New moon rocket passes NASA review

NASA's new moon rocket passed a key design milestone late Wednesday: Senior NASA management unanimously approved the preliminary design review of the planned Ares I rocket that would launch astronauts into space by 2015 and back to the moon by 2020.

But next year there will be another narrowly focused "delta" preliminary design review for one pending engineering issue — too much shaking after launch.

This is the first preliminary design review approval for a rocket that carries astronauts since 1973, when the space shuttle passed the same stage, said Steve Cook, NASA's Ares projects manager.

These reviews are to make sure that the broad design, plans and software mesh properly and pass early safety questions. A more detailed test — a critical design review — is scheduled for March 2011.

Most of the rocket is not built yet.

"This is where we wrap the entire vehicle together to say we have a sound design from stem to stern," Cook said in a Wednesday evening teleconference. "It's really a big step in our journey to launch."

NASA engineers last month said they had figured out how to fix the remaining shaking issue with giant shock absorbers, but still more work is needed before that can pass review.

About 10 per cent of the problems that engineers brought up are still to be resolved but do not require a separate review, including noise problems and questions if the rocket could fly through rough weather, especially lightning, Cook said. NASA is also looking at potential problems that could come when the lower part of the rocket separates.

The Orion crew capsule, which will sit on top of the Ares I, will have its preliminary design review in late 2009.

One issue raised was that engineers would have to make sure they shrunk the launch platform design by 20 cm to match an equivalent reduction in the size of the the bottom part of the rocket.

It's mostly a matter of paperwork, Cook said.

NASA is spending about $3 billion US a year on the return-to-the moon program.

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Scientists hope for surprises in Big Bang experiment

Scientists involved in a historic "Big Bang" experiment to begin this week hope it will turn up many surprises about the universe and its origins -- but reject suggestions it will bring the end of the world.

And Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the CERN research centre, predicted that discoveries to emerge from his organization's 6.4 billion euro ($9.2 billion) project would spark major advances for human society.

"If some of what we expect to find does not turn up, and things we did not foresee do, that will be even more stimulating because it means that we understand less than we thought about nature," said British physicist Brian Cox.

"What I would like to see is the unexpected," said Gerardus t'Hooft of the University of Michigan. Perhaps, he suggested, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at the heart of the experiment "will show us things we didn't know existed."

Once it starts up on Wednesday, scientists plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light inside CERN's tightly-sealed Large Hadron Collider to create multiple mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang.

Cosmologists say that that explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to formation of stars, planets -- and eventually to life on earth.

A key aim of the CERN experiment is to find the "Higgs boson," named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who in 1964 pointed to such a particle as the force that gave mass to matter and made the universe possible.

But other mysteries of physics and cosmology -- supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy among them -- are at the focus of experiments in the 27-km (17-mile) circular tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border

FEARS OF DISASTER

CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, says its key researchers -- and many ordinary staff -- have been inundated by e-mails voicing fears about the experiment.

There have been claims that it will create "black holes" of intensive gravity sucking in CERN, Europe and perhaps the whole planet, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a "worm hole" in space-time.

But a safety review by scientists at CERN and in the United States and Russia, issued at the weekend, rejected the prospect of such outcomes.

"The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," Aymar, who has led CERN for five years, said in response to that review. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction."

Cox, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Britain's Manchester University, was even more trenchant. "I am immensely irritated by the conspiracy theorists who spread this nonsense around," he said.

When the experiment begins soon after 9 a.m. (0700 GMT) on September 10, disaster scenarists will have little to work on.

In the first tests, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in just one direction. If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity. Any bangs at this stage, said one CERN researcher, "will be little ones."

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Google Earth Gets Highest-Res Satellite Images Ever

Google Earth will be receiving the highest resolution color satellite images available on the commercial market, thanks to Saturday's successful launch of the GeoEye-1 satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The GeoEye-1 satellite will capture digital images of Earth from a distance of 423 miles, while moving at 4.5 miles per second.

The GeoEye-1 satellite is able to capture images at 5.5 feet resolution in color and 16 inches resolution in black and white. However, under current government regulations, GeoEye can only offer 1.64 feet resolution images to the general public.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were on hand to watch the launch of GeoEye-1, according to Google spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy, Reuters reported.

