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Is all this space travel worthwhile? Will it really contribute to our civilization or our touchingly naive way of life? Will it even lift our spirits? I cannot be sure about the first two, as I feel these might be permanently floating somewhere out there. But I have some space-sourced spirit lifting to share. Japan's Sapporo Breweries, the entity that brings you those large silver tins of beer to complement your rainbow roll, announced this week that it is launching space beer.

Shortly after the first of the year (if not already), the Large Hadron Collider — the most powerful particle accelerator ever built — will smash protons together at record energies. If the Earth remains intact, doomsayers will once again have been falsified. Every time they forecast the demise of the planet, those prophets of Earthly annihilation prove themselves no more foresightful than mortgage bankers or phony psychics.

It seems there really is water on the moon, a major discovery that, like every answer to a great question, trails thousands of unanswered questions in its wake. Let us review the facts, or, at least, the facts as I understand them from my in-depth academic perusal of the headline crawl across the bottom of the screen on CNN. The lunar craft Chandrayaan-1, launched by India in October 2008, revealed a small amount of water on the moon, concentrated at the lunar poles. The craft wasn't manned , so presumably some kind of instrument relayed the news.

You won’t want to miss an interview with Debra Fischer now available on the MarketSaw site. The latter is a blog focused on 3D motion pictures, and thus the interest in Fischer’s work on Alpha Centauri draws from a cinematic base. Specifically, James Cameron’s new movie Avatar depicts a gas giant with a habitable moon around it, and the MarketSaw editors are interested in whether such a planet could exist around one of the Centauri stars. The interview that follows, discussing Fischer’s ongoing hunt for Centauri planets, is prime reading. I’ll quote from it, but you’ll want to read the...

We don’t exactly know what to call GJ 758 B, which may be a brown dwarf or simply a large planet of between ten and forty Jupiter masses. But the detection is being hailed as the first direct observation of a ‘planet-like object’ orbiting a star similar to our own Sun. We have the new High Contrast Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics (HiCIAO), recently attached to the Subaru Telescope and working in the near infrared, to thank for the detection.

Please try to resist the childish jokes, but the fact is that the odd tilt of Uranus may be the result of a particularly large moon. Uranus spins on an axis almost parallel with the plane of the solar system, rather than perpendicular to it -- though why it does this nobody knows. One theory is that the tilt is the result of a collision with an Earth-sized object, but this "hasn't succeeded in explaining much of anything", says Ignacio Mosqueira of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Why, for example, are the orbits of Uranus's 27 known moons...

The cool climate of Antarctica was a refuge for animals fleeing climate change during the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history, suggests a new fossil study. The discovery may have implications for how modern animals will adapt to global warming. Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, about 90 per cent of land species were wiped out as global temperatures soared. A cat-sized distant relative of mammals, Kombuisia antarctica, seems to have survived the extinction by fleeing south to Antarctica. Jörg Fröbisch, a geologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, and colleagues rediscovered fossils of...

Massive supernova produced rainbow of elements for months. Bang! The collapse of a massive star created a previously unseen type of supernova.NASA Astronomers have watched the violent death of what was probably the most massive star ever detected. The supernova explosion, which lasted for months, is thought to have generated more than 50 Suns' worth (1032 kilograms) of different elements, which may one day go on to make new solar systems. The explosion — dubbed SN2007bi — was spotted as part of a digital survey to hunt for supernovae at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California. One supernova in...

WASHINGTON — Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) said Dec. 3 that it expects to launch its cargo-carrying Dragon capsule on its first flight to the international space station (ISS) sometime between May and November 2010. In a press release, the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company said it had conducted Dragon operations training in October for a group of NASA astronauts to bring them up to speed on how the ISS crew will interface with the capsule while it is approaching and berthed to the station.

