lead to bigger crystals, more regular crystallization and crystals with higher intrinsic order, said Sebastian Mathea, the lead scientist on the LRRK2 experiment from the University of Oxford.

With those crystals, we hopefully will be able to collect data that allow us to solve the three-dimensional structure of LRRK2, which hopefully will push forward the understanding of the onset of Parkinsons, Mathea said.

Another science team awaits results from an experiment probing how microgravity affects the growth of new lung tissue, specifically bio-engineered material tailored to repair damaged organs or reduce the chance of organ rejection in transplant patients.

Scientists have trouble managing the expansion of bio-engineered lung tissue on Earth. The tissue has trouble moving through structures designed to help shape it, and stem cells used to produce the tissue are slow to replicate, according to Joan Nichols, professor of internal medicine and infectious diseases and associate director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Nichols said microgravity offers a more benign environment, aiding in cell dispersal to help form more uniform tissues.

Were getting two things out of this, she said. Were getting a better plan and a better strategy for how to manage production of tissues using microgravity environment, and were getting a model thats going to tell us what would happen in terms of lung repair on long-term spaceflight.

A supercomputer developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise will spend at least a year on the space station, helping engineers gauge the ruggedness of commercial computer components in the harsh conditions of space.

Most computers sent into space are physically hardened to withstand radiation, cosmic rays, and other rigors of spaceflight. Hewlett Packard said its spaceborne computer experiment was hardened with software, reducing the time, money and weight of the supercomputer.

The experimental computer passed at least 146 safety tests and certifications to win NASA approval for the trip to the space station. If it works, Hewlett Packard officials said it could help future space missions, including a human expedition to Mars, have the latest computer technology.

While astronauts get to work in experiments inside the stations lab facilities, the Canadian and Japanese robotic arms will remove a cosmic ray detector carried inside the Dragons external payload bay for mounting on a facility outside the stations Japanese Kibo module.

Derived from an instrument carried aloft on high-altitude balloons, the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass, or CREAM, payload will spend at least three years sampling particles sent speeding through the universe by cataclysmic supernova explosions, and perhaps other exotic phenomena like dark matter.

Scientists think the subatomic particles could hold the key to unlocking mysteries about the universe.

Four small satellites inside the Dragon capsule will be transferred inside the space station for deployment later this year.

The biggest of the bunch, named Kestrel Eye 2M, is a pathfinder for a potential constellation of Earth-imaging spacecraft for the U.S. military. About the size of a dorm room refrigerator, the Kestrel Eye 2M satellite was developed by the Armys Space and Missile Defense Command over the last five years.

While satellites the size of Kestrel Eye lack the fine imaging capability of large commercial and military spy satellites, they cost significantly less and could be spread around the planet in fleets of dozens or more.

Battlefield troops could connect with one of the satellites as it soars a few hundred miles overhead, ask it to take a picture of a nearby target, then receive the image, all within a few minutes.

The concept is to have warfighters to task and receie data directly from the satellite during the same overhead pass, said Wheeler Chip Hardy, the Armys Kestrel Eye program manager. The objective Kestrel Eye imagery data can be downlinked directly to provide rapid situational awareness to our Army brigade combat teams in theater without the need for continental United States relays.

From the space stations altitude around 250 miles (400 kilometers) up, Kestrel Eye 2Ms optical camera will be able to spot objects on Earths surface about the size of a car.

The Army has not approved development of further Kestrel Eye satellites. The demo craft set to launch Monday will be employed in military exercises with Pacific Command over the next few years, and Pentagon officials will evaluate its usefulness before deciding whether to press on with the program.

Three CubeSats were also ferried to the space station for release from a ground-commanded deployer in the coming months.

The ASTERIA mission, developed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, seeks to test miniature telescope components that could be used in future small satellites to observe stars and search for exoplanets. ASTERIA is about the size of a big shoebox and weighs around 26 pounds (12 kilograms).

Astronomers and engineers want to know if a CubeSat like ASTERIA can hold pointing to the precision necessary for stellar observations, and designers will also measure the performance of the focal plane inside an on-board telescope.

The Dellingr project spearheaded by NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland aims to prove out a new type of microsatellite design that is more reliable than conventional CubeSats.

Around the same size as ASTERIA, the Dellingr CubeSat, named for the mythological Norse god for the dawn, took around three years to design, build and test. Officials said the effort was not always easy, and managers had to define a balance between affordability and reliability.

Engineers tried using commercially-available components and software, but testing revealed many of the parts were inadequate for the level of reliability sought for Dellingr, which carries a sensor suite to study the suns influence on Earths atmosphere.

Its a new way of doing things, said Chuck Clagett, Dellingr project manager at Goddard. We were applying old ways to doing things to an emerging capability and it didnt work very well.

But officials said the extra testing paid off, and Dellingr is now ready to fly after helping reduce the risk of unforeseen problems on future missions NASA has approved work on a follow-up CubeSat incorporating Dellingrs design and lessons to make measurements of Earths ionosphere.

Another CubeSat named OSIRIS-3U from Penn State University launched inside Dragon will study space weather.

Working in coordination with the Arecibo Observatory, a giant radar antenna in Puerto Rico, OSIRIS-3U will fly into a region ionosphere heated to simulate the conditions caused by solar storms.

OSIRIS-3U will collect data on the electron density, temperature, and content in the region of space stimulated by radar emissions, according to a fact sheet released by NASA.

The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to depart the space station Sept. 17, bringing home more than a ton of research specimens and other gear for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles.

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Proton launcher takes off with dual-use Russian communications satellite – Spaceflight Now

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Updated after spacecraft separation.

A high-power Russian satellite designed to deliver broadband Internet connections and relay television and videoconferencing signals fired into orbit Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Destined to serve the Russian military and civilian customers, the first Blagovest communications satellite rode a Proton rocket into space at 2207 GMT (6:07 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, according to a statement released by ISS Reshetnev, the spacecrafts manufacturer.

Liftoff occurred at 4:07 a.m. local time Thursday at Baikonur, a sprawling spaceport leased by the Russian government from Kazakhstan.

The three-stage Proton booster deployed a Breeze M upper stage shortly after liftoff to conduct multiple engine firings aimed at guiding the Blagovest No. 11L spacecraft into a high-altitude geostationary transfer orbit. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, confirmed the Breeze M upper stage released the Blagovest satellite into an on-target orbit.

After separation from the Breeze M stage several hours into the mission, the satellites own engine will circularize its orbit over the equator at an altitude of nearly 22,300 miles (35,800 kilometers).

At that altitude, the Blagovest satellite will remain fixed over the equator at 45 degrees east longitude, staying in view of the same part of Earth and orbiting the planet at the same rate it rotates.

Designed for a 15-year mission, the Blagovest No. 11L satellite was built for the Russian military by ISS Reshetnev, a Russian aerospace contractor based in Zheleznogorsk, Russia. It is based on ISS Reshetnevs Express 2000 satellite bus.

Blagovest is the first satellite that has a payload fully designed and manufactured by ISS Reshetnev, ISS Reshetnev said in a statement. It is intended to provide high speed Internet access, communications services, television and radio broadcasting, telephony and videoconferencing.

The relay spacecraft will serve Russian military and civilian users with a suite of C-band and Ka-band transponders.

While ISS Reshetnev claimed the Blagovest communications payload was fully manufactured internally, information released by Thales Alenia Space indicates the French company supplied filters, power dividers and multiplexers for Blagovests telecom instrumentation.

Three more Blagovest communications satellites are planned for launch in the next couple of years.

