Breaking Orbit

MICROGRAVITY

Function: noun
Etymology: micr- + gravity
: a condition in space in which only minuscule gravitational forces are experienced : virtual absence of gravity ; broadly : WEIGHTLESSNESS

—via Merriam-Webster

Just as black holes do not suck, there is technically no such thing as zero gravity in low-Earth orbit. Earth's gravitational influence, after all, is what keeps the moon tied to our home world, so how could there be no gravity between it and us?

Plants ... in ... spaaaaace!
—Illustration by Dale Gustafson, National Geographic Stock

Instead, objects in orbit are really in a constant state of freefall, like being stuck on a roller coaster just as the car tips over a rise.

In fact, to create the sensation of being in orbit, those "zero G" tourist flights are doing nothing more than making roller coaster-esque swoops and dips in the sky.

What people in space experience is known among the science crowd as microgravity, and its effects have been studied on everything from protein crystal growth for pharmaceuticals to mammalian reproduction.

Quite a few experiments done in space have been focused on how to overcome the negative aspects of microgravity, such as weakened bones and skin rashes.

Astronaut Jeffrey Williams doing plant cells vs. microgravity experiments aboard the ISS in December 2009.
—Image courtesy NASA

But the newest experiment now aboard the International Space Station is shining a more positive light on weightlessness: growing plant cells to meet Earth's energy needs.

National Lab Pathfinder-Cells 3 was launched on the space shuttle Endeavour last month and will run on the ISS until Discovery brings it home in April.

The experiment is growing cell cultures of Jatropha curcas, a plant that produces an oil that can be converted into an alternative, bio-based fuel.

Jatropha cells ready for transport to the ISS.
—Image courtesy Wagner A. Vendrame, University of Florida, Homestead

"Our goal is to verify if microgravity will induce any significant changes in the cells that could affect plant growth and development back on Earth," study leader Wagner Vendrame, of the University of Florida, said in a statement.

Jatropha is a buzzword in the biofuels sector, since some experts think it could help ease the burden of growing crops such as corn for biofuels.

That's because jatropha is a hardy, drought-resistant plant that can be grown on lands not currently in use for food production.

The problem with growing jatropha as a commercial plant is that it hasn't yet been fully domesticated, so crop productivity can vary, no one is sure what pests or diseases might pop up when growth goes large-scale, and there's a chance its seeds and leaves might prove especially toxic.

Jatropha, all growed up.
—Image courtesy Wagner A. Vendrame, University of Florida, Homestead

Enter microgravity experiments on jatropha, which aim to show how life in freefall might lead to a commercial variant of the plant via changes in its cell structure, growth speed, and gene expression.

NASA, by the way, has a vested interest beyond helping humanity with its energy demands: Oils from jatropha are "of excellent quality and amenable for jet fuel mixes," according to the Cells 3 Web site.

Today the European Southern Observatory in Chile released a stunning new picture of NGC 1788, a ghostly little nebula in the Orion constellation. For backyard astronomers, the object can be spotted just a wee bit away from the bright stars in the Hunter's belt.

—Image courtesy ESO

This "hidden gem" is what's known as a reflection nebula, which means that it glows not due to heat from the dust and gases themselves, but because it is reflecting light from the young stars nestled inside.

By contrast, the nebula's blue, purple, and rosy hues are set against an almost vertical line of hydrogen gas, which glows red because it is being heated up by nearby massive stars.

Inside NGC 1788 is a veritable preschool of stars—most less than a million years old—separated into three distinct age groupings.

The oldest of these stars sit to the left while the youngest lie to the right, still wrapped in their natal cocoons of dust. It's the stars in the middle of the class that light up the nebula.

This progression of ages suggests to astronomers that the nebula experienced a wave of star formation that ultimately sculpted it into the shape we see today.

And the shape we see further suggested to the ESO team that the nebula looks like a big bat spreading its wings across the cosmos.

I'd bet astronomers have a ball looking at spectacular cosmic objects and arguing over whether any given galaxy looks more like a bunny or a bulldozer.

Heck, the earliest astronomers must have had amazing imaginations to look at the night sky and see lions and centaurs and women with scales.

Maybe I need more coffee, but I'm not getting a strong bat vibe from NCG 1788. Since angles are relative when it comes to space, I'd rotate that bad boy 90 degrees to the right and call it the Magic Mushroom Nebula. And what does that reveal about my personality?

Unlike this Rorschach test writ large, there are some space objects that really do have almost unquestionably appropriate names. Here are my top five:

5) The Cigar Galaxy
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

It's not too hard to see how Messier 82 (seen here in a Hubble Space Telescope shot) got this moniker ... although the red hydrogen plumes branching from the central bulge detract a bit from the effect.

4) The Cat's Eye Nebula
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

If my cats actually had eyes like this, I'd probably be making an emergency call to the vet's office. Still, that distinctive slit crossing a multihued orb makes the nickname for NGC 6543 fit pretty well. This is a planetary nebula, by the way, which means it's the dust and gases left over after a star like our sun expands during its death throes, sending the layers of its bloated atmosphere streaming out into space.

3) The Whirlpool Galaxy
—Image courtesy NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Not named for looking like a washing machine, Messier 51 is a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, except seen from Earth face-on so that it looks like a cosmic vortex. Also known in my book as the hypnotist's delight. You are getting sleepy, veeeery sleeepy ...