Reuters said that while GeoEye does provide images to Google competitors such as Yahoo!, that Google will be GeoEye's only online-search mapping customer.

The GeoEye-1 satellite was constructed by solution provider General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, at General Dynamics' Gilbert, Ariz., facility. General Dynamics (No. 9 on the 2008 VARBusiness 500) designed and manufactured the satellite, integrated the camera and optical telescope assembly, and did environmental testing of the satellite.

The steadiness of the camera, the agility of the satellite, and the ability to map large areas daily are all innovations we've incorporated into the GeoEye-1 satellite, said Mike Greenwood, a General Dynamics spokesman.

Matthew O'Connell, GeoEye chief executive officer, said in a statement, "Later this fall, we will start providing high-resolution color imagery of the Earth from our newest satellite to customers around the globe. The imagery from GeoEye-1 adds to the quantity and quality of that currently provided by our IKONOS satellite, and together this magnificent constellation will enable us to meet world-wide customer demand."

source

Adam Air black box transcripts: What they Said When Seconds from Disaster (Plane Crash)

Arctic Ice Melts Away Due To Impact Of Global Warming

A report released by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado has revealed that the Arctic ice is at its second-lowest level in history, and is melting because of the impact of global warming.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center put out the report late last week, confirming that the Arctic sea ice is melting away.

It is at its second-lowest point in recorded history. The lowest-point in recorded history was in 2007.

The report stated that “We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point.”

That tipping point has to do with global warming, and is causing major problems for the Arctic sea ice, and endangered species such as the polar bear.

The level of Artic sea ice in 2008 is at 2.03 million square miles, compared to 1.59 million square miles in 2007.

source : www.chattahbox.com

Ancient Urban Communities Discovered in the Amazon

Anthropologists from Brazil and the US have uncovered Amazonian settlements in Brazil dating from about 1250 to 1650, before European colonists came in. The findings, reported in the journal Science, show that these towns were more developed than previously thought, making up actual networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza.

The urban communities were discovered at the headwaters of the Xingu River, in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park. This means that the Amazon rainforest, previously thought of as pristine, was actually heavily influenced by human activities.

The team was led by anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, whose team collaborated tightly with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. They went to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people within roughly 7,700 square miles of forest. Each road was pointing north-east to south-west in order to keep with the mid-year summer solstice. Researchers also found a series of dams and artificial ponds which the dwellers used for fish farming.

The researchers also discovered signs of farming, wetland management and fish farms in the ancient settlements that are now almost completely covered by rainforest. The remains are hardly visible, but they could be identified by members of the Kuikuro tribe, who apparently are the direct descendants of those ancient tribes. The scientists used both satellite imagery and GPS navigation in order to uncover the towns, which used to be surrounded by large walls, similar to the ones encountered in medieval European and ancient Greek towns.

The tribes living in the newly found settlements, which date back to before the first Europeans arrived in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon in the 15th Century, don’t seem to be as sophisticated as well-known cultures like the Maya to the north, but still, their culture was much more complex that anthropologists had believed.

Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the settlements in a 2003 Science paper.

source : www.efluxmedia.com

Shoulder Motor Balks on Opportunity's Robotic Arm

A small motor in the robotic arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity that began stalling occasionally more than two years ago has become more troublesome recently.

Rover engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are diagnosing why the motor, one of five in the robotic arm, stalled on April 14 after much less motion that day than in the case of several earlier stalls. They are also examining whether the motor can be used and assessing the impact on Opportunity's work if the motor were no longer usable.

The motor controls sideways motion at the shoulder joint of the rover robotic arm. Other motors provide up-and-down motion at the shoulder and maneuverability at the elbow and wrist. A turret at the end of the arm has four tools that the arm places in contact with rocks and soils to study their composition and texture.

"Even under the worst-case scenario for this motor, Opportunity still has the capability to do some contact science with the arm," said JPL's John Callas, project manager for the twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit. "The vehicle has quite a bit of versatility to continue the high-priority investigations in Victoria Crater and back out on the Meridiani plains after exiting the crater."

