Panel says planned NASA rocket won't do the job

Illustration of Ares 1 Rocket set to replace the space shuttle

The committee charged with reviewing NASA's spaceflight program concludes that the Ares 1 rocket being developed to take astronauts into space after the Space Shuttle is retired is the wrong vehicle for the job.

That's because the rocket is more sophisticated than what is needed to ferry crew from Earth to orbit. Also, given the current budget, it is too costly for something that would serve as a "trucking service to low Earth-orbit," said committee chairman Norman Augustine October 22.

Augustine made his remarks during a press briefing in which the committee unveiled its final report. The White House charged the independent panel with reviewing the U.S. human space flight program because the space shuttle is set to retire next year. (The White House released the panel's summary report on September 8.

At the briefing, Augustine, retired chairman and CEO of the Lockheed Martin Corp., reiterated the committee's basic finding — that without an extra $30 billion in funding over the next 10 years, a plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 and then send them on to Mars won't be possible.

But the final report also details the pros and cons of several different options to reach those goals, assuming the extra $30 billion is provided. The Ares 1 rocket, which would launch a new Orion crew vehicle also under development, probably won't be ready until 2017 at the earliest. That delay would not only create a seven-year gap before a U.S. craft could send astronauts into space again, but would also mean that the rocket could do little to service the International Space Station, even if the station's lifetime is extended until 2020, noted panel member Edward Crawley of MIT.

The central question, Crawley said, is not whether the Ares 1 can be built, "but if it should be built." Other options suggested by the panel would include contracting commercial firms to transport both cargo and humans into low-Earth orbit. Instead of spending extra money to develop its own transport, NASA might be better off investing in technologies that would extend human exploration to Mars and beyond, Augustine said.

However, in a press statement released just after the briefing, House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Chairwoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) disagreed. She noted that the Ares 1-Orion program is in good shape and that "we are not prepared to have our astronauts' access to space held hostage to purchases of seats from nonexistent commercial providers."

The panel also said that NASA's administrator should be given broad powers to tailor NASA's workforce — adding or laying off people as needed, depending upon the workload. In the past, Augustine said, the White House and Congress have not allowed NASA to freely expand or contract its workforce as needed.

[SOURCE: SCIENCENEWS.ORG]

NASA Budget Too Slim to Reach Moon by 2020, Panel Says

A White House panel charged with reviewing NASA's exploration plans has dropped any hope of sending astronauts directly to Mars and found the space agency's budget too slim to accomplish its goal of returning humans to the moon by 2020.

After more than six hours of public deliberation on Wednesday, the 10-member committee overseeing the Review for U.S. Human Space Flight Plans decided not to include a plan to send astronauts straight to Mars - called Mars Direct - on its list of options to be considered by President Barack Obama because of its daunting challenges and cost.

"We think Mars Direct is a mission that we're really not prepared to take on technically or financially, and it would likely not succeed," said the committee's chairman Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO, late Wednesday after the televised meeting in Washington, D.C. "I really want to emphasize that we're not giving up on Mars at all."

A manned Mars mission is the ultimate goal, but shifting all of NASA's focus on getting there as soon as possible is not feasible, he added.

The committee is expected to present its initial report to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and White House science adviser John Holdren on Friday and file a final version for President Obama's review by the end of the month.

Augustine's committee is reviewing NASA's plan to retire its aging space shuttle fleet and replace it with a capsule-based Orion spacecraft as part of a larger effort to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. But NASA's current budget for human spaceflight through 2020 is not enough to cover the costs of achieving its baseline lunar goal, let alone other alternative options, the committee found.

NASA has a budget of about $80 billion for human spaceflight through 2020, about $28 billion less than projected when it first chose the Orion spacecraft and its Ares rockets to succeed the space shuttle fleet. Orion spacecraft are not expected to begin operational flights until 2015, the committee said.

Augustine said that NASA's exploration budget has been cut repeatedly since announcing the new space exploration plan in 2005, hindering its progress. Technical and other delays have also led to the current shortfall, he added. Still he and his committee were surprised none of their options fit in NASA's current budget.

Last week, the committee culled a list of 3,000 options for human spaceflight down to about seven different scenarios.