Russias Proton rocket program, managed by the Russian company Khrunichev, has two more launches on the books next month. The quicker launch pace comes after a year-long standdown from June 2016 through June 2017 to resolve engine quality concerns.

Wednesdays launch was the 414th flight of a Russian Proton rocket since 1965, and the 100th launch of the Proton M configuration since 2001.

While the mission with the Blagovest No. 11L satellite was part of Russias federal space program, the two Proton flights next month will be commercially managed by International Launch Services, a Virginia-based company responsible for selling Proton launches on the global market.

The Amazonas 5 communications satellite, owned by Madrid-based Hispasat, is already at the Baikonur Cosmodrome being readied for liftoff as soon as Sept. 9 on a Proton/Breeze M.

The AsiaSat 9 telecom craft is scheduled to blast Sept. 28 on a Proton/Breeze M.

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Proton launcher takes off with dual-use Russian communications satellite - Spaceflight Now

Japanese H-2A rocket launch rescheduled for Saturday – Spaceflight Now

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A photo of the H-2A rocket on the launch pad during a launch attempt Aug. 12. Credit: MHI

A heavy-duty version of Japans H-2A rocket is now scheduled to lift off Saturday with a geostationary navigation satellite after a week-long delay to diagnose and resolve a leak in the rockets propulsion system, the Japanese space agency announced Wednesday.

Launch of the 174-foot-tall (53-meter) rocket, flying with in its most powerful configuration with four strap-on solid-fueled boosters, is scheduled during an unusually-long nine-hour window opening at 0500 GMT (1:00 a.m. EDT; 2 p.m. Japan Standard Time) Saturday, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

The H-2A rocket is expected to roll out of its assembly hanger to a launch mount at the Tanegashima Space Center just after midnight Saturday, local time, for final launch preps and fueling.

Ground crews transferred the rocket back to the assembly building last weekend after a launch attempt Aug. 12 was scrubbed in the final hours of the countdown. Japanese space officials told reporters in a press conference that the launch team detected a leak in the rockets helium pressurization system, which is used to pressurize the H-2As propellant tanks for flight.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the H-2As prime contractor and launch operator, fixed the problem. Officials set Saturday as the new target launch date after careful investigations and completion of repair actions of the rocket propulsion system, the space agency said in a statement.

The H-2A flight was originally slated to take off Aug. 11, but officials opted to forego a launch attempt that day due to a poor weather forecast.

Saturdays launch will be the 35th flight of an H-2A rocket since it debuted in August 2001, and the fourth H-2A launch this year.

The satellite enclosed inside the launchers 16.7-foot (5.1-meter) payload shroud is Michibiki 3, the third member in a planned quartet of navigation stations in Japans Quasi-Zenith Satellite System.

Japans navigation satellites supplement positioning signals broadcast by the U.S. militarys Global Positioning System, providing more accurate location estimates for civilian and security users in the Asia-Pacific. The regional navigation network will result in improved reception in urban areas and rugged terrain, where high-rise buildings and mountains can block signals from GPS satellites near the horizon.

The GPS satellites circle Earth in orbits 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) above Earth. Although there are at least 30 operational GPS spacecraft, only a small fraction of the fleet is visible from a single point on Earth at one time.

It takes four GPS satellites to calculate a precise position on Earth, but a Michibiki satellite broadcasting the same four L-band signals will give a receiver an estimate if there are not enough GPS satellites visible, or it can help produce a more accurate position calculation even with full GPS service.

The two Michibiki satellites launched to date fly in inclined orbits, tracing figure-eight patterns as they oscillate north and south of the equator, while their longitudinal, or east-west, position remains over the Asia-Pacific at an average altitude of around 22,300 miles (nearly 35,800 kilometers) above Earth.

Michibiki 3 will head into an orbit at the same altitude, but will eventually settle into a parking slot over the equator, where it will remain in a fixed geostationary position in the sky.

The fourth in the current series of Japanese navigation satellites will go up later this year on another H-2A rocket, taking up a post in an inclined high-altitude orbit like the first two.

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Station managers push back next Cygnus cargo flight to November – Spaceflight Now

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A photo of the Antares rockets twin RD-181 engines installed on the rocket slated to launch Orbital ATKs next Cygnus supply ship to the International Space Station. Credit: Orbital ATK

NASA and Orbital ATK have agreed to schedule the launch of the next Cygnus supply ship for Nov. 10 from Wallops Island on Virginias Eastern Shore, a delay of a month from the missions earlier target launch date to allow the flight to carry more cargo to the International Space Station, officials said.

The new launch date also will allow time for station astronauts to complete three spacewalks in late October and early November to swap out a latching end effector on the stations Canadian-built robotic arm and complete other maintenance tasks, according to Dan Hartman, NASAs deputy space station program manager.

If the Nov. 10 date holds, liftoff of the automated cargo mission on top of an Antares rocket will occur around 8:02 a.m. EST (1302 GMT), roughly the moment Earths rotation brings the Wallops launch base in the flight path of the space station, according to an Orbital ATK spokesperson.

With the slip of one month, were able to get new cargo that we need up to the station, on the order of about 400 kilograms (880 pounds), Hartman said Sunday. So a significant increase in the amount of mass we can take up.

Some specific items NASA wants delivered to the space station would not have been ready in time for the previous Oct. 11 launch date.

The next mission by NASAs other cargo delivery provider, SpaceX, will slip from early November to early December in the schedule shuffle. SpaceXs latest cargo flight arrived at the space station Wednesday, two days after launching from NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Orbital ATK said in a statement that the delay of the next Cygnus cargo mission, named OA-8, was decided by NASA and was solely based on NASAs revised ISS traffic planning and cargo needs.

The flight will ferry experiments, supplies and spare parts to the space station.

Integration and test of the Antares launch vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft are complete and both were processed to support a mission as early as September of this year, Orbital ATK said. Final preparations for the mission will begin in early October to support the new November 10 target launch date.

The mission will be the Orbital ATKs eighth operational logistics flight to the space station, and the fifth to lift off from Wallops on the companys own Antares booster. Three others flew on United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets from Cape Canaveral.

Hartman said the space station has plenty of supplies, and the delays of the next two U.S. cargo flights will have no impact to the research labs operations.

Our consumables are in very, very good shape on-board the International Space Station, Hartman said. So the slip there will have absolutely no impact to a crew of four, he said, referring to the four astronauts from NASA and the European Space Agency who are part of the outposts overall six-person crew.

NASA managers recently approved a plan to conduct three spacewalks in late October and early November, Hartman said.

Astronauts will replace a latching end effector on the space stations 58-foot-long Canadian-built robotic arm during the excursions. Engineers have noticed some fraying on wires inside the end of the arm, components used to grasp cargo ships as they arrive at the space station and transfer experiments and payloads around the outside of the complex, Hartman said.

The spacewalkers will also change out lights and cameras outside the space station.

Meanwhile, Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy planned to head outside the station Thursday to release five small satellites and work on experiments on the outside of the Russian segment of the complex.

Yurchikhin will be joined by NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer for return to Earth on Sept. 2. Three fresh crew members will launch on a new Soyuz spaceship Sept. 12 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

A Russian Progress cargo and refueling freighter will launch Oct. 12 from Baikonur, followed by the next Orbital ATK and SpaceX resupply runs in November and December.

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Station managers push back next Cygnus cargo flight to November - Spaceflight Now

Berkeley Lab Intern Focuses on Using Light for Spaceflight – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Elliot Heywood (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab)

Elliot Heywood had dreamed of landing an internship at the science lab in the hills not far from his school in Lafayette, California, but he never could have imagined this dream would take wing as a summerlong stint researching an ultrafast interplanetary propulsion system.

