Dragon makes history with space station docking

This image provided by NASA-TV shows the SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft after Dragon was grappled by the Canadarm2 robotic arm and connected to the International Space Station, Friday, May 25, 2012. Dragon is scheduled to spend about a week docked with the station before returning to Earth on May 31 for retrieval.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- The private company SpaceX made history Friday with the docking of its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station, the most impressive feat yet in turning routine spaceflight over to the commercial sector.

It marked the first time a business enterprise delivered a supply ship to the space station.

"There's so much that could have gone wrong and it went right," said an elated Elon Musk, the young, driven billionaire behind SpaceX.

"This really is, I think, going to be recognized as a significantly historical step forward in space travel - and hopefully the first of many to come."

SpaceX still has to get its Dragon back next week with a load of science gear; the retro bell-shaped capsule is designed to splash down into the ocean, in the style of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. But Friday was the crucial step, Musk noted, and NASA agreed the next SpaceX mission could come as early as September.

After a three-day flight from Cape Canaveral, the Dragon closed in on the space station as two control centers - NASA in Houston and SpaceX in Hawthorne, Calif. - worked in tandem. A problem with the capsule laser-tracking system prompted SpaceX controllers to order a temporary retreat, but the problem quickly was resolved.

NASA astronaut Donald Pettit used the space station's 58-foot robot arm to snare the gleaming white Dragon as the two craft soared 250 miles above Australia, a day after a practice fly-by.

"Looks like we've got us a dragon by the tail," Pettit announced once he locked onto Dragon's docking mechanism.

NASA's dressed-up controllers applauded. In contrast, their SpaceX counterparts - including Musk - lifted their arms in triumph and jumped out of their seats to exchange high fives.

The company's youthful-looking employees - the average age is 30 - were still in a frenzy when Musk took part in a televised news conference a couple hours later. They screamed with excitement as if it were a pep rally and chanted, "E-lon, E-lon, E-lon," as the 40-year-old Musk, wearing a black athletic jacket with the SpaceX logo, described the day's events.

Alcohol was banned from the premises during the crucial flight operation, Musk noted, "but now that things are good, I think we'll probably have a bit of champagne and have some fun." The crowd roared in approval.

Although cargo hauls have become routine, Friday's linkup was significant in that an individual company pulled it off. That chore was previously reserved for a small, elite group of government agencies.

Not only that, the reusable SpaceX Dragon is designed to safely return items, a huge benefit that disappeared with NASA's space shuttles. It is the first U.S. craft to visit the station since the final shuttle flight last summer.

"I think you know it, but you made history today," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told the space station astronauts and everyone else involved in Friday's docking. "It was an effort that will revolutionize the way we carry out space exploration."

NASA provided seed money for SpaceX - $381 million going into Tuesday's launch, a small portion of the more than $1 billion that the company has invested in the effort.

Two hours after the capture, the crew attached the Dragon to the space station as the congratulations poured in.

"Everyone who is working to push forward the space frontier recognizes that such a mission is a massive challenge, and I join the world in lauding this important accomplishment," said Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company that is holding a seat for Musk aboard its SpaceShipTwo.

"Nearly 43 years after we first walked on the moon, we have taken another step in demonstrating continued American leadership in space," said Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step onto the moon.

The capsule- 19 feet tall and 12 feet across - is carrying 1,000 pounds of supplies on this unprecedented test flight. The crew starts unpacking Saturday and will have just under a week to unload the food, clothes and other contents.

After this test flight, SpaceX - officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. - has a contract to make a dozen delivery runs. It is one of several companies vying for NASA's cargo business and a chance to launch Americans from U.S. soil.

Rival Orbital Sciences Corp. is shooting for its own supply run by year's end.

President Barack Obama is pushing commercial ventures in orbit so NASA can concentrate on grander destinations like asteroids and Mars. Obama's chief scientific adviser, John Holdren, called Friday's linkup "an achievement of historic scientific and technological significance."