2) The Eskimo Nebula
—Image courtesy Credit: Andrew Fruchter (STScI) et al., WFPC2, HST, NASA

C'mon. What else would you call the planetary nebula NGC 2392? If ever a dying star wanted to know what it'd look like wearing an Arctic-ready parka, this'd be the trend setter.

And finally,

1) The Butterfly Nebula
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

With these billowing, shiny wings, the planetary nebula NGC 6302 practically deserves its own genus and species. We can only hope our own sun will create an equally beautiful nebula someday—and that our ancestors will be living on some distant colony so they'll be able to take pictures of its splendor.

Our solar system, living proof of the Copernican model
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

Astronomers might think they have it tough waiting for the ultimate validation of discoveries: an official name.

For example, it took the International Astronomical Union four years to go from the discovery of a new dwarf planet in 2004 to the name Haumea in 2008. And names for a series of new features spotted on Mercury took from January to April to materialize.

Well, when it comes to apparent dawdling, the IAU ain't got nothin' on the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

Scientists at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Germany first created element 112 in a particle accelerator by firing zinc ions into a lead target in February 1996.

Now, 14 years later, IUPAC has officially recognized element 112—now the heaviest known element on the periodic table—as copernicium. And thank goodness, cuz more than a decade of calling it by its placeholder name ununbium must have been tripping up many a chemistry student's tongue.

To be fair, making copernicium was not an easy task to reproduce. The version made by the German lab lasted for less than a second. The most stable version of the element, copernicium-285, hangs around for only a few minutes before it decays into darmstadtium-281.

Copernicium, abbreviated Cn, joins the list of relatively heavy elements named after prominent scientists, from curium (Cm, 96) and einsteinium (Es, 99) to bohrium (Bh, 107) and meitnerium (Mt, 109).

You'll see that most of the names bestowed on elements are those of notable physicists. In picking an astronomer as a chemical namesake, GSI team leader Sigurd Hofmann said in an IUPAC statement that he and his colleagues wanted to "salute an influential scientist who didn't receive any accolades in his own lifetime, and highlight the link between astronomy and the field of nuclear chemistry."

I'm on board with that, as Nicolaus Copernicus is most famous for setting up the scientific framework that proves Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. This was a pretty radical proposal for the mid-1500s, and one Copernicus didn't see published until he was on death's door.

Since then, IUPAC states on its Web site, "the planetary system introduced by Copernicus has been applied to other analogous systems in which objects move under the influence of a force directed towards a common centre. Notably, on a microscopic scale this is the Bohr model of the atom with its nucleus and orbiting electrons."

I also find it fitting that the name should come about during today's frequent collisions between particle physics and astronomy. Particle accelerators in particular have gone from churning out new elements to breaking those elements apart in efforts to solve mysteries of the universe.

So congrats, Copernicus, on a well-deserved [if long in coming] nod from the chemical and physical communities.

—Image courtesy NOAA

Next week NASA will launch the latest in a series of satellites run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration designed to track extreme weather events from space.

Known as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, or GOES, each craft carries a letter designation until it arrives in orbit, when it is renamed with a number.

Proving that someone should really think about such naming conventions beforehand, the craft slated to launch on March 2 will be GOES P.

If only GOES was a series of probes headed to Uranus ...

Done snickering? Phew, OK.

In all seriousness, GOES P will play on important role in NOAA's efforts to provide continuous coverage of weather events—from tornadoes and hurricanes to flash floods and solar storms—across all 50 U.S. states.

The satellites sit in geostationary orbit, which means each one is "fixed" in place over a particular geographic region.

Here, for example, is a color-enhanced picture from GOES 11, aka GOES WEST, of conditions along the Pacific coast right now:

—Image courtesy NOAA

By watching for changes over time in things such as cloud cover and temperature, NOAA can track the formation of major events, hopefully offering enough warning to get people out of Nature's way.

GOES P will join GOES 14 as a back-up satellite, to be "stored" in orbit and turned on only if another GOES satellite stops functioning.

GOES 13 was also launched as an orbital spare in 2006, but it will soon be brought online permanently to replace GOES 12, which is being reassigned to keep watch over South America as part of the [also humorously named] Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

In case you're wondering, GOES 1 was launched in 1975. If GOES P makes it into space and is pronounced operational, it will become GOES 15.

GOES 3 and 7 were used as communications satellites, while the rest of 1 through 10 were either decommissioned or—in the case of GOES G—didn't make it into orbit.

Grand unified theory. Re-creating the big bang. Finding the "God particle." Some days it seems as if particle physicists are on the verge of discovering the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Which may or may not be 42.

With the recent stream of breakthroughs in dark matter, neutrinos, and the debut of the Large Hadron Collider, some folk are even asking whether the upcoming round of physics experiments will in fact find all the answers, effectively putting an end to particle physics as a field of study.

That's nowhere close to true, according to Barry Barish, a Caltech physicist and current director of global design effort for the International Linear Collider, a proposed "straight line" companion to the circular LHC.

Particle physics "is suffering from overzealousness and the use of hyperbole by colleagues in my field," Barish told the crowd during a lecture at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

"We need to be more humble."