On Wednesday, committee members refined that list down to four general scenarios that include more funding. They include building Orion spacecraft for eventual manned mission to the moon, as well as options for sending astronauts farther out into deep space to visit near-Earth asteroids or the stable Lagrange points around Earth by the mid- to late-2020s or 2030.

Only one of the four scenarios includes NASA's planned Ares I rocket, the booster designed to launch Orion capsules into space. Some included extending the International Space Station's lifetime beyond 2016 to 2020.

The committee strongly favored encouraging commercial vehicles for launching astronauts into orbit and suggested setting $2.5 billion aside between 2011 and 2014 to spur development in those spacecraft.

It also included options that included spacecraft more heavily derived from current space shuttles, as well as current unmanned heavy-lift rockets like the Delta 4 Heavy and variants of NASA's giant Ares V rocket envisioned to launch lunar landers into orbit.

The potential for in-orbit refueling was cited as a key technological goal for some committee members. But adequate funding is key if NASA is to tackle an innovative, inspiring program that can capture the attention of the American public, committee members said.

"Our view is that it will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area," Augustine said.

[SOURCE: SPACE.COM]

LHC STARTS IN NOVEMBER

When launched to great fanfare nearly a year ago, some feared the Large Hadron Collider would create a black hole that would suck in the world. It turns out the Hadron may be the black hole.

The world's largest scientific machine has cost $10 billion, has worked only nine days and has yet to smash an atom. The unique equipment in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel with cathedral-sized detectors deep beneath the Swiss-French border has been assembled by specialists in many countries, with 8,970 physicists eagerly awaiting the startup.

But despite the expense, thousands of physicists around the world, many of whom hope to conduct experiments here, insist that it will work and that it is crucial to mankind'sunderstanding of the universe.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, said Friday it would restart the collider in November at half power under pressure from scientists eager to conduct experiments to unlock secrets of the universe.

But spokesman James Gillies told The Associated Press they would have to shut down yet again next year to finish repairs so that the Large Hadron Collider can operate at full energy of 7 trillion electron volts — seven times higher than any other machine in the world.

CERN has been working since late last year to repair the damage caused by a faulty electrical joint. The breakdown occurred nine days after the spectacular start up of the $10 billion machine last Sept. 10 when beams of subatomic particles were sent around the accelerator in opposite directions.

Fifty-three massive electrical magnets had to be cleaned and repaired after the failure. Tons of supercold liquid helium spilled out of the system, and a sooty residue had to be cleared from the tubes that are meant to be pristine, holding a vacuum in which subatomic particles can whiz around the tunnel at near the speed of light at temperatures colder than outer space.

Michio Kaku, a physics professor at City University of New York who is an outspoken critic of waste in big science projects, defends the CERN collider as a crucial investment.

CERN expects repairs and additional safety systems to cost about 40 million Swiss francs ($37 million) over the course of several years, covered by the 20-nation organization's budget.

The collider emerged as the world's largest after the U.S. canceled the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas in 1993. Congress pulled the plug after costs soared, and questions were raised about the value of the science it could produce.

Gillies says all 20 of CERN's member nations have remained supportive and that four other countries — Cyprus, Israel, Serbia and Turkey — have asked to join. A fifth country — Slovenia — has expressed interest.

Japan, India, Russia and the U.S. are observer countries that have made sizable contributions to the CERN project.

CERN is now aiming to restart the machine in November with beams of subatomic particles initially running at 3.5 trillion electron volts, or TeV. That's only half the level the machine was designed for, but it's still 3 1/2 times higher than the second most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago. During last year's brief startup phase, the CERN collider only operated at half the Fermilab level.

Even as the machine is being calibrated this winter, scientists will be able to conduct experiments, collecting data on the collisions of protons and lead ions in the accelerator.

They hope the higher energy will enable them to see particles so far undetected, such as the elusive Higgs boson, which in theory gives mass to other particles — and objects and creatures — in the universe.

Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom's nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles. And they still have other questions about antimatter, dark matter and particle mass they want to answer with CERN's new collider.

They hope the fragments that come off the collisions will show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe. The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing quickly.

Some skeptics have expressed fears the high-energy collision of protons could imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes — subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

CERN and leading physicists dismiss the fears and maintain the project is safe.