"It's essential we maintain such competition and fully support this burgeoning and capable industry to get U.S. astronauts back on American launch vehicles as soon as possible," Holdren said in a statement.

Without the shuttle, NASA astronauts must go through Russia, an expensive and embarrassing situation for the U.S. after a half-century of orbital self-sufficiency. Once companies master supply runs, they hope to tackle astronaut ferry runs.

Musk, who founded SpaceX a decade ago and helped create PayPal, said he can have astronauts riding his Dragon capsules to orbit in three or four years. He also runs the electric car company Tesla Motors.

The space station has been relying on Russian, Japanese and European cargo ships for supplies ever since the shuttles retired. None of those, however, can bring anything of value back; they're simply loaded with trash and burn up in the atmosphere.

The space station's six-man crew will release the Dragon on Thursday after filling it with science experiments and equipment. It will aim for the Pacific Ocean just off the California coast.

"At the beginning of the launch, I said there were a thousand things that had to go right," said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA's commercial crew and cargo program. "Well, there still are several hundred left. But I am very confident we'll get through it. ... Today this really is the beginning of a new era in commercial spaceflight"

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Commercial rocket will fly to the space station

A halo forms around the top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 test rocket

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- For the first time, a private company will launch a rocket to the International Space Station, sending it on a grocery run this weekend that could be the shape of things to come for America's space program.

If this unmanned flight and others like it succeed, commercial spacecraft could be ferrying astronauts to the orbiting outpost within five years.

It's a transition that has been in the works since the middle of the last decade, when President George W. Bush decided to retire the space shuttle and devote more of NASA's energies to venturing deeper into space.

Saturday's flight by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is "a thoroughly exciting moment in the history of spaceflight, but is just the beginning of a new way of doing business for NASA," said President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren.

By handing off space station launches to private business, "NASA is freeing itself up to focus on exploring beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years."

California-based Space Exploration, or SpaceX, is the first of several companies hoping to take over the space station delivery business for the U.S. The company's billionaire mastermind, Elon Musk, puts the odds of success in his favor while acknowledging the chance for mishaps.

NASA likewise cautions: This is only a test.

"We need to be careful not to assume that the success or failure of commercial spaceflight is going to hang in the balance of this single flight," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager. "Demo flights don't always go as planned."

Once it nears the space station after a two-day flight, the SpaceX capsule, called Dragon, will spend a day of practice maneuvers before NASA signals it to move in for a linkup. Then its cargo - a half-ton of food and other pantry items, all nonessential, in case the flight goes awry - will be unloaded.

Up to now, flights to the space station have always been a government-only affair.

Until their retirement last summer, shuttles carried most of the gear and many of the astronauts to the orbiting outpost. Since then, American astronauts have had to rely on Russian capsules for rides. European, Japanese and Russian supply ships have been delivering cargo.

It will be at least four to five years before SpaceX or any other private operator is capable of flying astronauts. That gap infuriates many. Some members of Congress want to cut government funding to the private space venture and reduce the number of rival companies to save money and speed things up.

The shift to private enterprise, while revolutionary in space, has a long history in the U.S. The Internet, for example, evolved from government work. Space station astronaut Donald Pettit points to the settling of the American West: The government ran the forts, and private enterprise built the railroads.

In this instance, NASA employees are still working closely with the commercial contenders, giving advice and attending company meetings.

"I see this whole story repeating itself again and again as we move from low-Earth orbit," Pettit said. "And it will probably repeat itself when we go to the moon and elsewhere."

No one is rooting more for SpaceX than NASA. The space agency has poured $381 million into the SpaceX effort, while the company has spent $1 billion over its 10-year lifetime, said Musk, the high-tech pioneer who co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric car company.

NASA also gave $266 million to a second company it hired to make supply runs. Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. hopes to launch its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule from Wallops Island, Va., by year's end.