Argonne National Lab director Albert Crewe explains the 1957 Zero Gradient Synchrotron
—Photo courtesy Argonne National Laboratory

According to Barish, part of the issue is that particle physics has changed from an observational science to an inquiry-based one.

In other words, it's no longer about making colliders and watching what happens in order to make discoveries. It's about asking questions and then building the experiments that have a shot at answering them.

And right now, it's one looooong list of questions:

• What's the nature of dark energy?
• Do extra dimensions exist?
• Why are there so many types of particles?
• What exactly is dark matter?
• Where did the universe come from?
• What's the deal with antimatter imbalance in the early universe?
• Why do neutrinos have so little mass?
• Are there any undiscovered particles we haven't even predicted yet?
• Etc.

Within each of these broad questions is a subset of secondary questions waiting to be explored.

The LHC, for example, is constantly being hailed as THE machine that will find the Higgs boson, the predicted particle that should explain why matter has mass. Kinda funny that we don't know that, right? But we don't.

Trouble is, even if the LHC does find the Higgs, it won't be able to study its properties, Barish said. That's because when the LHC collides particles, it's smashing up protons on protons, which are themselves made of several subparticles.

In a way that's kind of the point, as physicists are hoping that the Higgs will be one of the short-lived pieces broken out of the protons and recorded by LHC detectors.

But all the other subparticles will get detected, too, so there'll be a lot of "background noise" in there along with the Higgs signature.

What proton-proton collisions might look like to the LHC. Can anyone spot a Higgs?
—Image courtesy CERN via USCMS/NSF

That background will keep scientists from being able to really analyze the Higgs and determine some of its fundamental properties, such as how it couples to other particles.

It'd kinda be like if Bob Ballard had found the wreck of the Titanic but hadn't had the equipment to go down there and take pictures, collect artifacts, or find Kate Winslet's ginormous diamond necklace [kidding, of course, on that last one].

What's the point of knowing the Higgs boson is there if we still don't know how it works?

And all of that is assuming there even is a Higgs boson. It's a best guess for now, but as Barish pointed out, Newtonian gravity worked great until Einstein came along and showed us how much we didn't really know about why apples fall from trees.

"Right now, we can see the horizon, we know how to ask discrete questions, and we can build the instruments that might answer them," Barish said.

"But decades from now, a lot of [these theories] will either be stale or just plain wrong."

Now don't get all depressed. In science, not having all the answers is actually pretty exciting, and getting things wrong is part of the process. What I think Barish was really saying is that there's a ton of work left to do in particle physics.

Those doing the work simply need to take a step back now and then so they can help the public appreciate the small victories that come from doing Big Science.

"That's no moon. Oh, wait, yes it is!"

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

When Luke said that TIE fighter was headed toward a "small moon," he must have had Mimas on his mind.

Since the 1980s this small Saturn moon has been likened to the fictional Death Star, thanks to its most noticeable blemish, the 88-mile-wide (140-kilometer-wide) Herschel Crater.

Of course, while the Death Star's "crater" was really a weapon that could obliterate planets, Mimas's crater was made by an impact that likely almost shattered the tiny moon.

For starters, the basin's width is almost a third of the width of the moon as a whole—for a rocky body, take a hit like that without getting rattled.

In fact, fractures on the other side of Mimas appear to have been made by the impact shock as it traveled clean through the moon.

The second Death Star? Nah, just an incomplete image from Cassini.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Despite this blow and some other serious, if smaller scale, cratering, Mimas is the tiniest body that stays round thanks to its own gravity.

Scientifically speaking, this is a moon we would like to know better.

Today NASA unveiled some of its most detailed pictures yet of Mimas, taken during a close approach by the Cassini orbiter.

Cassini zoomed in for the flyby last week, making its closest pass on Saturday, at a mere 5,900 miles (9,500 kilometers) from the moon's surface.

The raw pictures took a few days to get beamed back to Earth, landing in NASA's lap just yesterday. But the unprocessed snapshots are already revealing some of Mimas's secrets, including the bright and amazingly steep slopes inside Herschel.

Mimas's surface, up close and personal
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

"This flyby has been like looking at a cell or an onion skin under the microscope for the first time," Bonnie Buratti, one of the science team leaders, said in a statement.

"We'd seen the large crater from afar since the early 1980s, but now its small bumps and blemishes are all clearly visible."

Later processing and study of the pictures could offer even more tidbits about the pockmarked moon, such as what its exact composition might be, why its south pole is lacking in large craters, and just how it influences Saturn's rings.

Mimas (near) and Epimetheus (far) lie along Saturn's ringplane in a natural-color snapshot from Cassini.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

After hunkering down to survive D.C.'s "snowpocalypse" this past week, I was definitely ready for some sun.

—Image courtesy United Launch Alliance/Pat Corkery via NASA

Luckily, NASA obliged me with Thursday's launch of their latest space probe, the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

The SDO is a semi-autonomous craft that will orbit Earth, taking continuous observations of the sun in an attempt to better understand how and why our star is so stormy.

The overall goal is to someday be able to predict sun storms the way we predict weather on Earth, so we can be prepared for solar flares and other events that might knock out electrical stuff or fry satellites.

NASA, which has definitely shown eagerness to embrace social media and new technologies, revealed at a press briefing today that the SDO will stream data into an app for the iPhone, called 3D Sun.

It's a cool little widget that sends you the probe's most recent pic of the sun overlaid with current features such as axial tilt and sunspots, along with a news feed on what the probe has seen lately.

