July 30, 2010

Greening The Moon And Mars Moffett Field CA (SPX) Jul 30, 2010 - Future manned missions to the Moon or Mars could use plants as bio-harvesters to extract valuable elements from the alien soils, researchers say. Now they hope to launch new experiments to follow up on tests done with plants and lunar regolith during NASA's Apollo program that landed men on the Moon. Lunar regolith is a loose mixture of dust, soil, broken rock and other related mater ... more

'Welfare robots' to ease burden in greying Japan Tokyo (AFP) July 29, 2010 - Robotic wheelchairs, mechanical arms and humanoid waiters are among the cutting-edge inventions on show at a robotics fair in Japan, a country whose population is ageing rapidly. To ease the burden in a nation with one of the world's highest life expectancies, engineers have come up with technologies to make life easier for the elderly and disabled, and their caregivers. A new robot whee ... more

Japan experts call for robot expedition to moon Tokyo, Japan (AFP) July 29, 2010 - An expert panel advising the Japanese government called in a report approved on Thursday for the nation to send a wheeled robot to the moon in five years and to build the first lunar base by 2020. "It is extremely important to probe the moon... as we now see the dawn of the age of great exploration in the solar system," the report formally adopted by the panel on Thursday said. "China, I ... more

Broadway sings blues over synthesizer invasion New York (AFP) July 29, 2010 - While audiences at Broadway's "West Side Story" thrill to the on-stage drama, musicians in the orchestra pit are fighting a battle every bit as vicious as the Sharks-Jets rivalry. This is gang warfare of a high-minded sort, pitting some of New York's best live musicians against a synthesizer they fear will usurp the job of playing Leonard Bernstein's pulsating score. Sophisticated synthe ... more

BP, oil spill victims argue over trial venue Boise, Idaho (AFP) July 28, 2010 - Lawyers for Gulf of Mexico disaster victims opened the first stage in a massive civil trial Thursday, arguing for the venue to be in one of the hardest hit states and not the oil headquarters of Texas as requested by BP. The hearing before a panel of judges in Boise, Idaho was to consider whether lawsuits from some 200 plaintiffs should be consolidated into one or several cases, and where th ... more

Astronomer: Manned missions less likely London (UPI) Jul 27, 2010 - Future manned space exploration will be the province of adventurers rather than state-backed missions, Britain's astronomer royal says. In an interview 40 years after the first manned moon landing, Cambridge University Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics Martin Rees said most future space mission would likely be robotic, BBC News reported Tuesday. Manned space exploration wou ... more

Gulf beach closures up 10-fold since spill: report Washington (AFP) July 28, 2010 - Oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill has forced authorities to close or post water quality warnings at one in five beaches in the 100 days since the crisis began, a report said Wednesday. Forty-nine of 253 stretches of beach in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have had to close or post warnings for swimmers as a result of the spill, the report by the Natural Resources Defense Council ... more

cosmonauts Complete First Expedition 24 Spacewalk Houston TX (SPX) Jul 28, 2010 - Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko concluded a six-hour, 42-minute spacewalk Tuesday at 6:53 a.m. EDT. The cosmonauts began their spacewalk when they opened the hatches of the Pirs docking compartment at 12:11 a.m. This was the 147th spacewalk overall in support of International Space Station assembly and maintenance. The cosmonauts wore their Russian Orlan spacesuits ... more

Gulf focus shifts, but where is all the oil? New Orleans, Louisiana (AFP) July 27, 2010 - With BP's leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil? For three long months a massive slick threatened the shorelines of Louisiana and other southern US Gulf Coast states as BP tried everything from top hats to junk shots and giant domes to stanch the toxic sludge. A cap stopped ... more

ISS Crew Perform Spacewalk Houston TX (SPX) Jul 27, 2010 - The members of the International Space Station's Expedition 24 crew shifted their sleep schedule Monday in preparation for their mission's first spacewalk, waking up at about 2:40 p.m. EDT. Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin, a veteran of three spacewalks in 2007 during Expedition 15, and Mikhail Kornienko, a spacewalk rookie, will perform the six-hour spacewalk. The pair will exit the Pir ... more