The performance of the motor in the past week is consistent with increased resistance in the electrical circuit, such as from degrading of wire in the winding, rather than a mechanical jam. Additional tests are planned for checking whether the apparent resistance is localized or intermittent.

Opportunity and Spirit landed on Mars in January 2004 to begin missions originally planned for three months. They have continued operating for more than four years, though each with some signs of aging.

Opportunity's balky shoulder motor began stalling occasionally in November 2005. The motor could still be operated by applying increased voltage. Engineers assessed it has an increased likelihood of becoming unusable, however, so the team changed its standard procedures for stowing and unstowing the arm.

Until then, on days when the arm would not be used, the team kept it stowed, resting on a hook under the front of the rover deck. Motion of the stall-prone shoulder motor is necessary to unstow the arm, so if the motor were to become unusable with the arm in the stowed position, the arm could not be deployed again. With diminished confidence in the balky motor, the team began unstowing the arm at the end of each day's drive rather than leaving it stowed overnight. This keeps the arm available for use even if the motor then stops working.

This spring, Opportunity is crossing an inner slope of Victoria Crater to reach the base of a cliff portion of the crater rim, a promontory called "Cape Verde." On April 14, Opportunity was backing out of a sandy patch encountered on the path toward Cape Verde from the area where the rover descended into the crater. As usual, the commands included unstowing the arm at the end of the day's short drive. The shoulder motor barely got the arm unstowed before stalling.

"We'll hold off backing out of the sand until after we've completed the diagnostic tests on the motor," Callas said. "The rover is stable and safe in its current situation, and not under any urgency. So we will take the time to act cautiously."

source : www.nasa.gov

NASA's moon rockets will sport shocks to smooth out bumpy ride

The nation's new moon rockets will be outfitted with shock absorbers to buffer astronauts from jackhammer-like vibrations during rocky rides into orbit.

A spring-and-damper ring will separate the first and second stages of Ares 1 rockets, which NASA is developing for missions to the International Space Station, the moon and later Mars.

Sixteen actuators that act like shock absorbers also will be added to the bottom of the rockets, significantly reducing the gravitational forces and vibrations astronauts will be exposed to in flight.

"The good news here is we've got a solution that will solve the thrust oscillation phenomenon," said Steve Cook, manager of Ares Projects at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

NASA's Ares 1 rocket is being developed to launch Apollo-style Orion crew capsules.

The rocket's first stage will comprise a five-segment solid rocket booster derived from the four-segment boosters that help propel shuttles into orbit. The second stage will be powered by a liquid-fueled engine.

NASA design engineers found the Ares 1 — dubbed the "single stick" due to its slender shape — would shake violently near the end of a two-minute firing of the rocket's first stage.

This "thrust oscillation" is induced as solid fuel in the first stage depletes, leaving a long, empty metal case that takes on the characteristics of a pipe organ, resonating at frequencies between 12 and 14 hertz.

The resulting vibrations could shake the Orion crew capsule enough to make it difficult for astronauts to read cockpit displays. In a worst case, astronauts might be injured or critical components of the spacecraft could be damaged.

An internal NASA task force determined the second stage of the vehicle and the Orion crew capsule would naturally dampen resulting pressure pulses.

The astronauts, however, would be subjected to forces five or six times that of normal gravity — or about double the three G's shuttle crews are exposed to during nine-minute climbs into orbit.

The task force recommended NASA add the shock absorber system, which will reduce gravitational forces to 0.25 G, or about the same level that Mercury and Gemini astronauts were exposed to.

The system will reduce the lift capacity of the Ares 1 rockets by 1,200 to 1,400 pounds. But Cook said the rockets still will be powerful enough to fly missions to the space station and moon.

NASA aims to debut the Ares 1 rocket and Orion spacecraft by March 2015 — five years after the agency's shuttle fleet is retired. The target for the first moon mission is 2020.

source : www.usatoday.com

Archaeologists get a glimpse of life in a Sahara Eden

The tiny skeletal hand jutted from the sand as if beckoning the living to the long dead.