But wait. The 3D Sun app has been available since last year, streaming data from another NASA sun probe, STEREO.

And don't we also have TIMED, SOHO, RHESSI, TRACE, and Hinode—all currently orbiting sun probes that NASA has a hand in operating?

Just how much sun can one space agency handle?

Of course, even if the target is the same, every mission is unique—each of these fine craft is equipped with instruments that study different aspects of the sun-Earth interaction.

And I can see why the sun would be such a hot topic for NASA.

Clearly, if we ever hope to understand stars that are light-years away—and how those stars might influence other planets—we'd better get a handle on what's going on with the closest star to Earth.

Not to mention that whatever we learn about the sun has a direct impact on life on Earth right now, from the strength of aurorae to long-term climate events.

So let's take stock of what all those previous sun probes have been doing, and what the SDO now brings to the party, with a sunny little time line:

December 1995: SOHO

Comet Bradfield, as seen by SOHO in 2004
—Image courtesy NASA/ESA

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency with mission control at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Its suite of 12 instruments was designed to answer three main questions: 1) what are the structure and workings of the sun's deep interior; 2) why does the sun's atmosphere have a bright upper layer, or corona, and why is it unexpectedly hot; and 3) what drives the solar wind?

SOHO also has a proven track record spotting previously unseen comets—it's found several hundred so far, and even witnessed one get vaporized not too long ago.

April 1998: TRACE

—Image courtesy NASA

The Transition Region and Coronal Explorer was designed as a companion to SOHO, a smaller satellite with the targeted mission of watching the sun's upper atmosphere up close and looking for connections between plasma structures (coronal holes and coronal mass ejections) and the sun's magnetic field.

It's kind of like having a biologist looking at an animal's skin and teeth under a microscope while another watches the same animal's behavior in the wild: Little changes on the surface can have big impacts.

December 2001: TIMED

—Image courtesy NASA

Meanwhile, the Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics satellite is hard at work studying how the sun affects the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, a region believed to be a gateway for solar energy reaching our planet.

Its four instruments are collecting data on chemical and temperature changes in Earth's upper atmosphere, energy flow in and out, and the speed and direction of winds.

February 2002: RHESSI

—Image courtesy NASA

The Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager is another SOHO companion, this one focused on the particle physics of solar flares. The instrument uses high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy (how different atoms emit and absorb light) to find out how high-energy particles get accelerated in the flares.

Aside from adding to sun science, this probe is also looking at high-energy sources elsewhere in the universe, such as the Crab Nebula and gamma-ray bursts.

September 2006: Hinode

—Image courtesy NASA/MSFC

Meaning "sunrise" in Japanese, Hinode (hee-NO-day) is primarily a JAXA mission that has support from NASA and the U.K. Launched just over ten years after SOHO, Hinode was billed at the time as the "next generation" of solar observatories. It carries optical, x-ray, and extreme ultraviolet imagers all trained on figuring out how energy is made and moved from the lower atmosphere to the corona. The probe also watches for clues to how energy stored in the sun's magnetic field gets released, and how that influences the heliosphere.

Technically, the sun's atmosphere encompasses our whole solar system, since the sun sends charged particles—solar wind—streaming in all directions for millions of miles. The heliosphere is the entirety of the sun's upper atmosphere, which means one of Hinode's jobs is looking at how magnetic changes on the sun's surface ultimately affect, for example, Saturn.

October 2006: STEREO

Break out the 3D glasses...
—Image courtesy NASA

Perhaps the most aptly named solar probe, STEREO is actually two spacecraft positioned to offer images of the sun, that's right, in stereo. Just as two eyes gives us depth perception, STEREO's twin craft give astronomers their first-ever 3D pictures of the sun and its storms.

STEREO specifically looks at coronal mass ejections, eruptions of energy from the sun's surface that are so powerful they can blow up to ten billion tons of solar atmosphere out into space. Coronal mass ejections can trigger solar storms, which carry significant risks to satellites, spacewalking astronauts, and even power grids on Earth.

February 2010: SDO

—Image courtesy NASA

And so finally we come to SDO. The newest probe's mission is to look at how solar activity starts and evolves, based on changes in the sun's magnetic field. Its three instruments will take oodles of data simultaneously, offering some of the highest resolution pictures of surface action on the sun.

Although at first blush SDO seems to do much of what SOHO and STEREO have been doing, the technology is updated and the amount of data collected will be ginormous. By way of comparison, NASA notes that SOHO takes one image every 12 minutes. STEREO takes one image every 3 minutes. But SDO will take one image every 0.10 of a second. The instrument also has the specific goal of finding out why the sun has an 11-year cycle of activity.

By Susan Poulton
for Breaking Orbit

The space shuttle Endeavour successfully launched tonight at 4:14am ET after a last minute scare that the weather was not going to cooperate at the back up landing sites in Europe. They cleared up long enough for the shuttle to get off the ground and it was a spectacular lift off.

I've seen many launches, but being on the roof of the Vehicle Assembly Building was a once in a lifetime experience, especially for a night launch. The sky literally turns from night to day, and the shockwave shook the entire building beneath my feet. It felt like I was watching the launch from an other-worldly vantage point. The air was so crisp and cold, a rarity for Florida, that you could see the shuttle all the way into space, until main engine cut off seven to eight minutes later as a small glowing dot that wavered in brightness and then faded to a deep red and disappeared.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton. Photographers gather on the roof of the Vehicle Assembly Building preparing to photograph the launch.