It took humans thousands of years to explore our own planet and centuries to comprehend our neighboring planets, but nowadays new worlds are being discovered every week. To date, astronomers have identified more than 370 “exoplanets,” worlds orbiting stars other than the sun. Many are so strange as to confirm the biologist J. B. S. Haldane’s famous remark that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” There’s an Icarus-like “hot Saturn” 260 light-years from Earth, whirling around its parent star so rapidly that a year there lasts less than three days. Circling...

An Anglo-French study has revealed that long before the English Channel there was a giant river which ran south from an area of the North Sea. Previous research found that 500,000 years ago a range of low hills connected Britain to Europe between the Weald in South-East England and Artois in northern France. But during a series of ice ages beginning 450,000 years ago huge ice sheets covered much of northern Europe, trapping a portion of the North Sea the size of East Anglia. The great rivers of Europe poured into this lake at the southern end of the North...

William Patterson, from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, and his colleagues have shown that switching off the North Atlantic circulation can force the Northern hemisphere into a mini 'ice age' in a matter of months. Previous work has indicated that this process would take tens of years. Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by a mini ice-age, known by scientists as the Younger Dryas, and nicknamed the 'Big Freeze', which lasted around 1300 years. Geological evidence shows that the Big Freeze was brought about by a sudden influx of freshwater, when the glacial Lake Agassiz in...

New evidence has made it more likely that remnants of Martian microbes were transported to Earth in a meteorite, it was revealed today. A study by scientists from the American space agency Nasa has found chemical signatures in the rock strongly associated with life. The discovery strengthens the case for believing that worm-like structures in the meteorite are 'microfossils' of ancient Martian bugs. Sceptics have pointed out that similar-shaped structures could be formed from non-biological processes. Another unanswered question is whether the microfossils were the result of contamination by Earthly bacteria. This was originally ruled out by Nasa but has...

The new research may help explain why large galaxies tend to have super-massive black holes at their cores. Astronomers have long wanted an answer to the chicken-and-egg question of what comes first, a super-massive black hole or the stars surrounding it. A new observation of a far away object five billion light years from Earth may now help to solve the riddle. The object is a quasar, a powerful source of energy believed to mark the location of an active giant black hole. Nothing that gets close enough to a black hole can escape its powerful gravity. However, material swirling...

"What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue," Post told the newspaper. "We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there. This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it." The newspaper said the scientists took cells from a live pig's muscles and immersed them in a mixture of other animal products. The cells reportedly multiplied and created muscle tissue that could be turned into something resembling steak by artificially "exercising"...

He shows a fascination with science, an all-too deliberate decision-making demeanor, an adherence to logic and some pretty, ahem, prominent ears. They all add up to a quite logical conclusion, at least for "Star Trek" fans: Barack Obama is Washington's Mr. Spock, the chief science officer for the ship of state. "I guess it's somewhat unusual for a politician to be so precise, logical, in his thought process," actor Leonard Nimoy, who has portrayed Spock for more than 40 years, told The Associated Press in an e-mail interview. "The comparison to Spock is, in my opinion, a compliment to him...

Every field has its holy relics, the objects that are held in such high regard by those who practice in that field, or admire the field, that they are imbued with almost holy significance. Space is like that. There are the Moon rocks; the Apollo, Mercury, and Gemini capsules; and, for the most devout, the historical sites where important things happened, like the launch pads where vehicles first left Earth. In the United States, many of these relics are displayed in the closest equivalent Americans have to a church of spaceflight, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in...

NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center employee Justin Junell of Slidell received the prestigious Silver Snoopy award Oct. 22 during a special ceremony held in conjunction with the Stennis Health and Safety Day. Junell is a theoretical simulation technologist for NASA’s Engineering and Test Directorate at Stennis. He was honored for outstanding and distinguished contributions on the shuttle gaseous hydrogen flow control valve test project, especially his role in quantifying the risk and substantiating the safety rationale for continued shuttle program use of the existing configurations of the shuttle’s external liquid hydrogen-2 tank flight pressurization system flow control valve.