For thousands of years, it had lain unheeded in the most desolate section of the Sahara, surrounded by the bones of hippos, giraffes and other creatures typically found in the jungle.

A chance discovery by a team of American scientists has led to the unearthing of a Stone Age cemetery that is providing the first glimpses of what life was like during the still-mysterious period when monsoons brought rain to the desert and created the "green Sahara."

The more than 200 graves that have been explored so far indicate that, beginning 10,000 years ago, two populations lived on the shores of a massive lake, separated by a 1,000-year period during which the lake dried up.

Among the scientists' most surprising discoveries has been a poignant burial tableau of a woman and two children with fingers intertwined, a find that is putting a surprisingly human face on the little-known people who enjoyed a brief visit to Eden in what is normally one of the most forbidding places on Earth.

The first to settle the area was a group of tall, powerfully built hunters, gatherers and fishermen called the Kiffian, University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno said at a news conference Thursday.

The group that followed the Kiffian was a physically smaller band of pastoralists called the Tenerian, who relied on fishing and hunting but also herded cattle, he said.

"They've managed to find these people," said archaeologist Anne Haour of the University of East Anglia in Britain, who was not involved in the research. "We've always suspected something was going on, but this is the first time it has been properly documented."

In addition to the graves, researchers found a massive collection of the remains of meals, tools, pots and other artifacts -- the detritus of everyday life.

"This is a real find . . . for a time period that is not very well documented in that part of the world," said archaeologist Kathy Schick of Indiana University's Stone Age Institute. "It's just a gold mine of information."

The new findings were published Thursday in the online journal PLoS One and in the September issue of National Geographic magazine.

The Sahara has been a desert for untold millenniums. But about 12,000 years ago, a faint wobble in Earth's orbit and some other factors caused Africa's seasonal monsoons to shift slightly north, bringing rains to the Sahara and greening it from Egypt in the east to Mauritania in the west.

About 8,000 years ago, the rains retreated, leaving the region arid once more and causing it to be abandoned. A thousand years later, the rains returned for two more millenniums, before again retreating.

The newly discovered site, called Gobero after the Tuareg nomads' name for the area, lies deep in Niger's Tenere Desert, a large region in the still larger Sahara. The site lay unobserved and untouched because it was literally "in the middle of nowhere," Sereno said. "There is absolutely no reason for anyone to go there."

Sereno had a reason: a nearby table of 110-million-year-old sandstone "that has more dinosaurs in it of high quality than any other rock in the continent of Africa."

In 2000, Sereno and a small group of colleagues were on one of their periodic forays in which they would load up a Land Rover and travel as far from their main site as they could in one day, looking for dinosaur bones.

"We were at the end of our rope," Sereno said, nearly out of water and ready to turn around, when he spotted a stone formation sticking up in the distance and decided to go a little farther.

When they got there, they found animal bones scattered on the surface, exposed by the weather. Photographer Mike Hettwer wandered off to a trio of small dunes, then rushed excitedly back to the group.

"I found some bones," he told them. "But they're not dinosaurs. They're human."

The hand, probably belonging to a child, stood out amid the flat landscape, its finger bones blackened but intact. The researchers saw parts of dozens of human skeletons, including jawbones with nearly full sets of teeth and skullcaps like serving dishes filled with sand.


source : www.latimes.com

Fingerprint Test Tells What a Person Has Touched

With a new analytical technique, a fingerprint can now reveal much more than the identity of a person. It can now also identify what the person has been touching: drugs, explosives or poisons, for example.

Writing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, R. Graham Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, and his colleagues describe how a laboratory technique, mass spectrometry, could find a wider application in crime investigations.

The equipment to perform such tests is already commercially available, although prohibitively expensive for all but the largest crime laboratories. Smaller, cheaper, portable versions of such analyzers are probably only a couple of years away.

In Dr. Cooks’s method, a tiny spray of liquid that has been electrically charged, either water or water and alcohol, is sprayed on a tiny bit of the fingerprint. The droplets dissolve compounds in the fingerprints and splash them off the surface into the analyzer. The liquid is heated and evaporates, and the electrical charge is transferred to the fingerprint molecules, which are then identified by a device called a mass spectrometer. The process is repeated over the entire fingerprint, producing a two-dimensional image.