Gulf focus shifts, but where is all the oil? New Orleans, Louisiana (AFP) July 26, 2010 - With BP's leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil? For three long months a massive slick threatened the shorelines of Louisiana and other southern US Gulf Coast states as BP tried everything from top hats to junk shots and giant domes to stanch the toxic sludge. A cap stopped ... more

Next Generation Surgical Robots: Where's The Doctor? Durham NC (SPX) Jul 23, 2010 - As physician-guided robots routinely operate on patients at most major hospitals, the next generation robot could eliminate a surprising element from that scenario - the doctor. Feasibility studies conducted by Duke University bioengineers have demonstrated that a robot - without any human assistance - can locate a man-made, or phantom, lesion in simulated human organs, guide a device to t ... more

NASA Goes Deep In Search Of Extreme Environments Woods Hole MA (SPX) Jul 22, 2010 - An expedition partially funded by NASA, part of a program to search extreme environments for geological, biological and chemical clues to the origins and evolution of life, has discovered the deepest known hydrothermal vent in the world, nearly 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) below the surface of the western Caribbean Sea. The research will help extend our understanding of the limits to which l ... more

'Sample return' space missions examined Washington (UPI) Jul 21, 2010 - Space missions meant to return cosmic samples to Earth are expensive, more complicated and riskier than regular robotic missions, but worth it, scientists say. Recent sample-return missions, like the Japanese Hayabusa asteroid probe that attempted to gather billion-year-old rock from an asteroid's surface, have proven their usefulness, SPACE.com reported Tuesday. "With a sample-r ... more

Commentary: Less is more Washington (UPI) Jul 20, 2010 - America's global commitments, from Japan to Germany, from NATO to Afghanistan, from EUCOM to AFRICOM, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf, from USPACOM in Honolulu to CENTCOM in Tampa, Fla., all are being reassessed - at home and abroad. Can a superpower whose infrastructure is rapidly decaying to Third-World standards in many sectors and in need of a $1 trillion face-lift affo ... more

Expedition To Mid-Cayman Rise Identifies Unusual Variety Of Deep Sea Vents Woods Hole MA (SPX) Jul 22, 2010 - The first expedition to search for deep-sea hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Cayman Rise has turned up three distinct types of hydrothermal venting, reports an interdisciplinary team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work was conducted as part of a NASA-funded effort to search extreme environments for geol ... more

Andrews Space And Honeybee Robotics Team To Develop Spacecraft Control Moment Gyroscopes New York NY (SPX) Jul 21, 2010 - Andrews Space and Honeybee Robotics jointlyhas announced that they have entered into an exclusive teaming arrangement to provide control moment gyros for a range of spacecraft sizes. Under the agreement Andrews Space (Andrews) and Honeybee Robotics (Honeybee) will leverage their respective strengths in systems engineering, spacecraft attitude determination and control technology, spacecraf ... more

U.S. robot sets 14-mile 'walking' record Ithaca, N.Y. (UPI) Jul 20, 2010 - A robot designed by U.S. engineering students set an unofficial untethered walking record of 14.3 miles at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., the school says. Steered by students using a standard remote control unit for toys, the untethered Ranger robot covered the distance in 11 hours, making 108 laps around an indoor track at the university's Barton Hall on July 6, a university relea ... more

Wyle Awarded NASA Crew Robotics Avionics And Vehicle Equipment Contract El Segundo CA (SPX) Jul 19, 2010 - NASA has awarded a Crew Robotics Avionics and Vehicle Equipment (CRAVE) contract to Wyle for engineering services at Johnson Space Center. The contract allows for a wide variety of tasks in the areas of flight hardware and software development, non-flight/prototype hardware and software development, analysis, and sustaining engineering. The work will be performed at Wyle's facilities locat ... more

No serious problem at capped Gulf oil well: US Washington (AFP) July 19, 2010 - None of the anomalies detected close to BP's blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico are threatening the integrity of the capped wellhead, a senior US official said Monday. Seepage found some three miles (1.9 kilometers) from the capped well was not related to the operation to staunch the flow of oil from the wellhead, said US Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen. "We do not believe that is assoc ... more

	Launch Vehicle Systems Design and Engineering Cocoa Beach, FL September 13-15, 2010 $1,395 Launch Vehicle Coupled Loads Analysis Dulles, VA, September 13-15, 2010 $1,395 Launch Vehicle Payload Integration Cocoa Beach, FL. October 25-27, 2010 $1,395