A new NASA study of a Martian meteorite that made headlines 13 years ago strengthens the original claim that the rock contains evidence of life on ancient Mars. Researchers at the Johnson Space Center used advanced electron microscopes that weren't available in 1996 to re-examine the magnetite crystals on the meteorite. The meteorite, called ALH84001, was blasted from the surface of Mars 16 million years ago, scientists say, and is thought to have landed on Earth 13,000 years ago. An American scientist found it in Antarctica in 1984.

When you consider that conventional chemical rockets extract a mere 10-8 of the energy locked up in their fuel, the attraction of antimatter becomes undeniable. Could we build an engine that extracts 100 percent of the energy created by matter-antimatter annihilation? Louis Crane (Kansas State University) is dubious, pointing to problems of storage and the difficulty of making enough antimatter to get the job done.

While the idea was tabled several years ago, with suggestions it could even have launched by 2007, no progress has so far been made. However, now Nasa has issued a “teaming opportunity”, offering private companies and designers the chance to help create the craft. The team behind the concept hope that it will be accepted as one of the space agency’s “Discovery” missions, aimed at swiftly and (relatively) inexpensively exploring other worlds in our solar system. Other recent proposals that been put forward for Discovery include a nuclear-powered robot sailing-boat to plough the seas of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Nasa scientists have produced the most compelling evidence yet that bacterial life exists on Mars. It showed that microscopic worm-like structures found in a Martian meteorite that hit the Earth 13,000 years ago are almost certainly fossilised bacteria. The so-called bio-morphs are embedded beneath the surface layers of the rock, suggesting that they were already present when the meteorite arrived, rather than being the result of subsequent contamination by Earthly bacteria. “This is very strong evidence of life on Mars,” said David Mackay, a senior scientist at the Nasa Johnson Space Centre , who was part of the team of...

Copenhagen’s sex trade did brisk business during the recent business climate conference. The global climate challenge may have been on the daytime agenda during the recent World Business Summit climate conference in Copenhagen, but in the evenings many businessmen, politicians and civil servants are reported to have availed themselves of the capital’s prostitutes. “We’ve been extremely busy. Politicians also need to relax after a long day,” says ‘Miss Dina’, herself a prostitute.

The discovery could offer clues in the search for life on Mars and beyond, researchers said in October at a meeting of the Geological Society of America... The microbes were found on the walls of lava tubes in Hawaii, New Mexico, and the Portuguese Azores islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean... The finds include "a lovely blue-green ooze dripping out of the [cave] ceiling in Hawaii; a vein of what looks like a gold, crunchy mineral in New Mexico; and, in the Azores, amazing pink hexagons," said Diana Northup, a geomicrobiologist at the University of New Mexico... Lava...

An engineer peers at damaged magnets inside the Large Hadron Collider on December 11, 2008 -- almost a month after an electrical glitch stopped the first attempt at sending a beam of protons around the world's largest particle accelerator. After more than a year of repairs, physicists now have both beams of protons stable and circulating though the collider's main ring, LHC managers announced on November 23, 2009. Photograph courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERN

Water-on-moon discovery doesn't align with 'trends' Tuesday, November 24, 2009 3:18 AM By JOE BLUNDO A few days have passed since we learned that the moon has water, but I'm still not over it. Water on the moon! It's astounding, isn't it? At least a little? I checked Google Trends for Nov. 13, the day NASA made the announcement. "Water on the moon" finished 10th -- behind search terms such as "Tony Alamo," "Tia Mowery wedding pictures" and "Wal-Mart Black Friday." The next day, the topic didn't make the list. Granted, Google Trends -- a daily look at the most...

A nondescript sign along an anonymous road east of Dallas announces the location of bustling and urbane Caddo Mills Municipal Airport (former home of Southwest Soaring, phone number now obscured by time or paint). A passing traveler might overlook the large white hangar with the doors wide enough to admit the reaching wings of delicate glider planes.

Join us for a lively chat during the show. "V" returns in Spring 2010, after the Winter Olympics.