The collider's teething problems are typical of complicated accelerators, but it has been especially frustrating to physicists from around the world, who already have been waiting for years to conduct their experiments on the machine.

They decided some of the splices need to be repaired before the collider goes to full power, but that they can operate safely up to 5 TeV without further repairs now.

That has been set as the highest energy for the collider before its next shutdown for maintenance, probably in November 2010. Then the further repairs will be made so that the energy level can be ramped up.

Rolf Heuer, who has taken over as CERN's director-general since the failure, said the collider has been studied very carefully and is much better understood than a year ago.

"We can look forward with confidence and excitement to a good run through the winter and into next year," Heuer said.

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DISCOVERY RETURNS HOME

Discovery Lands in Florida

Space shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven safely touched down at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:14 p.m. EDT on Saturday, March 28.

The weather cooperated enough to allow the spacecraft to land on the second opportunity.

Mission Specialist Sandra Magnus also returned to Earth with the STS-119 crew.

Magnus spent 129 days aboard the International Space Station as flight engineer for Expedition 18. Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata took her place on the orbiting laboratory and will return to Earth with the STS-127 crew.

The 13-day mission included three spacewalks, about 6-hours a piece, to install the S6 truss and enormous starboard-side solar arrays. They also unfurled the arrays and performed other get-ahead tasks.

Mission STS-119's crew of seven completed a successful mission aboard the International Space Station -- increasing the orbiting laboratory's power capacity and giving it the ability to accommodate additional crew members in the future.

[SOURCE: NASA.GOV]

DISCOVERY UNDOCKS WITH ISS

A video camera aboard space shuttle Discovery captured this image of the International Space Station shortly after undocking

Space shuttle Discovery undocked from the International Space Station at 3:53 p.m. EDT Wednesday.

At 5:09 p.m., the first of two separation burns was performed to move Discovery away from the station to start the journey home. The final separation burn occurred at 5:37 p.m.The STS-119 crew is scheduled to go to sleep at 10:13 p.m. EDT. They will wake at 6:13 a.m. Thursday and perform a late inspection of Discovery’s thermal protection system using the shuttle robotic arm and the Orbital Boom Sensor System around 10:28 a.m.

Discovery's first landing opportunity at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., will be Saturday at 1:43 p.m.

Commander Lee Archambault leads Discovery's crew of seven, along with Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold and Sandy Magnus on mission STS-119.

The STS-119 crew members flew the S6 truss segment and installed the final set of power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station. The S6 truss completes the backbone of the station and provides one-fourth of the total power needed to support a crew of six.

[SOURCE: NASA.GOV]

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NASA SATELLITE CRASHES

Nasa's first dedicated mission to measure carbon dioxide from space has failed following a rocket malfunction.

Officials said the fairing - the part of the rocket which covers the satellite on top of the launcher - did not separate properly.

Data indicates the spacecraft crashed into the ocean near Antarctica.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was intended to help pinpoint the key locations on our planet's surface where CO2 is being emitted and absorbed.

Nasa officials confirmed the loss of the satellite at a press conference held at 1300 GMT.

John Brunschwyler, from Orbital Sciences Corporation, the rocket's manufacturer, told journalists: "Our whole team, at a very personal level, is very disappointed in the events of this morning."

He added: "The fairing has considerable weight relative to the portion of the vehicle that's flying. So when it separates off, you get a jump in acceleration. We did not have that jump in acceleration.

"As a direct result of carrying that extra weight, we could not make orbit."

The $270m (£190m) mission was launched on a Taurus XL - the smallest ground-launched rocket currently in use by the US space agency.

Since its debut in 1994, this type of rocket has flown eight times, with six successes and two failures including this launch. But this is the first time Nasa has used the Taurus XL.

The US space agency will now put together a "Mishap Investigation Board" to determine the root cause of the nose cone's failure to come off three minutes into the launch.

Onlookers watched the launcher soar into the sky from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 0955 GMT on Tuesday.

The first indication of a problem came in an announcement made by the Nasa launch commentator, George Diller.

"This is Taurus launch control. We have declared a launch contingency, meaning that we did not have a successful launch tonight," he said.

HOW SATELLITE SHOULD HAVE LAUNCHED

Separation of the fairing was one of the last technical hurdles faced by the satellite as it flew into orbit. Orbital said there had been no changes to the design of the fairing since previous launches.