In May, after a friend and fellow high school senior at the Bentley School put him in touch with his father, a computer scientist at Berkeley Lab the U.S. Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Heywood received an unexpected email.

His friends father had reached out to Carl Pennypacker, an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, and Pennypacker had invited Heywood to the Lab.

Another way to get to Mars

Carl emailed me, saying, I want you to work on this Mars project, said Heywood, who is 18. Pennypacker is also a science educator who founded the Hands-On Universe program in the 1990s that connects students with astronomical observatories around the world.

Heywoods school requires seniors to participate in an internship before graduating, so the timing was perfect. His introduction to Berkeley Lab was a TED Talk by Mina Bissell, a cell biologist at the Lab whose work has benefited cancer research; ever since, hed wanted to experience for himself what it was like to work there.

I remember just being mesmerized and thinking, Theres no other place like this in the Bay Area so many people doing so many amazing things, he said. To be invited here, this was really an honor for me. He added, I knew that coming here was going to be invaluable in terms of the connections I was going to make with people and the work I would be doing.

During the month of May, Heywood traveled to the Lab five days a week to work on calculations for this project. After graduating from high school he stayed aboard at the Lab for a summer internship, ending his work there in early August.

Heywood was tasked with exploring what it would take to send one crew member and supplies in a spacecraft weighing just over 1 ton in total, or about 2,300 pounds, to Mars using finely focused laser light.

The laser-based system would greatly reduce the time it would take to make this journey, which would reduce the astronauts exposure to space radiation and also reduce the required payload and overall size of the spacecraft. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but there is solid scientific ground for this type of propulsion system.

Phil Lubin of UC Santa Barbara a former student of Berkeley Lab physicist and Nobel laureate George Smoot, and a colleague of Pennypackers is part of a team that is studying how to develop a light-based propulsion system to send tiny, unpiloted spacecraft dubbed nanocraft to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, on beams of light. Alpha Centauri is about 4.4 light-years away.

Artists rendering of a solar sail. (Credit: Adrian Mann, UC Santa Barbara)

This work builds upon successes such as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agencys 2010 launch of a solar sail spacecraft, IKAROS, using sunlight for propulsion much like a sailboat uses wind. And the Planetary Society in May 2015 tested a CubeSat, or tiny satellite, dubbed LightSail, also propelled by a solar sail. Planning is underway for a successor LightSail mission.

Big challenges for big spacecraft

Light-based propulsion systems could conceivably cut the Earth-to-Mars travel time from 5-10 months down to weeks or days, though larger payloads would require much larger laser systems.

During his internship, Heywood attended a presentation by Jessica Lu, a UC Berkeley astronomer, and he also studied up on research by Lubin, who has been working on light-based propulsion systems for spaceflight and asteroid defense.

Heywood corresponded with Lubin, met with Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter a Lab physicist who studies supernovae and dark energy and he also communicated with other Lab scientists during his internship. Just interacting with these scientists was a really gratifying and rewarding experience, Heywood said. I learned not to be afraid to ask questions, and to do independent research.

His work culminated in a 13-page paper that he hopes will be followed up with more research. The spacecraft envisioned in the paper would have a light sail measuring about 935 feet (285 meters) in diameter, and the spacecraft and sail would together weigh about 1,760 pounds.

The spacecraft could be launched with conventional propulsion into Earths orbit, where the sail would be deployed. Laser light would then be focused on the spacecraft with noise from Earths atmosphere corrected by an adaptive optics system via a ground-based telescope or telescopes.

Illustration of a light-driven solar sail (left), with Earth pictured at right. (Credit: Breakthrough Starshot)

Heywoods paper noted other challenges, including that the laser-propulsion source would require a huge power supply equivalent to the output of about 10-100 nuclear power plants, and that the light beam would need to be extremely focused over the length of the trip.

While it may sound like a wild idea, Heywood said that its still within the realm of possibility using current technology.

Maybe this is a seed that, decades from now, somebody will sow, he said. Maybe it sounds so naive and so optimistic but I think having maybe a little bit of naive optimism is so important to moving this off the drawing board and into space.

Looking back, and ahead

Heywood said he hopes to rejoin the Lab for future internships. Carl said Im welcome to come back pretty much every summer.

Later this month, Heywood will begin attending George Washington University, where he plans to study chemistry, with a possible minor in physics.

Im really interested in pharmaceuticals, and specifically drug design, he said. His parents both work in the medical field, and Heywood said he would like to help find ways to use synthetic organic chemistry to develop cancer-fighting drugs that are easier for the body to tolerate than current chemotherapy drugs.

The side effects (of these drugs) are often worse than what the cancer gives you, he said, adding that it would be great to find a way to improve quality of life for patients undergoing these treatments.

Heywoods advice for other students pursuing science internships: Dont stop contacting professors and researchers. Never stop. Always keep persevering, because eventually youre going to get lucky. He added, I never thought I would get an internship at Berkeley Lab, but it happened.

Also, when you do find an opportunity, always treat it with the professionalism that it deserves. These opportunities dont come along that often.

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Berkeley Lab Intern Focuses on Using Light for Spaceflight - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Good news for redheads: a tanning drug for the pale-skinned

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Washington (AFP) - After 10 years of research, scientists have come up with a drug that could help people tan without exposure to the sun, potentially reducing the risk of skin cancer.

The drug stimulates cells that produce the pigment that absorbs ultra-violet light, the researchers said in the US journal Cell Reports published on Tuesday. They stressed that further tests are needed to safeguard against potential side-effects in humans.

Applied as a cream to the skin, the drug allowed red-haired mice to develop a deep tan. Like their pale-skinned human counterparts, the mice are particularly susceptible to the damaging effects of the sun's ultra-violet rays.

The original breakthrough in mice was announced more than a decade ago, in a study published in the British journal Nature in 2006. But it has taken scientists that much time to work out how to make much thicker human skin absorb the substance.

The initial report revealed that a substance called forskolin gave red-haired mice a deep tan without exposure to UV light. But because human skin is relatively hairless compared to animals', it has evolved to be much tougher in order to protect against heat, cold and other environmental factors, and the topical substance could not penetrate it effectively.

"Human skin is a very good barrier and is a formidable penetration challenge. Therefore, other topical approaches just did not work," said David Fisher, chief of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, a professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School, and one of the authors of the study.

"But 10 years later, we have come up with a solution. It's a different class of compounds, that work by targeting a different enzyme that converges on the same pathway that leads to pigmentation," he said.

The scientists tested the substance on samples of human skin kept in laboratories and found that it darkened in proportion to the dosage applied. The tan lasted several days.

In animal tests, red-haired mice became "almost jet black in a day or two with a strong enough dose," the researchers observed. When the dosage was removed, normal skin regeneration meant the color faded within a week or so.

"We believe the potential importance of this work is towards a novel strategy for skin cancer prevention," Fisher said.

"Skin is the most common organ in our bodies to be afflicted with cancer, and the majority of cases are thought to be associated with UV radiation," he said.

The long-term aim would be to create a cream that develops a tan without exposure to sunlight but which also absorbs harmful UV rays like traditional sun screens.

Related: 5 Ways to Get a Great Tan Safely

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Red-headed woodpeckers in a mysterious decline – SW News Media

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Recently I had a wonderful opportunity to study and photograph a pair of red-headed woodpeckers nesting in an old tree and feeding their young.

All of this happened because a reader of this column gave me a shout to share the exciting news of this cool woodpecker.