This launch begins the 13-day mission of STS-130 with including three spacewalks and the installation of the Tranquility node. For the full launch timeline, visit NASA's STS-130 overview at http://tinyurl.com/y9u72qm and watch NASA TV online at http://www.nasa.gov.


—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

By Susan Poulton
for Breaking Orbit
If there's one person in the press center who often gets the most attention it's the representative from the 45th Weather Squadron. The group, including Kathy Winters, the Shuttle Launch Weather Officer, is responsible for monitoring all the local weather here and at the back up landing sites and giving the all clear for launch. Anytime weather conditions are suspect, the media will gather around him eagerly, waiting for any sign of improvement. He always looks a little helpless, knowing that everyone in the room is waiting for him to give the green light for launch, and that he might have to tell us all that we're going to have to come back another day. People expect him to be a soothsayer, weather maker, mind reader. When I saw him walk into the press center tonight for his shift, he had a briefcase and several bottles of soda. He looked ready for a very long night. We're currently in violation of the weather criteria, but I hear the term "cautiously optimistic" tossed around. And so we wait...

I think the pass/fail on whether you're a space shuttle launch "regular" includes several key tests: a) you can drive from Orlando to Kennedy Space Center with your eyes closed, b) you actually like the food in the NASA Snack Mobile, and c) you understand more than half of the acronyms used during the launch countdown (because lets be realistic, not even NASA employees know 100% of them).

—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

By Susan Poulton
for Breaking Orbit
Fueling of the space shuttle is complete and it stands ready for a second launch attempt at 4:14am ET. We just returned from the crew walk out and they are now getting strapped into their seats on the shuttle. Their faces never seem to look any less excited on a second attempt even with the weather conditions questionable. The crowd here at Kennedy Space Center has thinned out a bit as it traditionally does the day after a scrub. I've confirmed that I will be returning to the roof of the Vehicle Assembly Building tonight to photograph the launch, so I'm quite excited (and much more organized and rested than I was last night!)

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

The six crew members from left to right are Bob Behnken, Nicholas Patrick, Steve Robinson, Kay Hire, Terry Virts (pilot) and George Zamka (commander). All are veterans of previous launches except for pilot Terry Virts. At crew walkout, I especially love seeing the faces of the astronauts for whom this will be their first trip into space. Their smile always seems to be a little extra wide!

—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

By Susan Poulton
for Breaking Orbit
NASA has scrubbed the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour due to weather and will try again tomorrow at 4:14am ET.

As I was dozing off in the press center waiting for the countdown, I heard my name announced over the loud speaker. All of a sudden, I found myself in a van full of photographers, headed over to shoot the launch from the roof of the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building). After a very long elevator ride, we emerged on the roof into the cold and the wind, overlooking the shuttle on the launch pad.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

The VAB is the assembly building where the Apollo Saturn V rockets were assembled and where the space shuttles parts are now mated. It's the fourth largest building in the world by volume and the largest one story building in the world. It is the tallest building in the United States outside of an urban area. Standing on the roof of this building to watch the launch was breathtaking, can't wait to come back tomorrow!

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

By Susan Poulton
for Breaking Orbit
One of the more special moments in the marathon of launch events is crew walkout. The astronauts get suited up, wave goodbye to staff members and family and head for the van. Outside of a handful of NASA administrators who ride along in the van, the members of the press and other invited guests have the privilege of being the last folks to wave farewell to the astronauts.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

The press center here at Kennedy Space Center is now hopping as we only have two and a half hours to go until launch. Weather conditions have deteriorated to only a 30% chance of favorable conditions at launch time, so everyone here is waiting anxiously for any improvements in the cloud cover and winds, but we could all be back here tomorrow night for another attempt.

—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

By Susan Poulton
for Breaking Orbit
The press center is very quiet right now as most members of the media (and Kennedy Space Center staff) have gone home to get some rest before tonight's excitement. Only those of us who were not able to get a hotel room thanks to the Super Bowl being played a couple of hours south of here are slugging it out in the press room.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

Fueling of the external fuel tank, called "tanking," has begun and is proceeding normally. Even with 0% weather conditions affecting the tanking (they usually can't load highly flammable liquid oxygen and hydrogen during lightning storms, etc), several milestones must be reached that have been problem spots in the past. Sensors in the early part of tanking and near the topping off phase must read normal in order for the launch to proceed. So far so good!

I just took a walk down to the countdown clock to marvel at the brightly lit launch pad under a starry sky, and it's extremely windy and cold outside right now. The winds are expected to die down and the weather forecast to improve, however there are several weather fronts moving into the area that they are keeping an eye on.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton

After tanking is complete, the press will assemble around 11:30pm ET to head over for the crew walk out when they board the "astrovan" to proceed over to the shuttle. This is a moment strong with tradition - the astronauts have suited up and departed through the same doors since the Apollo missions. Even the astrovan, while undergoing an extensive internal renovation, has kept its retro style from the '60s.

Given the limited number of opportunities to see U.S. astronauts departing Kennedy Space Center in the near future, I expect this will be an emotional send off for all.