Mr Brunschwyler, programme manager for the Taurus rockets, cast doubt on any suggestion of a link between the failure and a power glitch which occurred to the vehicle just prior to launch.

"That was on a separate system, so I do not believe there was any connection," Mr Brunschwyler told journalists at the Nasa press conference.

Dr Paul Palmer, a scientist from the University of Edinburgh, UK, who was collaborating on the mission, told BBC News: "I am bitterly disappointed about the loss of OCO. My thoughts go out to the science team that have dedicated the past seven years to building and testing the instrument."

Professor John Burrows, from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who is also collaborating on the mission, commented: "The UK and European science community is a major partner in OCO and the loss of this instrument is a serious setback."

Scientists had hoped OCO would improve models of the Earth's climate and help researchers determine where the greenhouse gas is coming from and how much is being absorbed by forests and oceans.

This would have helped scientists make more accurate predictions of future climate change.

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[SOURCE: BBC]

DISCOVERY TO LAUNCH NO EARLIER THAN FEB. 22nd

Pilot Tony Antonelli uses the virtual reality lab in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center to train for some of his duties aboard the space shuttle and space station.

NASA's Space Shuttle Program managers will hold a special meeting Feb. 13 to review flow control valve data and determine whether to proceed with the Joint Flight Readiness Review, or FRR, for space shuttle Discovery's STS-119 mission to the International Space Station.

The valves under assessment channel gaseous hydrogen from the shuttle's main engines to the external fuel tank. One of these valves in shuttle Endeavour was found to be damaged after its STS-126 mission in November. As a precaution, Discovery's three gaseous hydrogen valves were removed, inspected and reinstalled.

In light of a positive outcome from the special meeting, the official launch date will be set at the FRR, although for planning purposes, the liftoff currently is scheduled for no earlier than Feb. 22.

Meanwhile, STS-119 Commander Lee Archambault and Pilot Tony Antonelli will fly to White Sands Space Harbor in Las Cruces, N.M., in T-38 training jets late today for night landing practice in NASA's shuttle training aircraft.

Space shuttle Discovery's STS-119 crew is set to fly the S6 truss segment and install the final set of power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station.

The S6 truss, with its set of large U.S. solar arrays, will complete the backbone of the station and provide one-fourth of the total power needed to support a crew of six.

The two solar array wings each have 115-foot-long arrays, for a total wing span of 240 feet. They will generate 66 kilowatts of electricity -- enough to provide about 30 2,800-square-foot homes with power.

Commander Lee Archambault will lead Discovery's crew of seven, along with Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata.

Wakata will replace Expedition 18 Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus, who will return to Earth with the STS-119 crew. Wakata will serve as a flight engineer for Expeditions 18 and 19, and return to Earth with the STS-127 crew.

Discovery's STS-119 mission to the International Space Station is targeted to lift off no earlier than Feb. 22.

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DISCOVERY AT LAUNCH PAD

Space Shuttle Discovery on Launch Pad

NASA has moved space shuttle Discovery to its launch pad for a February supply run to the international space station.

Discovery moved out to the pad Wednesday. Seven astronauts are scheduled to blast off around sunrise Feb. 12 with the space station's final set of solar wings. The crew will conduct four spacewalks to hook up the new equipment and perform maintenance.

The space shuttle also will deliver, if it's ready, a machine designed to turn astronauts' urine into safe drinking water. A similar processor that went up in November is not working, and bringing it home could help engineers understand what's wrong.

Commander Lee Archambault will lead a crew of seven, along with Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata.

One of Discovery's crew — Koichi Wakata — will replace an astronaut on the orbiting outpost and become the first Japanese to live up there.

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NASA CHIEF TO STEP DOWN

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin is planning to leave office on Jan. 20, and a short list of potential replacements is starting to emerge as the incoming Obama administration moves toward Inauguration Day.

Griffin, a veteran rocket scientist who always has said he serves at the pleasure of the president, does not expect to be offered an opportunity to stay on after President-elect Barack Obama takes office.