The researchers call the technique desorption electrospray ionization, or Desi, for short.

In the experiments described in the Science paper, solutions containing tiny amounts of various chemicals including cocaine and the explosive RDX were applied to the fingertips of volunteers. The volunteers touched surfaces like glass, paper and plastic. The researchers then analyzed the fingerprints.

Because the spatial resolution is on the order of the width of a human hair, the Desi technique did not just detect the presence of, for instance, cocaine, but literally showed a pattern of cocaine in the shape of the fingerprint, leaving no doubt who had left the cocaine behind.

“That’s an advantage that this technique would have,” said Bruce Goldberger, professor and director of toxicology at the University of Florida who runs a forensics laboratory that helps medical examiners and law enforcement. Dr. Goldberger was not involved in the research.

The chemical signature could also help crime investigators tease out one fingerprint out of the smudges of many overlapping prints if the person had been exposed to a specific chemical, said Demian R. Ifa, a postdoctoral researcher and the lead author of the Science paper.

Prosolia Inc., a small company in Indianapolis, has licensed the Desi technology from Purdue and is already selling such analyzers as add-ons to large laboratory mass spectrometers, which cost several hundred thousand dollars each.

Prosolia has so far sold about 70 analyzers, said Peter T. Kissinger, the company’s chairman and chief executive. The most sophisticated $60,000 version that would be needed for fingerprint analysis went on sale this year.

However, fingerprints are not the main focus for Prosolia or Dr. Cooks. “This is really just an offshoot of a project that is really aimed at trying to develop a methodology ultimately to be used in surgery,” Dr. Cooks said.

If a Desi analyzer can be miniaturized and automated into a surgical tool, a surgeon could, for example, quickly test body tissues for the presence of molecules associated with cancer. “That’s the long-term aim of this work,” Dr. Cooks said.

In unpublished research, the researchers have successfully tested the method on bladder tumors in dogs.

Prosolia is collaborating with Griffin Analytical Technologies, a subsidiary of ICx Technologies, on a Desi analyzer that works with a portable mass spectrometer. That product is probably a year or two away from the market, Dr. Kissinger said.

As it becomes cheaper and more widely available, the Desi technology has potential ethical implications, Dr. Cooks said. Instead of drug tests, a company could surreptitiously check for illegal drug use by its employees by analyzing computer keyboards after the workers have gone home, for instance.

source : www.nytimes.com

NASA Dispels Internet Rumors About Life On Mars

Officials caution against rumors, conspiracy theories, and speculation as interest grows and the Phoenix Mars Lander continues to collect specimens from the Red Planet.

NASA researchers and scientists have been looking for evidence that Mars could have supported life in the past or that it could be habitable in the future, but they want to dispel any online rumors: They have not found life on the Red Planet.

The Phoenix Mars Lander has been analyzing soil samples from Mars, and NASA's support team for the mission is interested in finding evidence of whether Mars has or ever could support life. Some samples have shown that the Red Planet has some indications -- like evidence of water, ice, and nutrients -- it could support life. However, NASA has not announced or implied that it has discovered life on Mars.

The Phoenix mission has gained a following. Media reports late last week stated that NASA had briefed the White House about finding life on Mars, while attempting to hide that information from the public. The rumors of Martian life and a White House conspiracy caused enough of a distraction that the space agency decided to hold a news conference Tuesday to dispel them.

Nevertheless, the findings have been interesting enough for NASA to extend the mission from its original 90-day schedule, which would have concluded at the end of August, to continue for an additional five weeks.

During the news conference Thursday, NASA employees cautioned that they are in the early stages of examining several findings (including the possible discovery of perchlorate) and all of the information must be tested and verified.

"We decided to show the public science in action because of the extreme interest in the Phoenix mission, which is searching for a habitable environment on the northern plains of Mars," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "Right now, we don't know whether finding perchlorate is good news or bad news for possible life on Mars."

source : www.informationweek.com

Chemical discovery on Mars stumps Phoenix team

Scientists analyzing two soil samples their Phoenix spacecraft dug from the surface of Mars announced they have discovered what may be the highly oxidizing chemical called perchlorate, a common component of rocket fuels, explosives and some medicines, they reported Monday.