—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

By Susan Poulton

for Breaking Orbit

It was a chilly morning at the launch pad, as the sun rose on Endeavour during the rollback of the Rotating Service Structure (RSS). When the shuttle is on the launch pad, it is covered by a gantry structure to protect it from the elements and allow for access to the payload bay and other orbiter systems. About 20 hours before launch, this structure is rolled away to reveal the orbiter in final preparation for launch. It's a special moment to witness, especially when the crowd of press and photographers is small and the air is fresh and quiet. These quiet moments with the space shuttle will become few and far between as attendance for launches grows toward the final launch.

After a brief update from NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, the press center will become quiet until later this evening as the press prepares for an all-nighter leading up to the 4:39am ET launch.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton. The sun rises on Kennedy Space Center as the countdown clock holds at 11 hours.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton. The RSS gantry begins to swing back to reveal the orbiter on the launch pad.

—Image Credit: Susan Poulton. It's been a long road for the shuttle program and Endeavour waits for launch at 4:39am ET.

—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

By Susan Poulton

for Breaking Orbit

We're in the final stages of the countdown of both STS-130, the final night launch of the space shuttle, and possibly the U.S. manned space program--at least for quite some time.

President Obama's recent announcement regarding the approved 2011 budget for NASA effectively cancels the next phase of the manned space program for the U.S., focusing instead on technology development and robotic space missions exploring our solar system and beyond.

Covering space shuttle launches has became a hobby for me since I saw my first launch, STS-114, the Return to Flight mission of Discovery and the first space shuttle launch since the Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003. I was hooked. Feeling the rush of the launch shockwave left me breathless (and teary-eyed) and I was determined to return for every launch remaining in the space shuttle program. I've kept my word and now find myself at the sad and final five launches of the shuttle program.

As I've written before in this blog, shuttle launch watching can be a trying game with many scrubs for weather or technical reasons, endless hours waiting to see if the countdown will continue. However, everything is looking quite good for the 4:39am ET launch of Endeavour early on Sunday morning with weather predictions improved to an 80% chance for a successful launch.

—Image courtesy of NASA. The STS-130 mission patch represents the cupola and the image of Earth is the first photograph of the Earth taken from the moon by Lunar Orbiter I on August 23, 1966.

STS-130 will be delivering the Tranquility node to the International Space Station. The special feature of this node is the cupola, providing a panoramic view of earth for the space station inhabitants. You may already be familiar with the Tranquility node and not realize it: it was named via votes on the NASA website. The name "Colbert" actually won the polling (fans voted in honor of TV personality Stephen Colbert), however NASA selected Tranquility as the final name. Stephen Colbert instead had the C.O.L.B.E.R.T. (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill) exercise machine named after him, which launched on STS-128 and will be moved into the cupola so space station residents can work out in full view of the earth below.

I'll be posting here throughout the launch, beginning with the 8:00am ET rotation of the RSS tomorrow morning (the RSS or Rotating Service Structure protects the shuttle when it is on the launch pad and is "rolled back" to reveal the shuttle 15-20 hours before launch).

For those of you who were curious what "STS" stands for, it's quite simple: Space Transportation System.

—Susan Poulton works for National Geographic Digital Media and is a self-proclaimed space geek. Since graduating from Space Camp in 1987, she's been fascinated by all things space and can't resist sharing this passion with others. A veteran of 12 launches (and over 30 launch attempts), she has attempted to see every space shuttle launch since STS-114 in 2005.

Call it the $5,000-to-$50,000 question: If a meteorite crashes through your roof, is it yours or your landlord's?

A piece of the moon that fell to Earth
—Image courtesy NASA

That's the dilemma being faced right now by a doctor in Lorton, Virginia, who recently had a meteorite the size of a tennis ball come to a screeching halt in the examination room next door.

Marc Gallini, who maintains the practice with fellow doctor Frank Ciampi, promptly brought the space rock to the Smithsonian, which proclaimed it to be a genuine former asteroid from the belt between Mars and Jupiter and offered the good doctors $5,000 for the lump.

But according to the Associated Press, the landlords who own the doctor's office are now saying the space rock is theirs to claim.

On the open market, a meteorite of this size could fetch $25,000 to $50,000, an expert appraiser told AP.

So far the landlords haven't made any formal demands, and the rock remains with the Smithsonian. But the doctors' lawyer wants to take the case to court anyway, saying it's "the fairest way to deal with things."

Fundamentally this is a legal question. Does an acorn that drops on your patio become your acorn? Or does it belong to the people renting your house? For that matter, does it belong to your neighbors, because it fell off a tree in their yard?

Or, to look at it another way, does the acorn belong to everyone, since we all live on the planet it was once a natural part of?

Contrary to what Eddie says, we don't own the moon cuz we stuck a flag in it.
—Image courtesy NASA

For example, most governments agree at this stage that nobody owns the moon.

But that hasn't stopped people from trying to claim it and sell off units of property. There's valuable stuff that could be mined on the moon, after all, and to some folk it's the next pioneer's landscape, no different than California was during the Westward Expansion in the 1800s.

If it ever becomes feasible for humans to land on Mars, or any other planet for that matter, the rules will be much the same. Which on one hand is weird, considering that we are totally comfortable with owning a parcel of land here on Earth.