This autumn, China and the U.S. began moving toward greater cooperation in space. As China lifted a little more of the veil covering its space program, U.S. officials expressed a greater desire to work together in exploring space. Presidential science adviser John Holdren floated the idea of increased cooperation in human spaceflight last spring. The Augustine committee raised the idea again, and Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao pledged to deepen space cooperation last week

BOULDER, Colo. – Call it Operation: Plymouth Rock. A plan to send a crew of astronauts to an asteroid is gaining momentum, both within NASA and industry circles. Not only would the deep space sojourn shake out hardware, it would also build confidence in long-duration stints at the moon and Mars. At the same time, the trek would sharpen skills to deal with a future space rock found on a collision course with Earth. In Lockheed Martin briefing charts, the mission has been dubbed "Plymouth Rock – An Early Human Asteroid Mission Using Orion." Lockheed is the builder of NASA's...

Scientists from Northern Illinois University and Nasa's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston found dozens of valleys, shown in red, after using new software to analyse images of the surface and create the most accurate map to date. The valleys, first spotted in 1971, were caused by a network of rivers more than twice as extensive as previously mapped, pictured right. The new map shows water channels in a belt between the equator and mid-southern latitudes. Experts say this is consistent with heavy rain, and the presence of an ocean covering most of Mars's northern half. "It would also explain...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Nov. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne today helped boost into orbit an Intelsat communications satellite that will provide data, voice and video services for the Americas, Europe and Africa. The satellite includes Intelsat’s first Internet Router In Space. The mission, AV-024, launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket powered by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne’s RL10 upper-stage engine and the RD AMROSS RD-180 booster engine. Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is a unit of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX). RD AMROSS LLC is a joint venture of...

There’s a tremendous opportunity in space right now, a rare alignment of technology and interests that only comes once every couple of generations. What’s missing is something to push it over the edge and get it flying, to pique people’s and industry’s interests in such a way that it takes off and is sustainable. In the wake of the Augustine report, many articles have been written discussing where to go and what launchers to use, but the most important aspect—the political one—has gotten scant attention. The Obama Administration is facing a spectrum of problems, most with more political prominence than...

In 2004, the European Space Agency released a design study called “Human Missions to Mars: Overall Architecture Assessment”. This study was undertaken after a decade of work, notably by David Baker, Jim French, and Robert Zubrin, which established that local propellant production using the Martian atmosphere would be a key technology for practical human access to the Red Planet.

Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to announce the creation and initial membership of the Spaceports Council, composed of spaceports worldwide who seek to cooperate on issues of common interest such as airspace access, legal and regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, international policy migration, liability, and voluntary common operating standards.

I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby. This first one I put together from two of the south polar plume images – you can see all four of the tiger stripes, and the plumes issuing from them, in this wide shot. I mosaicked two images, matching their levels, rotated them 180 degrees to put "ground" at the bottom and "sky" at the top, and filled in a little of the background in the corner at lower right to fill out the whole image. Enceladan south polar vents...

United States President Barack Obama is preparing to make his first official trip to Asia this week, and a growing list of important economic and defense-related issues are on his agenda. From the time he touches down in Tokyo on Thursday until the time he flies home from Seoul - stops in Singapore, Shanghai and Beijing are also planned - Obama is going to be watched closely back home. Obama's visit to China is going through some last-minute changes due to recent remarks about China's plans for space by General Xu Qiliang, commander of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Air...

All the organic material extracted from the corpse has therefore now been identified and is conserved in responsible hands,’ a spokesman for the museum said. ‘On the basis of considerable historical documentation, there are no doubts about the authenticity of the items.’ The relics will be exhibited from early 2010, when the museum will re-open after current renovation work and will change its name to the Galileo museum. SNIP Clerics eventually denounced him to the Roman Inquisition in 1615 over his support of a heliocentric, or Sun-centered, view of the universe. Although he was cleared of any offence at that...