The surprising discovery in the Martian soil seems contradictory, because if it really is confirmed as a perchlorate compound it suggests that the planet's soil may be very much like Earth's, said Peter Smith, the University of Arizona scientist who heads the Phoenix mission.

However, Smith said in his announcement, "further analysis has revealed un-Earthlike aspects of the soil chemistry."

And whether the chemical actually is perchlorate - or in which of its many compounds it exists in the Martian soil - has not yet been determined, Smith said.

The Phoenix science team would not speculate on whether the chemical is naturally part of the Martian soil or whether it might have contaminated the soil directly around the spacecraft when Phoenix landed gently on the arctic plains of Mars on May 25, slowed by its 12 hydrazine retro-rockets in a blast of gas for its safe upright landing. Hydrazine is not a perchlorate, however.

NASA officials and the scientists will hold a teleconference today to discuss steps the Phoenix team has taken over the past month to pin down the identity of the perchlorate and why an experiment Sunday by one of its instruments found no evidence of the chemical directly above an ice layer that was scraped from soil near the spacecraft.

Two samples of the chemical have now been analyzed and detected on Mars by the spacecraft's miniaturized Wet Chemistry Lab, which is part of a more elaborate series of Phoenix instruments called MECA -for Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, Smith said.

An earlier measurement of surface soil by another Phoenix instrument called TEGA - for the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer - "was consistent with but not conclusive of the presence of perchlorate," Smith said.

On Earth, perchlorates are used in many types of explosives - including the rockets that blast astronauts into orbit aboard the space shuttles. They are also commonly used in fireworks, in blasting caps and even in medicine as part of a combination treatment for hyperthyroidism.

It is also a serious and toxic environmental contaminant left over from many American chemical plants, and Congress is now in a battle with the Environmental Protection Agency over the EPA's refusal to set safety standards for perchlorates in drinking water and milk.

source : http://www.sfgate.com/

NASA Has Phoenix Looking For Life On Mars After Ice Discovery

Boston (dbTechno) - NASA confirmed last week that the Phoenix Mars lander managed to confirm that there is ice in the red planet’s soil. Now that the discovery has been made, the hope is that the Phoenix can now look for any signs of life on Mars.

Last week, NASA scientists were opening up bottles of champagne to celebrate the finding of ice on Mars.

Now that the celebration has begun to pass though, it is time to get back to work, as their next goal to try and analyze soil samples, to see if they can find any signs of life.

The Phoenix Mars lander is going to have extra time to do this as well, as NASA has extended the mission by five weeks, meaning the Phoenix will have until September 30th to look around the planet.

The September 30th date will likely the deadline, as it is not believed that the craft will be able to survive the winter on Mars.

The remainder of the mission for the Phoenix Mars lander will be used to analyze samples on the red planet.

The hope is that they will end up turning up some sort of evidence of primitive life,s uch as bacteria, organic molecules, etc.

We will have to wait and see, as it should be an exciting few weeks to come.

source : http://www.dbtechno.com/

Batman sequel leads box office for third weekend

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "The Dark Knight" fended off a strong challenge from the new "Mummy" sequel to lead the North American box office for a third weekend, and is on track to become the second-biggest movie of all time.

The Batman blockbuster earned $43.8 million for the three days beginning Friday, distributor Warner Bros. Pictures said on Sunday. Universal's "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" followed with $42.5 million.

The Walt Disney Co. political comedy "Swing Vote" came in at No. 6 with just $6.3 million, the latest disappointment for its star, Kevin Costner, who has not had a $100 million movie since 1992's "The Bodyguard."

The total for "The Dark Knight" rose to $394.9 million. Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc , said it expects the film to add at least $100 million, surpassing the $461 million haul of 1977's "Star Wars" and its two reissues, the current No. 2 movie of all time in the United States and Canada. The $601 million record, held by 1997's "Titanic," seems watertight.