Now granted, no one person owns the Earth. But we do allow governments to claim large hunks of land and sea, and then we allow governments/corporations/individual people to buy and sell the land and what's on it.

So in the science-fiction future, when there are colonies on the moon and Mars, who owns the lovely bungalow I'm gonna live in along the Sea of Tranquility?

Asteroid 951 Gaspra: I can haz?
—Image courtesy U.S. Geological Survey

On the other hand, why is it OK to say no one is allowed to own Itokawa or Vesta, but anyone can call finders-keepers on pieces of them that fall to Earth?

Okay, I'll admit, small meteorites make for some nice jewelry. But chunks larger than a golf ball or so could be so much more valuable to humans as a whole if they're put in the hands of scientists and educators.

Even though the outsides of meteorites are burned to a crisp, when handled with care, the insides can offer valuable clues to what our solar system was like as it was shaping up 4.6 billion years ago.

I guess I'm torn between the lofty idea that meteorites are for the benefit of the people, and the notion of fairness that says if a space rock almost beans you in the office, you should have the right to decide what to do with it.

In Lorton's case, it's just the luck of the draw that the people who found the space rock want it to go to science and not on a bookshelf at home.

Whether they ultimately get to make that call, it seems, will be up to the courts to decide.

The closer stuff is to the sun, the harder it is to see.

—Image courtesy SOHO (ESA & NASA)

That's the fundamental problem with vulcanoids, a hypothetical band of asteroids orbiting between the sun and the closest planet in, Mercury.

In fact, for years that was the problem with studying Mercury, since looking at the tiny planet through a backyard telescope is like trying to make out the patterns on a moth's wing as it sits on a football stadium floodlight.

Bigger telescopes on the ground or in Earth orbit can see the planet, but in doing so, glare from the sun would damage the instruments' sensitive lenses.

Even Hubble, capable of peering into the far reaches of the universe, can't safely look too hard at the innermost planet.

To really see details on Mercury, you need a spacecraft that gets close enough to keep the sun's glare out of the frame.

Mariner 10 gave humans our first good look at Mercury during a series of flybys in 1974 and 1975. But that mission was able to take pictures of just half the planet—we had to wait until January 2008 to see the other side!

Our first glimpse of Mercury's "hidden" face came via the MESSENGER mission, a spacecraft now swirling around Mercury in a gravitational dance that will eventually see the probe settle into orbit in 2011.

Along the way, MESSENGER has been taking scads of pictures, and one of its targets has been the stretch of space inside Mercury's orbit where small, faint vulcanoids could be hiding.

The concept of vulcanoids arose from research done in the late 1800s, when astronomers trying to use the classical rules of celestial mechanics to chart Mercury's orbit kept finding things wrong with their calculations.

French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph le Verrier took the challenge to heart, and in 1860 he announced that discrepancies in Mercury's orbit were due to an unseen planet, which he named Vulcan.

Le Verrier's theory was eventually disproven thanks to Einstein's revolutionary theory of relativity—when you include the sun's gravitational field in the mix, Mercury's orbit works out just fine, thanks, no extra planet required.

But the concept of something being between Mercury and the sun has lived long and prospered, and a number of missions (some using fighter jets!) have kept the search alive over the years.

MESSENGER has been making its vulcanoid searches when its orbit brings it closest to the sun. The craft has taken a host of snapshots in June 2008, February 2009, and most recently in January 2010. So far, nada.

—Image courtsey NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

But on January 16 MESSENGER did get an eyeful of neighboring Venus, the brightest dot in this polka dotted field of view.

Of course, Venus is so wildly overexposed in this picture that it looks like someone shot a hole in the sky.

But that highlights just how hard MESSENGER has to stare to even hope to catch a glimpse of a vulcanoid—if any are out there at all.

Order up!
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Somewhere there's an intergalactic diner that's missing part of a really big blue-plate special.

Of course, in reality this is Saturn's moon Prometheus cast in a rather unusual light, as seen by NASA's Cassini orbiter on January 27.

In this raw, unprocessed snapshot, Cassini caught the moon at just the right angle that natural light makes the porous, icy body look like a fried egg.

Now, Saturn has a lot of moons—more than 60 known and about 50 with official names—and the list keeps growing. In fact, just last March Cassini spotted a new moon hidden among Saturn's rings.

According to NASA, Saturn's many moons are a study in contrasts, varying "drastically in shape, size, surface age, and origin."

Among the oddities:

• Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, with a thick atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane;
• Enceladus, an icy body spitting out plumes of frozen particles rich in organics;
• Iapetus, a "two-faced" moon shaped like a walnut

Prometheus, which has been known about since 1980, is one of Saturn's inner moons, orbiting the planet at a mere 85,590 miles (140,000 kilometers).

The tiny moon is so close that it orbits just inside Saturn's outer F ring, sometimes crossing the ring and pulling out streamers of material.

Although named for a mythological Titan, Prometheus is relatively small—just 92 x 62 x 42 miles (148 x 100 x 68 kilometers).

The new snapshot showcases Cassini's ability to zoom in on Saturn's moons and reveal fine details that could lead to new and improved scientific insights.

But for now, all I wanna know is, where's the celestial bacon?

The space shuttle has been on my mind a lot lately, since 2010 will see the final five shuttle launches for all time.

Already NASA has plans to distribute the decommissioned shuttles to museums and education centers.