He and all other political appointees from the Bush administration have submitted their letters of resignation as a matter of course. All are effective Jan. 20, a Tuesday. Monday, Jan. 19, is a federal holiday, so that means the preceding Friday would be Griffin's last day in his ninth-floor office at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Friends and family are campaigning and petitioning for Obama to keep Griffin on board, but all indications are that a new NASA administrator will be nominated along with a new NASA deputy administrator sooner rather than later. The Government Accountability Office rated the impending retirement of NASA's shuttle orbiter fleet as one of the top 13 issues the new president will have to deal with in short order.

The administration is expected to nominate new NASA leadership before making any significant decisions regarding U.S. space policy and the future of the human spaceflight program.

According to congressional sources, a former astronaut who would be the first black NASA administrator leads the list of potential candidates.

Charlie Bolden flew four times on the space shuttle, including the mission to deploy NASA's flagship Hubble Space Telescope and the historic first joint U.S.-Russian shuttle mission. He also flew on a 1986 mission with then-congressman Bill Nelson, who now is the senior U.S. senator from Florida.

Nelson likely will be a key figure in the selection process. He runs the Senate committee that oversees NASA and has been advising Obama on the future of the nation's space agency. Nelson declined comment on the possibility of Bolden heading NASA.

Other potential candidates might include:

Sally Ride: who became the first American woman to fly in space in 1983. Ride, who served on the commissions that investigated both the Challenger and Columbia accidents, wrote an editorial in support of Obama during the presidential election.

Alan Stern: The principal investigator of a mission to Pluto, Stern served a short term as associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. After he left, Stern criticized NASA for ongoing cost overruns in space and planetary science missions.

Wesley Huntress: A former NASA space science chief, Huntress played a key role in the deployment of a series of vitally important planetary science missions after the 1986 Challenger accident, including the Magellan Venus Radar Mapper, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo Jupiter probe.

Scott Hubbard: Known for turning around NASA's Mars program after back-to-back failures in the late 1990s, Hubbard was a key member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. He went on to serve as a director of NASA's Ames Research Center before leaving the agency for academia.

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LHC TO BE REOPENED THIS YEAR

On 28 November the first replacement magnet for sector 3-4 was about to be lowered into the LHC tunnel.

The first replacement magnet for Sector 3-4 underwent its final preparations before being lowered into the tunnel on 28 November. This is a good indication of the progress being made on the repairs to the sector damaged on 19 September. Around a hundred CERN personnel and external contractors are engaged in the repair work and tests. By the time the Laboratory closes for the Christmas break, all the magnets needing to be repaired or simply needing to be cleaned (around fifty at most) will have been brought to the surface.

The teams are conducting tests to ensure that such an incident does not reoccur. Almost the entire machine has now been tested, with new tests having been developed and additional instrumentation being deployed.

The schedule for the LHC re-start in 2009 is being drawn up and will be announced during the Council’s December Session.

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TELESCOPES OF TOMORROW - EEET

A Modern Telescope

400 years ago, Galileo Galilei first trained a telescope on the night sky. That original telescope was relatively primitive, with a magnifying power of four. Modern telescopes have little in common with their 16th century counterpart. They are bigger, more powerful and far more complex.

A notable example is the European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT. When it goes into operation in 2017, it will be the most modern of its kind, heralding a new class of high-performance telescopes, 100 times more sensitive than today's most powerful telescopes.

This model shows what could one day be the world's biggest telescope. Its main mirror will measure 42 meters in diameter. It's been designed for the European Southern Observatory. The Extremely Large Telescope - or E.L.T as this kind of telescope is called - will give astronomers an unprecedented look at space.

The ground-based telescope will detect the visible and infra-red light that's penetrated the atmosphere. Their biggest headache is the atmosphere itself. Large modern telescopes have to be adjusted to account for the atmosphere. To correct the distortions of the incoming light, Markus Kissler-Patig and his team are applying a sophisticated technique known as Adaptive Optics. He developed it at the European Southern Observatory.

Markus Kissler-Patig thinks: "By the time they reach the telescope, the smooth images coming from space have been distorted by the earth's atmosphere. So we need to correct these distorted pictures . What we do is build a mirror into the telescope - not a smooth one, but one that we can deform. We deform it a hundred times a second - after calculating exactly how the deformations have to look to smooth out the distorted images. It passes on the smoothed-out images to the instruments. It can turn a blob into a high-definition image."