The red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythocephalus) was once a very common woodpecker. In the mid-1800s, John James Audubon stated that the red-headed woodpecker was the most common woodpecker in North America. He called them semi-domesticated because they werent afraid of people. He stated that they were camp robbers and also a pest.

According to the Audubon Societys Christmas Bird Count data, between the 1950s and the year 2010, the population of red-headed woodpeckers dropped dramatically. Over 80 percent of the population died out in just over 50 years.

Currently we continue to lose about 2 percent each year. That means within a couple decades we could see this bird become extinct if the trend continues.

The reason behind this decline is not understood. Many are quick to blame loss of habitat for their decline. While it is true that we have had a decline in mature tree habitat, no conclusive study indicates this to be the cause.

I would point to the fact that the population of red-bellied woodpeckers, with a similar size, shape and habitat requirement, is exploding across the country. If it were truly a habitat issue, it should affect both species equally since they both have the same habitat requirements.

Competition with European starlings for the nest cavity has also been implicated in the decline of the red-heads. While theres no doubt competition for the nest cavity with the starling will impact the red-heads, the population of the European starling is also dropping across the country at the same time. Also, if the starling usurps the red-head, the woodpecker can always excavate a new cavity.

It has been proposed that red-headed woodpeckers are habitat specialists and require a very unique habitat called the oak savanna. The argument goes that as oak savanna habitat is reduced, so goes the woodpecker.

I would maintain that the amount of oak savanna habitat was never very large and perhaps the reason why we find red-heads in this habitat now is because its the last holdout where the woodpeckers can still live. Ask anyone over the age of 50 who grew up on a farm and theyll remember red-headed woodpeckers, and they didnt have oak savanna habitat.

Over the past 30 years of studying and photographing red-headed woodpeckers, the vast majority have not been in oak savanna habitat. In fact the nest I was photographing recently was in a dead birch tree in a mixed deciduous forest.

There are over 200 species of woodpecker in the world and only four species cache food. Caching food is a process of storing nuts, such as acorns, in a cavity for later consumption. This might be a clue. For example the number of nut-bearing trees has declined dramatically over the past 100 years.

Both the number of oak trees, hickories and beech have declined and the American chestnut is completely gone. Whether or not this is the cause of the decline is not known.

Here are some interesting aspects of the red-headed woodpecker. In nearly all of the woodpeckers species, it is easy to see the difference between the male and female. Usually the male has some kind of marking on its head.

However the red-headed woodpecker male and female look exactly the same. Even if you have these birds in your hands and you can examine them, you wont be able to tell the difference between the male and the female. This is an interesting difference between the red-headed woodpeckers and the rest of the woodpeckers.

Red-headed woodpeckers are remarkable species and I always feel honored to be able to see and film this bird. If you have a nest in your yard, no matter how common the species, give me a shout. You never know, I might come visit.

Stan Tekiela is an author, Eden Prairie city naturalist and wildlife photographer who travels the United States to study and photograph wildlife. He can be followed on Facebook and Twitter. He can be contacted via his webpage at http://www.naturesmart.com.

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Yes, it really has taken NASA 11 years to develop a parachute – Ars Technica

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Enlarge / A test model of the Orion spacecraft, with its parachutes, is tested in Arizona.

NASA

Last week, NASAs acting chief technologist, Douglas Terrier, visited one of NASAs main contractors in the Houston area, Jacobs. Along with a handful of media members, he spent about an hour touring the companys engineering development facility, where the company supports NASA programs from the International Space Station to the Orion spacecraft.

At one stop during the tour, Terrier learned about a new distiller that might more efficiently recover water from urine during long-duration missions. At another, he learned about new debris sensors that will go to the station to record micrometeorite and orbital debris impacts. And at yet another, he heard about the parachute system that Jacobs has helped develop for the Orion spacecraft.

Terrier continued to nod pleasantly along and ask insightful questions. The tour went on. But inwardly, I was taken aback. Surely, it did not take 11 years (and counting) to develop and test parachutes for a spacecraft. After all, between 1961 and 1972, humans went from first taking flight with Yuri Gagarin, to flying Apollo missions to the Moon. And if it was true, what did it mean for where NASA was really going in terms of human exploration?

It was true. According to NASA spokeswoman Barbara Zelon, the contract for the development and certification of the Orion parachute system has been in place for 11 years. This included early concept and trade studies, numerous ground-based tests, and 17 full-scale development airdrop tests required to prove out a wide range of failure scenarios. Finally, Orion has completed three of the final eight human certification airdrop tests and plans to complete human certification in early 2019. So Jacobs is likely to have a parachute development contract forat least 13 years.

NASA

In some sense, this is what NASA does. It tests out new technologies on the frontier of exploration and then shares them with industry. For example, Zelon said, NASA has shared more than 300 artifacts, including the design, models, and test data, with the agencys commercial crew partnersBoeing and SpaceX. This has allowed them to leverage NASAs efforts and eliminate nearly all the development work and unique testing. This saves both NASA and the companies money in the long run.

But what does it say about an exploration program that requires 13 years to develop a parachute system? After all, NASAs Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules all had parachute systems, too, and each wasdeveloped within a few years. NASA had a broad base of knowledge to draw on (Orion will probably only ever come back from the Moon, like the Apollo capsules, although it is larger). It seemed like a 13-year contract for parachute development may indicate that the agency really wasnt going anywhere fast.

After the Jacobs tour, I put this question to Terrier. He did not flinch. I think its a very fair question, he said. I think its a very fair debate to ask if we as a nation are serious about this, and making it a priority. What weve enjoyed is a very constant level of support, but its certainly not the Apollo or Manhattan-type project to crank this thing out in seven years.

That is not to say that NASA, or its large contractor base, isless able than it wasin the 1960s. Far from it, Terrier said. I think its important to realize that the team and the technology and manufacturing base is very capable of doing that, the moment someone flicks that switch. The speed at which were moving is not limited by the capability of NASA or the contractors; it is limited by the resources and, frankly, the political emphasis.

Here, Terrier has highlighted the biggest reason why the United States and NASA have not moved beyond the Moon since 1969, or indeed, even sent humans back. Once the Apollo program met its Cold War imperative, NASAs priority sank, and the funding dried up. NASA has been left with significantly less money, relative to the rest of the federal budget, since then. It then tried to cobble together a meaningful human-exploration program in low Earth orbit with the shuttle and space station.

Perhaps the new administration will change this. Vice President Mike Pence has spoken about a renewed human exploration planalong with a willingness to inject more low-cost, commercial space into the mix to push NASA further, faster. Certainly, the potential is there. But for now, at least, the switch has yet to be flicked on.

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Yes, it really has taken NASA 11 years to develop a parachute - Ars Technica

NASA’s Rocket to Nowhere Finally Has a Destination – WIRED

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On a Thursday afternoon in June, a 17-foot-tall rocket motorlooking like something a dedicated amateur might fire offstood fire-side-up on the salty desert of Promontory, Utah. Over the loudspeakers, an announcer counted down. And with the command to fire, quad cones of flame flew from the four inverted nozzles and grew toward the sky. As the smoke rose, it cast a four-leaf clover of shadow across the ground.

This was a test of the launch abort motor, a gadget built to carry NASA astronauts away from a rocket gone wrong. Made in Utah by a company called Orbital ATK, it's part of the Space Launch System : the agency's next generation space vehicle, meant to ferry humans and cargo into deep space . NASA has tasked Orbital ATK and other contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Aerojet Rocketdynewith building SLS and its crew capsule for the kinds of missions NASA hasnt undertaken since the Apollo days. But for much of the program's six years, NASA didn't know exactly where SLS would go. The agency spent billions of dollars on what critics called a rocket to nowhere.