And the space agency just announced that the Endeavour launch, slated for February 7, will be the last-ever night launch of a space shuttle, bringing to a close the opportunity to see the fiery glory of lift-off against a darkened sky.

Challenger during the first-ever night launch on September 23, 1983
—Image courtesy NASA

But today my space shuttle musings are especially emotional, since this day marks the 24th year since the space shuttle Challenger and all seven crew members were lost shortly after launch.

Challenger was the second space shuttle to fly, the first being Columbia, also lost in a 2003 disaster that claimed the lives of everyone on board.

During its nine successful missions between 1983 and 1985, Challenger helped ring in a number of firsts for manned spaceflight: first female U.S. astronaut, first African-American astronaut, first night launch.

Sadly, on January 28, 1986, Challenger earned the grim distinction of being the first space shuttle destroyed in flight and the first mission to see U.S. astronauts lost in flight.

[That last part is pretty amazing, by the way, considering that the U.S. has been sending people into space since 1961.]

The last Challenger mission, STS-51L, lasted all of 1 minute, 13 seconds and traveled just 18 miles (28.9 kilometers) before a failure in the right solid rocket booster caused the craft to explode.

The disaster shook the country to the core. Instead of delivering his planned State of the Union address, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan delivered a message of "mourning and remembering" on national broadcasts that same day.

"I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff," Reagan said during his speech.

"I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them."

I was in grade school when the Challenger explosion rocked the world, although I wasn't one of those watching the launch on TV.

But I clearly remember my mom, who was a math teacher at the time, getting visibly shaken as she listened to a news report on the car radio about the loss of Challenger's crew, which included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

Discovery on approach to the International Space Station in October 2007
—Image courtesy NASA

Reagan was right, and we did continue to follow Challenger into the future—although only after roughly two-year hiatus filled with accident reports, technical evaluations, and a lot of debate about the risk-to-benefit ratio of sending humans into space.

Discovery was the first shuttle to return to flight following the tragedy, on September 29, 1988, which perhaps makes it fitting that Discovery will be the last shuttle to fly.

Today Endeavour, Discovery, and Atlantis are the only working shuttles left of the original fleet of five, and the final flights will rotate between them.

Now, I can only imagine the pure passion it must take to strap into a space shuttle built decades ago, knowing the risks involved, for the sheer sake of advancing human knowledge.

In my mind, no matter what your feelings are on manned spaceflight, there's no denying that space shuttle crews past, present, and future are national heroes.

Challenger, you are remembered.

Back row: Ellison S. Onizuka, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, Judy Resnik
Front row: Mike Smith, Dick Scobee, Ron McNair
—Image courtesy NASA

This week the Royal Society in London is holding a two day meet-up for scientists to talk about the state of our search for extraterrestrial life.

At a lecture today, astrobiologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University told the crowd that he thinks aliens already walk among us. Well, maybe not walk—more like float, or wiggle, or however else bacteria may locomote.

AHHH!!! It's an invasion!
—Buggy artwork by Jane Hurd, NGS

According to the Associated Press, Davies thinks that life from elsewhere in the galaxy has made its way to Earth at several points in human history. It's possible, he says, that alien life is "right under our noses—or even in our noses."

And why not? So many science-fiction writers seem convinced that if aliens of any shape or size were to come to Earth, they'll be bad for humans and hence immediately noticable. Giant robots! Predatory stalkers!! Killer pathogens!!! Yes, Michael Crichton, I'm looking at you.

But that certainly doesn't have to be the case.

For starters, consider the odds of an intelligent race of beings existing elsewhere in the universe.

One of the more popular tools for this thought experiment is known as the Drake Equation, proposed by radio astronomer Frank Drake in 1961. The equation goes like this:

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L

Where:

N = the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with which we would be able to communicate

R* = the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life

fp = the fraction of those stars with planetary systems

ne = the number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life

fl = the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears

fi = the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges

fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space

Critics point out that some of the values for this equation are either constantly being revised or are near impossible to measure right now (imho, see fl, fi, fc, and L).

That means any solution would be based on pure speculation and therefore would hold little scientific value.

Still, if you fill in the equation with educated guesses, values for N range from 5,000 to 2.3.

I'd add to that equation some variables for whether the aliens we ping have invented faster-then-light travel and decide to pop by for a quick hello?

Now consider the likelihood of a few hardy bacteria hitching a ride on an asteroid, and some parts of that space rock somehow raining down on Earth.

Ida: asteroid or alien "spaceship"?
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

Known Earthly microbes can achieve some pretty amazing feats of survival, from withstanding millennia in ice to "resurrecting" their DNA after intense radiation blasts.

And just think of all the meteorites that have come crash landing in a field or through the roof of a doctor's office, any of which could have been carrying galactic hitchhikers.

What's more, the rocks themselves don't even have to make it to the ground for their components—and maybe their cargo—to seed our atmosphere.

Finally, of the scads of Earth-based bacteria, less than one percent are known to causes diseases in people, according to the Mayo Clinic. That tells me it's entirely plausible for any alien microbes that make it to Earth to be perfectly harmless, and thus better able to wander around undetected.

All told, I'm with Davies, and I'd wager that simple organisms such as benign bacteria will be the first aliens we encounter on our home turf.

Anyone want to take me up on that bet?