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Global update: New Mars orbiter on ambitious mission
A school-bus sized spacecraft carrying the largest telescope ever installed in a planetary probe blasted off last week from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, beginning a seven-month journey to the Red Planet.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — 22 feet long and weighing more than two tons — will study the Martian surface and atmosphere from orbit, searching for sites where water may have once flowed, identifying potential landing sites for future surface craft and providing a powerful new relay station for transmitting data to Earth.
It is expected to return more data about Mars than all previous missions put together. “We’re up, we’re on our way to Mars, and we have a spacecraft that is performing … absolutely perfectly,” said James Graf, project manager for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
Mars was 72 million miles from Earth at launch time, but the craft will travel more than four times that distance to intercept the planet on March 10, 2006. A 30-minute burn of its main engine will slow the craft enough to put it in a highly elliptical orbit that will range from within 100 miles of the surface to 20,000 miles away from it.
For the rest of the year, the orbiter will perform a delicate manoeuvre called aero-braking in which it will dip into the upper fringes of the atmosphere about 512 times until its speed has slowed enough to bring it into a nearly circular orbit 190 miles above the planet, where it will begin its four-year mission. — Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
Baby black holes
It must be the biggest case of hiccups ever recorded: astronomers have found that some gamma ray bursts — the most powerful explosions in the universe — also produce baby black holes. And, at just seconds old, these voracious dead stars gorge on the material around them while simultaneously propelling other material away at great speeds.
The hiccups show that gamma ray bursts, until now thought to be enormous single events, are actually made up of several explosions. “Stars are exploding two, three and sometimes four times in the first minutes following the initial explosion,” said David Burrows of Penn State, the lead author of a paper appearing online on Science Express and in the Sept 9 issue of Science.
“First comes a blast of gamma rays, followed by intense pulses of x-rays. The energies involved are much greater than anyone expected.” Keith Mason, the chief executive of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, said he was surprised by the new data.
“Until now, we had assumed that stars died in a single massive explosion, creating a baby black hole and an even afterglow of dying embers.” But new data beamed down from the Nasa satellite Swift showed that the newly formed black hole starts to eat up the material around it, releasing enough energy for several more explosions.
Space tourism
It will be the trip of a lifetime: a fortnight in space, including a gentle cruise around the moon with plenty of time to take pictures. Lifetime membership of one of the world’s most exclusive clubs (current membership: 27 Apollo astronauts) is included. The only sticking point might be the price — the two-week, 250,000-mile journey to the far side of the moon will cost a cool $100m.
The company that took the first private passengers into space is now offering super-rich adventurers the very latest in extreme exploration. Eric Anderson, the chief executive of the Virginia-based Space Adventures, has announced that he wants to send fee-paying passengers on a close orbit of the moon by 2009.
Space Adventures took the American billionaire and former Nasa scientist Dennis Tito to the International Space Station in 2001 for $20m. The following year, the South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth made the same trip. In October the New Jersey scientist Greg Olsen will become the world’s third space tourist.
The proposed expedition, on board a modified Russian Soyuz capsule, would take just over a fortnight in total and passengers would see the far side of the moon from an altitude of 62 miles.
Faulty cellphones
Many of us are used to the frustration caused by a faulty mobile phone, but now it is official: one in seven handsets develops a fault within a year of purchase, according to a survey published recently.
The consumer watchdog magazine Which? questioned a panel of nearly 2,500 people about their recent mobile phone experiences. The results uncovered alarming evidence of widespread malfunction and failure.
The worst offender singled out by the report was mobile network 3, which launched the UK’s first third-generation (3G) network more than two years ago and has in excess of 3 million customers nationwide.
Handsets from phone manufacturers Motorola and Sony Ericsson had the highest reported number of malfunctions, with around one in five owners complaining of faults. Motorola, which is one of the world’s biggest handset manufacturers, released a terse statement saying that the company “puts the utmost priority on ensuring that our products meet and deliver the best consumer experience and standards in quality”.
The best-performing handsets came from the market leaders Nokia and Samsung, with less than one in ten of their phones developing a fault.
Poachers and the tsunami
Thousands of people were killed when the December tsunami struck Sri Lanka because poachers had removed coral reefs that would have shielded the coastline from the worst of the waves.
Scientists from the US and Sri Lanka who have surveyed the area say the pattern of destruction onshore matches the illegal mining of coral offshore. In the south-western town of Peraliya, where the research team found coral removed, a 10-metre wave surged more than a mile inland and killed 1,700 people when it swept a passenger train 50 metres off its tracks.
Two miles south in Hikkaduwa where the intact coral reef is protected by hotel owners as a tourist resource, the wave reached a height of three metres, and went inland just 50 metres, causing no deaths. The difference is not attributed to coastline features but the fact that the intact coral, just a few metres from the beach, blocked the wall of water and significantly reduced its height.
Skin from foetus
Skin from an aborted foetus has been used to create skin grafts to treat eight children with deep second- and third-degree burns, Swiss scientists reported last week.
Patrick Hohfield and colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne reported in the online edition of The Lancet that they had developed a “bank” of tissue from a small patch of skin taken after a terminated pregnancy, with the mother’s consent. —
Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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