In June, hundreds of spectatorsrocket scientists, astronauts, locals who line the highway for every scheduled testcame to watch the fireworks of the launch abort motor test. Charley Bown, a program manager, had warned it would be very short, very powerful, and very loud. Despite his prep talk, the crowd jumped at "fire." During tests like this one, Bown actually turns from the rocketry and watches the watchers, taking pictures of their faces. Some people just smile, he says. Some have a look of amazement.

Bown has been to a lot of these shows in his decades here. And Orbital ATK has done other test fires, lighting up the boosters that will launch the SLS. But this one was different. Because back in late March, Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for NASAs Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate gave a flashy presentation detailing the agency's Deep Space Gateway and Transport Planwith proposed missions through the 2030s. Finally, the builders and testers could envision not just that their creations would go but that they would go to lunar orbit .

The tapestry of SLS's fate was always tangled. In 2010, before the shuttle was even in its grave , Congress told NASA to build the rocket using reappropriated shuttle parts. First, they thought the system might take astronauts to an asteroidyou know, practice for Mars. But maybe SLS could send a robot to tug an asteroid from its natural orbit and into the moon's orbit ? Also practice for Mars, of course.

With the 2016 transition of presidential power, NASA abandoned what little agenda it had. Which isn't unusual. The agencys mandates are always subject to the US's four-year flip-flop, despite the fact that decades-long mission plans require, believe it or not, decades. Since Trump took office, officials have debated whether to scrap missions to asteroids, whether to favor the moon over Mars, and whether to put humans aboard the very, very first mission, called EM-1 (it was a bad idea, and they won't).

Through all this, the contractors kept constructing and testing, keeping their focus simply on finishing . Until Gerstenmeier's March presentation. Finally, here was a roadmap. The first mission, according to this plan, will go to the moon's orbit in 2018.

Four years later, the rocket will launch a mission to Europa, that mystery moon on which moviemakers imagine oceanic aliens. Then, crews will shuttle to lunar orbit to build a deep-space habitat and staging area for longer-distance travel. Trips there will continue through 2029, building up the outer-space infrastructure. Four lucky people will spend a year hanging out in the ether around the moon, to see how they and the hab fare. And eventually, other astronauts will undock part of the space town and swivel it on a path toward Mars.

With those goalposts in place, NASA's contractors finally have somewhere to aim. Orbital ATK is currently proving that its hardware meets NASA's previously-established specs for safety and performance. And contractor Lockheed Martin continues to test the human capsule for NASA's deep-space forays: Orion.

As of late July, the Lockheed crew was in the throes of testing a full-size mockup of Orion . Off a road called Titan Loop in Colorado, Lockheed engineers test how the capsule fares in all kinds of weather, blasting it with sound waves to see how it handles vibration, shocking it to see if its components come out OK, putting pressure on it to see if its structure survives. It tests all the systems in various kinds of badness, says Christopher Aiken, an integration and test engineer.

The mockup isnt just a shell: Its electronics and controls are silicon copies of final product. When we fly this, it doesnt know its sitting on the ground, says Paul Sannes, manager of the test lab. The idea is that this model will feel and behave like the real thing under those same conditions, a voodoo doll of space travel. Last week, four Lockheed interns did an AMA on reddit. Getting to see a full mock-up of the capsule every day is pretty awesome, wrote Bailey Sikorski. Plus I get to touch it, which is even cooler.

Six hundred miles northwest, back at Orbital ATK, the biggest task is bureaucratic: a design certification review of the company's solid rocket boosters, which will power 80 percent of SLS's first few minutes of flight. Cast inside space-shuttle casings, the propellant's final form has the consistency of a pencil eraser. Technicians mix the solution in 600-gallon KitchenAids209 of them per boosterand pour that liquid into the five segments that make up each booster. Then they'll cure, trim, and X-ray them to make sure they're defect-free.

Emma Grey Ellis

If We're Going to Get to Mars, These Rockets Need to Work

Peter Juul

NASA's Human Spaceflight Program Can't Afford Another Reset From the Next President

Wired Staff

The 12 Greatest Challenges for Space Exploration

When SLS goes up, it will eat through 1,385,000 pounds of that artisanal propellant in two minutes. And although the first flight wont happen till 2019, Orbital ATK has all the booster segments finished. The design certification will stretch through the end of this year. We provide to NASA all of the certification paperwork, all the drawings, all the test data, says Bown. And then? Assuming all's well? Ship, assemble, and fly, he says.

All that prep work means more now that SLS has real, concrete plans for launching astronauts to the moon's orbit. When the space shuttle Challenger broke apart in 1986, Bown worked at this Utah site. Engineers there, then as now, built NASAs rocket boosters. And it was a booster that failed, that cold Florida morning, 73 seconds after launch, when it was just higher than a commercial airliner. Seven astronauts died.

Bown kept working here, through decades and acquisitions and mergers and a whole lot of propellant work. I got to go from feeling horrible to feeling good about it again, he says.

Today, for major tests like that of the launch abort motor, NASA always sends at least one astronaut to observe. That presence means a lot: The astronauts get to meet the people theyve trusted to make the 177-foot-tall erasers that will fire them to space. And those engineers get to meet the people that propel their work.

The two types stand side by side at the testsboth jumping involuntarily, both perhaps in the frame of one of Bowns photos.

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NASA's Rocket to Nowhere Finally Has a Destination - WIRED

Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano – BBC News

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Nasa's ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
BBC News
I was a member of the Nasa Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for Nasa to defend the planet from asteroids and comets, explains Brian Wilcox of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology.

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Nasa's ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano - BBC News

From exoplanets to galaxies: NASA chooses 6 missions for further study – Fox News

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Six astrophysics programs selected for further study by NASA have science goals across the universe, ranging from exoplanets to galaxies.

This round of choices for NASA's Explorers Program, announced Aug. 9, includes three Explorer missions ($250 million each) and three missions of opportunity ($70 million each).

Each team has the chance to do a concept study. Scientific evaluations will be performed on each study, then NASA will select one Explorer mission and one mission of opportunity to fund in 2019. The expected launch dates would fall in 2022. [The Biggest Space Missions to Watch in 2017]

The three mission proposals (each receiving $2 million for the concept study), according to a NASA statement, are:

The three missions of opportunity (each receiving $500,000 for the concept study) are:

Explorers is NASA's longest-running program. Its first mission was Explorer 1 in 1958, which also was the first U.S. satellite. Explorer 1 discovered the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Earth. More than 90 missions have run under the program, including the Uhuru and Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) missions that led to Nobel Prizes for their investigators.

"The Explorers Program brings out some of the most creative ideas for missions to help unravel the mysteries of the universe," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate, said in the statement. "The program has resulted in great missions that have returned transformational science, and these selections promise to continue that tradition."

Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Google+ . Original article on Space.com .

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From exoplanets to galaxies: NASA chooses 6 missions for further study - Fox News

Likely NASA Administrator Has Big Space Ambitions But Trump May Hinder Them – Houston Press

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Thursday, August 17, 2017 at 10:54 a.m.

Illustration by Matt Griesmyer

An Oklahoma Congressman is President Donald Trumps choice to be the next NASA administrator, according to reports, but his plans for space may be pulled back to Earth by the man who hired him.

NASA Watch, a niche news organization that focuses on the space industry, reported Wednesday that Rep. Jim Bridenstine will be NASAs next leader. A Rice University graduate, Bridenstine is an aviator in the Navy Reserve and has served in Congress since 2012. He has not commented on speculation that hell soon join NASA.