Making the mirror is a huge challenge. So far it's possible to make single mirrors with a diameter of eight meters. But 42 meters? Impossible. So the Extremely Large Telescope's main mirror will be made up of 984 smaller ones fitted together. Each part can be adjusted separately.

The makers also have to secure the telescope against earthquakes, storms and other extreme conditions. A possible site for the giant telescope is the high, dry Chajnantor plateau in Chile. The ESO has already started to build another telescope there. Called ALMA, it will have an array of antennas that will scan the universe in the radio-frequency part of the spectrum. Together, ALMA and the ELT should provide astronomers with fabulous new insights.

The scientists asking themselves if we are alone in the universe? Is there life outside our solar system, outside our planet? We'll be looking for answers to those questions. And the Europeans are prepared to pay for it. The costs of designing, constructing and operating the 42-meter telescope will exceed 800 million Euro. For that they'll get an instrument beyond the wildest dreams of Galileo - who first looked through a telescope at the night sky 400 years ago.

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STEM CELL BREAKTHROUGH

Stem Cells


The Respiratory Tract

Surgeons in Spain have carried out the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant - using a windpipe made with the patient's own stem cells.

The groundbreaking technology also means for the first time tissue transplants can be carried out without the need for anti-rejection drugs.

Five months on the patient, 30-year-old mother-of-two Claudia Castillo, is in perfect health, The Lancet reports.

She needed the transplant to save a lung after contracting tuberculosis.

The Colombian woman's airways had been damaged by the disease.

Scientists from Bristol helped grow the cells for the transplant and the European team believes such tailor-made organs could become the norm.

To make the new airway, the doctors took a donor windpipe, or trachea, from a patient who had recently died.

Then they used strong chemicals and enzymes to wash away all of the cells from the donor trachea, leaving only a tissue scaffold made of the fibrous protein collagen.

This gave them a structure to repopulate with cells from Ms Castillo herself, which could then be used in an operation to repair her damaged left bronchus - a branch of the windpipe.



1 Trachea is removed from dead donor patient
2 It is flushed with chemicals to remove all existing cells
3 Donor trachea "scaffold" coated with stem cells from the patient's hip bone marrow. Cells from the airway lining added
4 Once cells have grown (after about four days) donor trachea is inserted into patient's bronchus

By using Ms Castillo's own cells the doctors were able to trick her body into thinking the donated trachea was part of it, thus avoiding rejection.

Two types of cell were taken from Ms Castillo: cells lining her windpipe, and adult stem cells - very immature cells from the bone marrow - which could be encouraged to grow into the cells that normally surround the windpipe.


After four days of growth in the lab in a special rotating bioreactor, the newly-coated donor windpipe was ready to be transplanted into Ms Castillo.

Her surgeon, Professor Paolo Macchiarini of the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona, Spain, carried out the operation in June.

He said it looked and behaved identically to a normal human donor trachea.

The operation was a great success and just four days after transplantation the hybrid windpipe was almost indistinguishable from adjacent normal airways.

After a month, a biopsy of the site proved that the transplant had developed its own blood supply.

And with no signs of rejection four months on, Professor Macchiarini says the future chance of rejection is practically zero.

Today Ms Castillo is living an active, normal life, and once again able to look after her children Johan, 15, and Isabella, four. She can walk up two flights of stairs without getting breathless.

Professor Martin Birchall, professor of surgery at the University of Bristol who helped grow the cells for the transplant, said: "This will represent a huge step change in surgery.

He said that in 20 years time, virtually any transplant organ could be made in this way.

US scientists have already successfully implanted bladder patches grown in the laboratory from patients' own cells into people with bladder disease.

The European research team, which also includes experts from the University of Padua and the Polytechnic of Milan in Italy, is applying for funding to do windpipe and voice box transplants in cancer patients.

Clinical trials could begin five years from now, they said.

Between 50,000 and 60,000 people are diagnosed with cancer of the larynx each year in Europe, and scientists say about half them may be suitable candidates for tissue engineering transplants.

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STS 126 CREW TO CARRY OUT SPACE WALKS

Expedition 18 and STS-126 crew members take a break to participate in interviews with reporters from ABC News, CBS News and NBC News

More cargo transfers between space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station, as well as preparations for the fourth STS-126 spacewalk, occupied the shuttle and station crews Sunday.