"The Dark Knight" will add yet another record to its impressive tally on Monday or Tuesday, when it breaks $400 million, which would be its 18th or 19th day of release. The old record of 43 days is held by 2004's "Shrek 2."

MUMMY BIG OVERSEAS

Pundits had predicted that the "Mummy" movie could open to upwards of $50 million, roughly in between its two predecessors, but the critically mauled Brendan Fraser film was a little bruised by the Batman juggernaut.

It marks the follow-up to 2001's "The Mummy Returns," which opened to $68 million. The franchise relaunched in 1999 with a $43.4 million bow for "The Mummy."

Universal said "The Mummy" was big internationally. The film, co-starring Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, opened to $59.5 million from 28 territories. Top markets included Russia and South Korea, each with about $13 million. Because the action is set in China, and the Olympic Games kick off in Beijing on Friday, Universal has been cross-promoting the movie with its General Electric Co. .corporate sibling NBC, which holds the U.S. broadcast rights to the games.

Fraser has had a low profile since appearing as part of the ensemble in the Oscar-winning 2004 movie "Crash." But he now has two movies in the top 5, with Warner Bros.' "Journey to the Center of the Earth" at No. 5 with a four-week total of $73.1 million.

"Swing Vote," in which Costner plays a hard-drinking oaf whose vote will determine the outcome of a U.S. presidential election, was released as a counterprogramming attempt. Disney distribution president Chuck Viane billed it as "a thinking person's movie," but it ended up being one of the worst openings of Costner's career. Reviews were mixed.

Disney's only summer success, the Pixar-produced cartoon "WALL-E" has earned $204.2 million after six weeks, and will pass the $206 million haul of last year's "Ratatouille." But it will end up as only the sixth-biggest of Pixar's nine productions.

Despite the strong performance of "The Dark Knight" and "The Mummy," overall sales fell for the second consecutive weekend, according to tracking firm Media By Numbers. The top 12 films grossed $149 million, down 10 percent from the year-ago period. Year to date, revenues are flat at $5.9 billion, while the number of tickets sold is down almost 3 percent.

Source : http://uk.reuters.com/

Rumors Abound About 'Potential for Life' on Mars

Rumors are flying this weekend that Mars Phoenix has made a major discovery relating to the potential for life on Mars.

Wired.com reached Sam Kounaves, the mission's wet chemistry lab lead, by cell phone this morning. He quickly directed us to speak with NASA's PR representatives, but not before he said, simply, "Rumors are rumors."

They stem from an article in Aviation Week and subsequent pickup on Slashdot and elsewhere indicating that the White House had been briefed on the potential for life on the planet.

"The White House has been alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the "potential for life" on Mars," wrote Craig Covault, citing anonymous sources on the Phoenix Lander's wet chemistry lab team.

Covault's article showed some restraint, though, and made sure to note that "sources say the new data do not indicate the discovery of existing or past life on Mars."

The subtleties, however, were quickly lost in the blogosphere, where excitement began to build that simple extraterrestrial life, or something suggesting its presence, had been found on Mars.

Late last night, @MarsPhoenix (aka Veronica McGregor, a NASA employee) responded to the story, via the mission's Twitter account.

"Heard about the recent news reports implying I may have found Martian life. Those reports are incorrect," she Tweeted. "Reports claiming there was a White House briefing are also untrue and incorrect."

Covault implies that a test in which Earth water was mixed with Martian soil is the cause of the excitement. Mars Phoenix scientists have repeatedly stated that the lander doesn't have the tools to directly detect life.

Over at LiveScience, David Leonard hints, without sourcing or attribution, that a paper on the work is going to come out in the journal Science.

"The reason that all this seems so hush-hush is due to a future paper and press release that appears likely to pop out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and its Science magazine," Leonard writes. "Whatever the poop is from the scoop that’s been studied by Phoenix, that information is purportedly going through peer-review."

Source : http://blog.wired.com/

Solar Eclipse Wows Airborne Skywatchers Over Arctic Circle

ABOARD A JET ABOVE THE ARCTIC OCEAN – A total of 147 observers from around the world had a perfect view of this morning's total eclipse of the sun, thanks to an 2,189-mile airlift to a grandstand seat 36,000-feet above the Arctic Ocean at a point between the uninhabited northern coast of Greenland and the Norwegian island group of Svalbard.