In his five years in Congress, Bridenstine has shown an enthusiasm for space exploration, and said he wants the United States to reinvest in space and NASA, including more moon missions to explore the possibility of establishing a base there.

In 2016, the congressman sponsored the American Space Renaissance Act, which aims to project military strength through an American presence in space, spur commercial space innovation and provide clear goals and deadlines for NASA. In a website he created to promote the legislation, Bridenstine noted how often technology created for space travel has benefited the everyday lives of Americans and argued that the United States may cede influence over space by neglecting NASA.

Unfortunately, continued socioeconomic growth from space technology maturation and increased space access is no longer assured, Bridenstine wrote. Space is becoming more congested, contested, and competitive. We must establish responsible governance that will prevent mishaps, misperceptions, and mistrust, while assuring the use of space for all responsible parties. As a military pilot, I can attest that our national security and our very way of life require both military and commercial space capabilities.

The bill did not make it out of committee and received just a single co-sponsor, highlighting the struggle NASA has had finding the money it needs for its missions. Since the glory days of NASA, government investment in the space agency has dwindled. In 1966, in the middle of the Apollo Program, NASA spending accounted for 4.5 percent of the federal budget. Now, that figure is less than half a percent. Since the end of the shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts have had to hitch a ride with Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station.

Despite his ambitions for NASA and the American space industry, Bridenstine may be hamstrung by the administration that hired him. President Trumps FY 2018 budget includes $19.1 billion for NASA, a $561 million decrease from present levels that CBS News reported would eliminate some Earth science missions and put the kibosh on NASAs plan to retrieve a piece of an asteroid, an exercise that would prepare astronauts for the challenges of flying to Mars.

Where the president himself stands on NASA remains a mystery. In 2012, he criticized the Obama administration for cutting NASAs budget and forcing astronauts to hitchhike from Kazakhstan but he has yet to offer an alternative travel arrangement.

Trump did not articulate a clear vision for NASA during his presidential campaign. During a call with astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Trump asked astronauts to reach Mars "during my first term or, at worst, during my second term," after those same astronauts told him this would not be possible until the 2030s. Plus, they'd need more money.

So Bridenstine may soon inherit a problem shared by leaders across the government: a president with grand plans unwilling to invest the time, expertise or investment to reaching them.

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Nanotechnology Gives Green Energy a Green Color – I-Connect007

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Solar panels have tremendous potential to provide affordable renewable energy, but many people see traditional black and blue panels as an eyesore. Architects, homeowners and city planners may be more open to the technology if they could install green panels that melt into the landscape, red panels on rooftops and white ones camouflaged as walls.

A new study published this week in Applied Physics Letters ("Efficient colored silicon solar modules using integrated resonant dielectric nanoscatterers"), brings us one step closer to a future of colorful, efficient solar panels.

Researchers have developed a method for imprinting existing solar panels with silicon nanopatterns that scatter green light back toward an observer. The panels have a green appearance from most angles yet only show about a 10 percent power reduction due to the loss of absorbed green light.

Left: The nanopatterned module appears green, independent of the angle. Right: Schematic of silicon nanoscatterer arrays on top of a sapphire cover slide, integrated into a commonly used solar panel design. ( AIP)

"Some people say 'why would you make solar cells less efficient?' But we can make solar cells beautiful without losing too much efficiency," said Verena Neder, a researcher at AMOLF and lead author of the paper. "The new method to change the color of the panels is not only easy to apply but also attractive as an architectural design element and has the potential to widen their use."

Most research on solar cells has focused on increasing efficiency and reducing cost. Currently, the solar panels sold to consumers can ideally turn up to 22 percent of the sun's light into usable energy. Colored solar panels are already on the market, but the dyes and reflective coatings that give them their color greatly reduce efficiency.

Neder and colleagues created their efficient, green solar panels through soft-imprint lithography, which works somewhat like an optical rubber stamp to imprint a dense array of silicon nanocylinders onto the cell surfaces. Each nanocylinder is about 100 nanometers wide and exhibits an electromagnetic resonance that scatters a particular wavelength of light. The geometry of the nanocylinder determines which wavelength it scatters and can be fine-tuned to change the color of the solar cell. The imprint reduces the solar panel's efficiency by about 2 percent.

"In principle, this technique is easily scalable for fabrication technology," said Albert Polman, a scientific group leader at AMOLF and senior author on the paper. "You can use a rubber stamp the size of a solar panel that in one step, can print the whole panel full of these little, exactly defined nanoparticles."

Unlike existing colored solar panels, the nanopatterns give a consistent appearance from different angles. "The structure we made is not very sensitive to the angle of observation, so even if you look at it from a wide angle, it still appears green," Neder said.

The nanopatterns also could be useful in making tandem solar cells, which stack several layers, each designed to absorb certain parts of the spectrum, to achieve efficiencies of greater than 30 percent.

Next, the researchers are designing imprints to create red and blue solar cells. Once they master these three colors, the primary colors of light, they can create any color, potentially even white. "You have to combine different nanoparticles, and if they get very close to each other they can interact and that will affect the color," Polman said. "Going to white is a really big step."

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Nanotechnology Gives Green Energy a Green Color - I-Connect007

Growth in Nanomedicine market-2017 trends, forecasts, analysis – satPRnews (press release)

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The report firstly introduced the Nanomedicine basics: definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain overview; industry policies and plans; product specifications; manufacturing processes; cost structures and so on. Then it analyzed the worlds main region market conditions, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, capacity utilization, supply, demand and industry growth rate etc. In the end, the report introduced new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.

Download sample pages of this report: http://www.kminsights.com/request-sample-1892

Nanomedicine is a branch of medicine that applies the knowledge and tools of nanotechnology to the prevention and treatment of disease. Nanomedicine involves the use of nanoscale materials, such as biocompatible nanoparticles and nanorobots, for diagnosis, delivery, sensing or actuation purposes in a living organism.

The ongoing market trends of Nanomedicine market and the key factors impacting the growth prospects are elucidated. With increase in the trend, the factors affecting the trend are mentioned with perfect reasons. Top manufactures, price, revenue, market share are explained to give a depth of idea on the competitive side.

Each and every segment type and their sub types are well elaborated to give a better idea about this market during the forecast period of 2017respectively.

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About Us: Key Market Insights is a stand-alone organization with a solid history of advancing and exchanging market research reports and logical surveys delivered by our numerous transnational accomplices, which incorporate both huge multinationals and littler, more expert concerns.

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Tiny robot vehicles travel to your stomach to drive away infection – ZDNet

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Wikimedia Commons

The future of drug delivery may be placed in the hands of autonomous vehicles no wider than the width of a human hair.

As reported by New Scientist, micromotors -- tiny, autonomous vehicles -- have been used in trials with mice to deliver drugs to clear bacterial infections in the stomach.

The research, conducted at the University of California San Diego by nanoengineer and professor Joseph Wang together with professor Liangfang Zhang from the Department of Nanoengineering at the Moores Cancer Center, utilized tiny robots consisting of a magnesium core which reacts with gastric acid once swallowed.

When this reaction occurs, usually after a maximum of 20 minutes, the vehicles release a stream of hydrogen bubbles which propel the micromotor forwards to where it needs to go to deliver drugs effectively.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the engineers say that once the hydrogen is produced, the level of acidity in the stomach diminishes, and at this point, the antibiotics are released.

The team designed the autonomous robots to release the drugs at this stage due to the possibility of high stomach acid levels reducing the effectiveness of the medicine.