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce. "Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team... Gill's team rules this out by putting a more accurate date on the decline and fall...

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again, a Florence museum said Friday. Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed by enthusiastic admirers from the astronomer's body in 1737, 95 years after his death, while his corpse was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb, opposite the tomb of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. One of the fingers was recovered soon after,...

A radiation-resistant version of NRAM carbon-nanotube-based memory, developed jointly by Lockheed Martin and Nantero, was tested on a recent Space Shuttle mission. The NRAM was incorporated by NASA into special autonomous testing configurations installed into a carrier at the aft end of the payload bay. It was launched into space as part of STS-125, the May 2009 mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis that successfully serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. The project was managed by Dan Powell, Chief Nanotechnologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

President Dmitry Medvedev says Russia will prioritize the development of nuclear energy, especially the use of nuclear technology in spacecraft. Medvedev made the announcement Thursday during his annual address to the Federal Assembly. This was not the first time that Russia has suggested the development of nuclear-powered spacecraft. Anatoly Perminov, the head of Federal Space Agency Roscosmos, said last month that the agency has planned to develop spacecraft with a megawatt-class nuclear power set.

Dark energy isn't good for life in the universe. This mysterious substance, which cosmologists believe makes up around 70 percent of the universe, may eventually pull apart galaxies, then stars and planets, and finally atoms and molecules, in what some call the Big Rip. It’s ironic, then, that the search for dark energy might help in the search for life in the universe. That's because planet hunting through a technique called microlensing requires a similar sort of instrument as a dark energy mission.

Want to make a planet that can sustain carbon-based life? Don’t park it in orbit around a sunlike star. “For the long term, the sun may not be the best star,” says Edward Guinan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, coauthor of a paper reporting a new model about the suitability of planets for life. Smaller, cooler stars called orange dwarf stars might be the most hospitable, he says.

WASHINGTON — America's once clear dominance in space is eroding as other nations, including China, Iran and North Korea, step up their activities, a panel of experts told the House subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics Thursday. "Others are catching up fast," said Marty Hauser, vice president for Washington operations at the Space Foundation, an advocacy organization headquarters in Colorado Springs. "Of particular note over the past decade is the emergence of China's human spaceflight capabilities."

LIBERIA, Costa Rica — Franklin Chang Diaz has great aspirations for his rocket: a mail-carrier for outer space, a garbage truck for orbital debris and, the ultimate goal, a shuttle to Mars. The Costa Rica-born physicist speaks nonchalantly about the day humankind will have moved entirely to outer space, while our precious Earth becomes “a protected park.” “Our great grandchildren will always be able to come back [to Earth] from wherever they happen to live and see where their ancestors and culture came from,” said the former NASA astronaut who is now president and CEO of the Ad Astra Rocket...

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery in April 1990. It is named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. Although not the first space telescope, the Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well-known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. The HST is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, and is one of NASA’s Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Clocks are clocks are clocks – or so you may think. However, some clocks are astronomical both literally and metaphorically. Here is a great selection of astronomical clocks of Europe.

It's a solid doomsday prediction that in about 5 billion years the dying sun will expand as a bloated red giant and engulf the Earth. But imagine if in just a few weeks the middle-aged sun suddenly ballooned out to the orbit of Saturn and immediately vaporized Earth and most of the other planets in the solar system! And, even before this happened, imagine that every morning you awoke the sun was ever more sweltering until it began evaporating the oceans, spontaneously starting forests ablaze, and melting asphalt! This sounds like the stuff of a far-out science fiction movie. But...

A new image of the bulge at the center of a distant spiral galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is giving astronomers insight into how these galactic paunches form. The image of NGC 4710 is part of a survey that astronomers have conducted to learn more about the formation of bulges, which are a substantial component of most spiral galaxies. When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges are more easily distinguishable from the disc. The detailed edge-on view of NGC 4710, taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows the galaxy's bulge in...