The contingent of eclipse watchers were onboard an LTU Airbus A330-200 long-range jet, racing the moon's shadow like paparazzi scrambling alongside a celebrity's passing automobile.

The aircraft's 555-mile-per-hour speed (mach 0.85) provided 175-seconds of total eclipse for the passengers to take pictures and record other data. In contrast, persons on a stationary ship on the Arctic sea below would have seen – provided no clouds blocked the view – the moon's 139-mile wide shadow speed past them at 2,740 mph, providing a noticeably shorter total eclipse lasting 132 seconds.

Unique observing location

No planetarium in the world could have produced so impressive a natural spectacle as the sun and moon did in the cobalt-blue heavens; although the sight lasted less than 3 minutes, the fantastically beautiful skyscape more than repaid the participants, many of whom were already up before dawn to ready themselves for a round-trip flight of 12 hours.

The adventure began nearly six hours earlier in Dusseldorf, Germany and was arranged by the air charter company Deutsche Polarflug (AirEvents) which has operated previous successful over-flights of the North Pole with this same aircraft.

Glenn Schneider, from the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, on hand for his 27th total eclipse, worked out the flight plan to rendezvous with the moon's shadow.

This morning's flight was unique in the annals of solar eclipse chasing since there were no other records of any total eclipse observations in such close proximity (approximately 500-miles) from the North Pole. Utilizing Schneider's data, Captain Wilhelm Heinz, maneuvered the aircraft into the track of the moon's dark shadow.

What a view!

This jet, surmounted more than 75-percent of the atmosphere (in terms of mass) and almost all of its water vapor below, providing an opportunity to see what happens in the Earth's upper atmosphere when the sun is switched off, so to speak. Minutes before totality, the light inside the cabin faded, much in the same manner as lights in a theater dim before the start of a show.

As the last of the sun's rays slipped behind the jagged lunar edge it produced a beautiful and long-lasting "Diamond Ring" effect

The dark lunar shadow then swept in from the west and enveloped the plane in an eerie darkness. The sun's beautiful corona heralded the beginning of the total phase. It appeared to throw off several long streamers – typical for a corona at sunspot minimum, which is where solar activity is now.

Adding to this scene was an array of four bright planets arranged to the lower left of the darkened sun: Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Mars. Some observers searched near the sun for a small, faint comet that was discovered on SOHO satellite imagery some hours before the eclipse. But no evidence of the comet was observed.

Data on plasma sought

Schneider's experiments dealt in part with the density of plasma within the solar corona, and especially how it is heated to millions of degrees.

Plasma is a gas in which normal atoms have been stripped of some or all of their electrons, thus becoming ions. This commonly occurs in extremely hot gases such as the solar corona. The plasma in the corona is strikingly similar to the plasma that would have to be heated, compressed and refined in a fusion reactor here on Earth, and the irregular behavior of the sun's corona might hold clues to the proper design of a workable fusion reactor.

Schneider was collaborating with Jay Pasachoff of Williams College in Massachusetts who was stationed in Siberia for the eclipse. Schneider utilized a platform controlled by two gyros that carried several cameras for recording eclipse images. Schneider and Pasachoff previously collaborated on a similar observation over the Antarctic in 2003.

"Pole Vault"

After the eclipse, the rest of the journey was spent "flightseeing."

Ahead lay endless fields of pack ice, cracks and enormous icebergs which offered breathtaking views. Captain Heinz did a "countdown" to the flight's impending arrival at 90-degrees north latitude, and soon, the eclipse participants were literally "on top of the world" at the North Pole.

After directly over-flying the Pole, we "circled the globe," clockwise and counterclockwise, flying across all 360 degrees of longitude within just two minutes. At the North Pole, we were practically equidistant to Point Barrow, Alaska as to Knivskjellodden in Norway. From this point, the distance to Northern Canada was only 465 miles, putting us closer to the American continent than to Europe.

Source : http://blog.wired.com/