The trial used Helicobacter pylori bacteria and clarithromycin as a model antibiotic. Over a period of five days, the robots were used to administer drugs, resulting in a noticeable reduction in the levels of bacteria in the stomach, without any side-effects which impacted stomach function.

According to the team, after 24 hours, normal stomach PH level was restored.

The robots are also biodegradable, and so there is no need for extraction or removal after they have completed their tasks.

"The propulsion of the drug-loaded Mg-based micromotors in gastric fluid along with their outer chitosan layer are shown to greatly enhance the binding and retention of the drug-loaded motors on the stomach wall," the engineers say. "As these micromotors are propelled in the gastric fluid, their Mg cores are dissolved, leading to self-destruction of these motors without harmful residues."

The duo believes that the results of the mice trial are promising for the future treatment of bacterial infections and disease. It is also possible that with the development of biocompatible fuels or fuel-free propellants, the autonomous robots could also be controlled to move around different parts of the body and treat other conditions.

"There is still a long way to go, but we are on a fantastic voyage," Wang said.

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Tiny robot vehicles travel to your stomach to drive away infection - ZDNet

Fiber Optics to Prevent Accidents in Mines and Power Plants – New Kerala

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MOSCOW, August 17, 2017 : NUST MISIS scientists have suggested a technology for the creation of high-precision sensors based on doped fiber optics for accident prevention in the nuclear, space, and mining industries.

The created fiber optics is doped with rare-earth and transition metals: erbium, holmium, bismuth, etc., in addition to nanoparticles of silver and silicon. The composition and ratio of ligands (chemical additives) in quartz-based fibers are unique, as they provide unique properties in obtained fibers. The study's results have been published in the journal LaserPhysicsLetters.

The high sensitivity of the resulting fibers to temperature changes, tension, chemical composition, and an environment's background radiation, as well as their stability in inhospitable environments and their high resistance to electromagnetic disturbances allows the fibers to carry out high-precision monitoring of large-scale facilities (pipelines, drillings, power plants, bridges) on a number of parameters. The length of fiber optics also gives the chance to measure large size objects (up to hundreds of meters). In near-earth orbit, sensors based on these obtained fibers can measure the conditions of background radiation in spacecrafts.

Sensors based on these fiber optics effectively register various types of radiation emissions in a wide range of doses, and can do so with high-precision in ultra-high (up to 1700) temperatures, harsh chemical compositions, and powerful electromagnetic fields. The length of fiber optics allows the technology to carry out remote measurements; for example, it can provide full-scale monitoring of deep oil wells, mines, and pipeline assemblies for nuclear plants. Due to its unique characteristics, devices based on this technology will be in high demand in a plethora of fields, including construction and geotechnical engineering, the aerospace and oil & gas industries, and high-current energy engineering, including nuclear engineering.

"A fiber optic sensor is either a small-sized ("pointed") device (which, in turn, can be a part of a multi-component detecting network, or an interrogator), or a " spatially-distributed circuit" which is able to collect information about detected parameters at great distances - due to fiber's property as a fundamentally "long" environment. In the former case, the sensitive elements of sensors can be Bragg gratings (spectrally-selective filters), written in fiber. Their parameters, i.e. reflection and transmission spectrums, greatly depend on the state of the environment (pressure, temperature, deformation, etc.), and respectively serve as the basis of detection. The entire length of a used fiber is the sensitive element in "long sensor" format. It is used either in "passive" mode (in this case, for example, the changes in absorption and transmission spectrum of doped fiber optics are detected parameters), or "active" mode, when it is a component of a laser (in this case, for example, relaxation frequency, optical spectrum, or laser oscillation mode are detected parameters).

"Our research, within this project's framework, is aimed at the creation, comprehensive research, and application of fiber sensors of the second type with the use of specially developed doped fibers, obtained, in particular, by the method of nano-engineering. Such fibers can become a reliable solution while working in an aggressive environment, when the device based on them is in extreme conditions - for example, when thermo-monitoring oil wells or performing dosimetry at power plants," told Alexander Kir'yanov, the head of the project.

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Fiber Optics to Prevent Accidents in Mines and Power Plants - New Kerala

Church over state – Vox

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MONTGOMERY, Alabama Stationed outside the entrance to Judge Roy Moores victory party Tuesday night stood two tablets embossed with the Ten Commandments, mounted on an easel and draped in white cloth.

Christian choir music played inside. A video came on in which Moore declared, God is raising up generals all over this great nation. When the early voting returns began rolling in, Moore came out and told the crowd he had run the best campaign of his career before catching himself in the boast.

"But remember," he quickly added, "all glory goes to God.

On Tuesday night, Moore proved the clear winner in a divisive and fantastically expensive Alabama Republican primary to fill the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Moore coasted to a first-place finish in a 10-person field, beating out two candidates incumbent Sen. Luther Strange and Tea Party favorite Rep. Mo Brooks with much more money and institutional support. Moore and Strange will now compete in a runoff to conclude the GOP primary on September 26; the general election will follow in December. Moore is in the drivers seat.

Its a remarkable rise for someone once consigned to the far-right fringes of politics, even in Alabama. Over three decades in public life, Moore has defied federal court orders, addressed a white supremacist group, penned invectives against Perez Hilton over same-sex marriage, and argued that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) should not be seated as a Congress member because he is Muslim.

All of those actions flowed from a conviction about religions role in policy that, by his own accounting, puts Moore far afield from almost all elected Republicans. His ambition isnt merely for the government to carve out a space for free religious exercise, as many conservatives demand; instead, he argues that Christian principles or, more accurately, Moores interpretation of Christian principles should provide the foundation for, and even supersede, the laws of men.

Moores ideology is an express belief that Gods law and his interpretation of Gods law stand on top of mans law, said David Dinielli, deputy director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Its an ideology that would allow those who think they know the unknowable and the mystic to impose their beliefs on everyone else.

Moores public presentation is that of a private citizen forced against his will to enter into service of his country. He likes to cite the apocryphal tale of Cincinnatus, the Roman general who chooses to turn down vast political powers to return to his farm, and of Thomas Paine at Valley Forge comparing the summer soldier" and "sunshine patriot" to soldiers willing to tough out long Revolutionary winters. A fan of evoking colonial imagery and rhetoric, Moore even rode his brown mare named Sassy, an aide said to the polling station on election day.

Im not a politician. I dont like politicians, Moore told a gun rights group gathered at Mr. Fang's Chinese restaurant in Homewood on Monday night.

About 15 seconds later, he felt the need to press the point, and returned to it: I am not a politician," he said. "I do not like politics."

Moore was 35 when he first ran for, and lost, a judicial post in Etowah County in 1982. "I had decided to run for political office in order to do what I could to preserve our moral heritage," he writes in his autobiography, So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and the Battle for Religious Freedom. Among those threats, as Moore lists them: a 1985 court case eliminating prayer in the courthouse and a 1963 Supreme Court ruling eliminating Bible studies in public schools.

That loss proved so bitter that afterward he took up karate and became a black belt; moved to Cairns, Australia, where he worked as a kitchen hand; and then herded cattle in the Australian Outback, building stockyards and carrying rocks six days a week.

But Moore has clung to the campaign trail on and off since he returned. He ran for district attorney in 1986 (losing again); for chief justice of Alabama's Supreme Court in 1999 (he won, though he was forced to step down in 2003); was floated for a run for president with the Constitution Party in 2004; ran for governor of Alabama in 2006 (losing in the GOP primary); ran for governor again in 2010 (and lost again); and then formed an exploratory committee for the 2012 presidential elections before dropping out.