The spacewalk is scheduled to kick off at 1:45 p.m. EST Monday and is slated to last 6.5 hours. Mission specialists Steve Bowen and Shane Kimbrough will work outside of the station on preventive maintenance on the port solar alpha rotary joint. Other tasks they will perform include installation of a video camera on the P1 truss and work on the Kibo laboratory.

In preparation for their spacewalk, Bowen and Kimbrough are spending Sunday night in the station’s Quest Airlock. The purpose of this “camp out” is to purge the nitrogen from their bodies before their planned exit from the station.

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MICROSOFT UNVEILS NEW WINDOWS 7

Microsoft has unveiled the latest version of its Windows operating system.

It promised that it will deliver a better experience for users when it arrives sometime late next year.

Windows 7 follows Vista, which Microsoft claims has been a success, but which has been subject to fierce criticism from a number of users.

When Vista launched in January 2007, many users complained that it ran slowly and failed to work at all with some programs and devices.

Corporate customers have been slow to switch from Windows XP to Vista, although Microsoft said that the operating system had an unfair press, and has enjoyed record sales.

Among the new features promised in the latest operating system are Windows Touch, which introduces support for multi-touch technology.

This will enable users to zoom in on an image by moving two fingers farther apart - a technology first introduced to millions of users by Apple's iPhone.

And there is more support for devices such as cameras, printers, and mobile phones with a product called Device Stage offering a single window to manage tasks for each device.

Microsoft also announced that its Office software will now be available as a web application, so that users can create and share documents across multiple devices.

Google already offers users online applications allowing them to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online for free.

Microsoft's Office Web will be supplied to customers who purchase the next edition of Office, but Microsoft stressed that it will provide all the same functions online as are available offline.

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MICROSOFT TO START CLOUD

Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service, in which data and applications will not be stored on individuals' computers.

The new platform, dubbed Windows Azure, was announced at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The platform was described by Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie as "Windows for the cloud".

The framework will be offered alongside the next Windows release, Windows 7.

The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software.

The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.

Microsoft believes consumers will also want to store far more of their data - from letters to photos to videos - on the servers in its "cloud" of giant data centres around the world, so that it can be accessed anywhere, from any device.

Microsoft software architect Ray Ozzie on the new "Windows for the cloud"
The move, which Microsoft sees as a major shift in its corporate strategy, was unveiled in front of 6,000 software developers from around the world.

The term cloud computing has become increasingly fashionable, as companies with large data centres start renting out space to businesses wanting to build rapidly growing online applications without needing to invest in more servers as traffic grows.

For consumers, there is the prospect of a future where much of their data and many of the applications they use could be stored online "in the cloud".

Microsoft, which still reaps huge profits from its Windows and Office products, is now moving into territory where it has so far struggled to make an impact.

Google, dominant in search and in online advertising, already has a suite of online applications living in the "cloud".

Amazon, with big data centres handling millions of e-commerce transactions, has been another pioneer in this field, with its Elastic Cloud Service.

Using the spare capacity on its servers, it allows a range of customers big and small - from Facebook application developers to the Washington Post - to build applications which can cope with a sudden rush of demand.

Microsoft is taking a different approach from some of its rivals, insisting that its customers still want to be able to choose to have their software offline, on their own computers, as well as online in the web cloud.

It's a strategy which rivals will say is designed to protect the profits from its existing software products. But the scene is set for a battle in the clouds between the few big companies wealthy enough to be able to build the huge data centres on which this new form of computing will depend.
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STS 126 TO LAUNCH ON NOV. 14

Space shuttle Endeavour’s will make a landmark contribution to the International Space Station during STS-126, Commander Chris Ferguson told reporters.

The Leonardo cargo module bolted inside Endeavour’s payload bay is carrying 19,000 pounds of equipment, including new crew quarters and facilities to eventually double the station’s full-time crew to six residents.

The Endeavour astronauts will survey the launch tower closely as part of intense training at Kennedy. They will conduct a countdown dress rehearsal Wednesday before flying back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

STS-126 is targeted for launch Nov. 14 at 7:55 p.m. EST.