At the gun rights event in Homewood, Moore lowered his head as the leader of the gun rights group ticked through the judges accomplishments on the bench. Moore then took the mic.

"When I hear you say what Ive done, I think to myself, its really not what Ive done; its what God has done through me by putting me in a position to stand for what I believe," Moore said. "Im not running for this position. Im running to serve God and his will.

The core of Moores ideology is that he denies the legitimacy of state law when it conflicts with his perception of Christian precepts. To Moore, thats because the state derives its legitimacy from God so if law passed by men contradicts that which he perceives as the law of God, the former should have no power over him or his countrymen.

This conviction resulted in the two high-profile national stories that gave Moore the name recognition now powering his Senate run. The first was his decision to install a monument to the Ten Commandments at his courthouse. Despite direct orders from a federal judge, Moore then refused to remove the monument or to cease holding a prayer session in his courtroom.

The Judeo-Christian God reigned over both the church and the state in this country, and that both owed allegiance to that God, he told the Atlantic at the time.

Moores defense in the Ten Commandments case is instructive. One conservative defense of the tablets could be that local courts should have the freedom to erect whatever monuments they want. This was not Moores argument. Instead, he said that the Ten Commandments should stay because they really are divine, and therefore more important than human law.

"The Ten Commandments are not only a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths, as the Supreme Court stated in Stone v Graham," he writes. "They are God's revealed, divine law and the basis on which our morality depends."

Moore was suspended again in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Moore has ... encouraged lawlessness by attempting to assemble a virtual army of state officials and judges to oppose the federal judiciary and its tyranny, the SPLC wrote at the time.

Its worth paying attention to exactly why Moore wrote in a 2006 LifeNet column that Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim, could not be seated by Congress. Moore argued that the Constitution is founded on specifically Christian principles; anyone whose beliefs fall outside Christian principles, by definition, falls outside that of the Constitution as well.

The Islamic faith rejects our God and believes that the state must mandate the worship of its own god, Allah, he writes. Islamic law is simply incompatible with our law.

When I asked Moore where he believes religions involvement in public life should end, Moore said that the state should not force citizens to follow a certain faith.

You cant force people to worship God in any matter, he said.

But that restriction itself, he added, stems from Christian principles. He defended the First Amendments protection of the free exercise of conscience not on the grounds that the state has a vested interest in pluralism, but because Jesus himself believed in it.

You see, the First Amendment was established on Christian principles, because it was Jesus that said this: Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and render unto God the things that are God's, Moore told me.

Islamic people practicing under Sharia law, Moore said, didnt have First Amendment protections because First Amendment protections are inescapably Christian.

Thats a Christian concept, he said of the ability to worship according to ones conscience. Its not a Muslim concept. Go to Saudi Arabia. Go to Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and be a Muslim, and see if you can exit that faith without consequences. You cant do it. You understand? Understand that its a Christian concept.

Moores fundamentalism has helped him advance politically and build a base of support in Alabama. But it has scared those in the state who believe it puts them on the other side of Moores interpretation of Gods intentions.

Moore has made an already difficult life for gay Alabamans even harder, said Alex Smith of Equality Alabama, an LGBTQ rights organization.

We are very concerned about Moore becoming a senator, Smith told me. Its been incredibly terrifying for LGBT folks in the state to watch.

Smith gave one example: Eight judges in Alabama are still not issuing marriage licenses to couples of either sex, following the guidelines of Moores order intended to prevent gay couples from wedding in the state.

New anti-LGBTQ legislation is on its way. In May, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the Child Placing Inclusion Act into law. It allows some agencies to deny LGBTQ couples the ability to adopt children; Moores nonprofit, the Foundation for Moral Law, was instrumental in its passage, according to Smith.

"Being gay in the South isn't the easiest thing," said Russell Howard, director of Druid City Pride. "But it's a whole lot harder when you have someone with Mr. Moore's positions in power."

Hezekiah Jackson, president of Birmingham's NAACP chapter, argued it would be a mistake to view God as behind Moores politics. Instead, he said that Moores religiosity represented a clever front to appeal to identity groups Christians, white men, heterosexuals.

"His thing is simple: He's a proponent of his own people, Jackson said. That's it. It's just obvious."

In Washington, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already faces an insurrectionist caucus on his right flank Sens. Rand Paul (KY), Mike Lee (UT), Ted Cruz (TX) that believes the Republican establishment is too eager to compromise with Democrats.

Moore would go further than any of them. If he makes it to Capitol Hill, hed bring a new conservative rebelliousness to the Senate chamber informed by an eye toward God.

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Church over state - Vox

Spotlight Innovation Enters into Sponsored Research Agreement with Indiana University to Develop New Therapies for … – Markets Insider

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URBANDALE, Iowa, Aug. 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --Spotlight Innovation Inc. (OTCQB: STLT) today announced that the Company has entered into a Sponsored Research Agreement with Indiana University to support research directed by Elliot Androphy, M.D., aimed at developing safe and effective drugs to treat patients with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Dr. Androphy is a member of Spotlight Innovation's Scientific Advisory Board and a co-inventor of STL-182, the Company's lead product candidate for SMA.

Geoffrey Laff, Ph.D., Spotlight Innovation's Senior Vice President of Business Development, commented, "Dr. Androphy is a prolific researcher and highly-respected thought leader. We are privileged to work with him to develop novel therapies for SMA."

Dr. Androphy is the Chair of the Department of Dermatology of Indiana University School of Medicine and has published widely in high-impact journals including Science, Nature, EMBO Molecular Medicine, Human Molecular Genetics, Journal of Virology, and Molecular Cell. He served as Vice Chair for Research of the Department of Medicine and Director of the M.D./Ph.D. Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where his lab characterized the disease-causing mechanism of alternative splicing of the SMN2 gene. At Indiana University School of Medicine, Dr. Androphy has used a novel, cell-based high throughput screen for compounds that increase levels of the SMN protein. This work has led to the identification of pre-clinical drug candidates for SMA.

About Spotlight Innovation Inc.

Spotlight Innovation Inc. (OTCQB: STLT) identifies and acquires rights to innovative, proprietary technologies designed to address unmet medical needs, with an emphasis on rare, emerging and neglected diseases. To find and evaluate unique opportunities, we leverage our extensive relationships with leading scientists, academic institutions and other sources. We provide value-added development capability to accelerate development progress. Whenscientifically significantbenchmarkshave been achieved, we will endeavor to partner with proven market leaders via sale, out-license or strategic alliance. For more information, visit http://www.spotlightinnovation.com or follow us on http://www.twitter.com/spotlightinno.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements herein include statements regarding Spotlight Innovation's efforts to develop and commercialize various product candidates, including STL-182, and to achieve its stated benchmarks. Actual outcomes and actual results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include risks and uncertainties, such as: the inability to finance the planned development of STL-182; the inability to hire appropriate staff to develop STL-182; unforeseen technical difficulties in developing STL-182; the inability to obtain regulatory approval for human use; competitors' therapies proving to be more effective, cheaper or otherwise more preferable; or, the inability to market a product. All of which could, among other things, delay or prevent product release, as well as other factors expressed from time to time in Spotlight Innovation's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a result, this press release should be read in conjunction with Spotlight Innovation's periodic filings with the SEC. The forward-looking statements contained herein are made only as of the date of this press release and Spotlight Innovation undertakes no obligation to publicly update such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

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Spotlight Innovation Enters into Sponsored Research Agreement with Indiana University to Develop New Therapies for ... - Markets Insider