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STS 126 CREW

Image above: These seven astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-126 crew portrait. Astronaut Christopher J. Ferguson, commander, is at center; and astronaut Eric A. Boe, pilot, is third from the right. Remaining crew members, pictured from left to right, are astronauts Sandra H. Magnus, Stephen G. Bowen, Donald R. Pettit, Robert S. (Shane) Kimbrough and Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper, all mission specialists. Image credit: NASA

Chandrayaan-1 enters Deep Space

Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has entered deep space after crossing the 150,000 km (one and a half lakh km) distance mark from the Earth. This happened after the successful completion of the spacecraft’s third orbit raising manoeuvre today (October 26, 2008) morning.

During this manoeuvre which was initiated at 07:08 IST, the spacecraft’s 440 Newton liquid engine was fired for about nine and a half minutes. With this, Chandrayaan-1 entered a much higher elliptical orbit around the Earth.

The apogee (farthest point to Earth) of this orbit lies at 164,600 km while the perigee (nearest point to Earth) is at 348 km. In this orbit, Chandrayaan-1 takes about 73 hours to go round the Earth once.

The antennas of the Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu are playing a crucial role in tracking and communicating with Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in such a high orbit.

The spacecraft performance is normal.

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The LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons (one of several types of hadrons) with very high kinetic energy. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics.

It is theorized that the collider will confirm the existence of the Higgs boson. This would supply a crucial missing link in the Standard Model and explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.

The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border between the Jura Mountains and the Alps near Geneva, Switzerland.

It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

The LHC is operational and is presently in the process of being prepared for collisions. The first beams were circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are expected to take place after 6-8 weeks.

The collider is contained in a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi), at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground. The 3.8 m wide concrete-lined tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988, was formerly used to house the Large Electron-Positron Collider.

Six detectors have been constructed at the LHC, located underground in large caverns excavated at the LHC's intersection points. Two of them, the ATLAS experiment and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), are large, general purpose particle detectors.

When in operation, about seven thousand scientists from eighty countries will have access to the LHC. It is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle among those predicted by the Standard Model.

The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would shed light on the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, through which the particles of the Standard Model are thought to acquire their mass. In addition to the Higgs boson, new particles predicted by possible extensions of the Standard Model might be produced at the LHC.

More generally, physicists hope that the LHC will enhance their ability to answer the following questions:

1. Is the Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model indeed realised in nature?

If so, how many Higgs bosons are there, and what are their masses?

2. Are electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force just different manifestations of a single unified force, as predicted by various Grand Unification Theories?

3. Why is gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces?

4. Is Supersymmetry realised in nature, implying that the known Standard Model particles have supersymmetric partners?

5. Will the more precise measurements of the masses and decays of the quarks continue to be mutually consistent within the Standard Model?

6. Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter?

7. What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?

8. Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we detect them?

Of the possible discoveries the LHC might make, only the discovery of the Higgs particle is relatively uncontroversial, but even this is not considered a certainty.

The total cost of the project is expected to be €3.2–6.4 billion.

The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs (€1.6 billion), with another 210 million francs (€140 million) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (€300 million) for the accelerator, and 50 million francs (€30 million) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007.

Once the supercollider is up and running, CERN scientists estimate that if the Standard Model is correct, a Higgs boson may be produced every few hours. At this rate, it may take up to three years to collect enough statistics unambiguously to discover the Higgs boson.

Although there have been questions concerning the safety of the planned experiments in the media and even through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no basis for any conceivable threat from the LHC particle collisions.

A primary concern, the appearance of micro black holes, has been dismissed due to the improbability of their production and, even if produced, their infinitesimal size and instantaneous decay.

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GOOGLE LAUNCHES INTERNET BROWSER

Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.
The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs.

Google has a suite of web apps, such as Documents, Picasa and Maps which offer functionality that is beginning to replace offline software.

The launch of a beta version of Chrome on Tuesday will be Google's latest assault on Microsoft's dominance of the PC business. The firm's Internet Explorer program dominates the browser landscape, with 80% of the market.

Writing in his blog, John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla was sanguine about the new rival.

"It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they’ve got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better."

Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves," he wrote.

He welcomed the competition and said collaboration between Mozilla and Google on certain projects would continue.

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, was more bullish.

"The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online," he said in a statement.

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