"This is the start of a real new era," said Dutch spaceman Andre Kuipers, who will help Pettit snare the Dragon and pull it to the space station with a robotic arm.

Pettit agreed the upcoming Dragon flight is a "big deal," but added: "I hope this becomes so routine that people won't even pay attention to it anymore."

SpaceX will have only a split second, at 4:55 a.m. Saturday, to shoot its Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule skyward. (All spacecraft bound for the space station these days have instantaneous launch windows in order to sync up efficiently with the orbiting outpost.)

SpaceX already has achieved what no other commercial entity has done: It launched a spacecraft into orbit and brought it back intact in a 2010 test flight that ended with the capsule splashing down in the Pacific.

But getting to the space station is twice as hard, said Musk, who is not only CEO but chief designer. A Dragon capsule has never before attempted a rendezvous and docking in orbit - an exquisitely delicate operation, with the risk of a collision that could prove ruinous for the space station, which has six men on board.

If something goes wrong, "we'll fix the problem and be back at it," Musk said. Two more SpaceX delivery trips are planned for this year.

The bell-shaped Dragon capsule is 19 feet tall and 12 feet across. What sets it apart from other capsules is that it can bring back space station experiments and old equipment, as the shuttles did. None of the Russian, European and Japanese supply ships do that - they burn up when they return to Earth. The Russian Soyuz vehicles that ferry astronauts have little room to spare.

The Dragon will be cut loose from the space station about two weeks after arriving and aim for a Pacific splashdown off the California coast.

Other U.S. companies vying for a shot at launching space station astronauts - like Sierra Nevada Corp., which is designing the mini-shuttle Dream Chaser - are cheering on SpaceX since it is the first one out of NASA's post-shuttle, commercial gate.

Former space shuttle commander Steven Lindsey, director of flight operations for Sierra Nevada in Colorado, said: "It's a new way of doing business, and there's a lot of debate back and forth on whether it's going to be successful - or whether it can be successful."

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We’ve seen the light: Nasa spots light being emitted from “super-Earth” planet

 Super-Earth” Planet

Light glowing from a "super-Earth" planet beyond our solar system has been detected by Nasa’s Spitzer Telescope.

Until now, scientists have never been able to detect infrared light emanating from 55 Cancri E, a super-hot extrasolar planet twice the size and eight times the mass of our own.

Experts are hailing the latest discovery as a historic step towards the eventual search for signs of life on other planets.

55 Cancri E is one of five exoplanets orbiting a bright star named 55 Cancri in a solar system lying in the constellation of Cancer (The Crab).

Previously, Spitzer and other telescopes were able to study the planet by observing how the light from 55 Cancri changed as the planet passed in front of the star.

In the new study, Spitzer instead measured how much infrared light came from the planet itself – revealing some of the planet’s major features.

At 41-light years from Earth, the giant planet is considered uninhabitable.

The giant planet is tidally locked, so one side always faces the star. The telescope found that the sun-facing side is extremely hot, indicating the planet probably does not have a substantial atmosphere to carry the sun's heat to the unlit side.

On its sun-facing side, the surface has a temperature of 1,727 Celsius – or 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit –  That’s hot enough to melt silver or aluminium.

It is calculated that one year on the alien planet lasts just 18 hours.

The new findings are consistent with a previous theory that 55 Cancri E is a water world: A rocky core surrounded by a layer of water in a "supercritical" state where it is both liquid and gas, and topped by a blanket of steam.

Bill Danchi, Spitzer programme scientist at NASA, said: “Spitzer has amazed us yet again. The spacecraft is pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to apply a similar technique on potentially habitable planets.”

Michael Werner, who also works on the Spitzer project, added: “When we conceived of Spitzer more than 40 years ago, exoplanets hadn't even been discovered. Because Spitzer was built very well, it's been able to adapt to this new field and make historic advances such as this.”

The planet was first discovered in 2004 and the new findings are published in the current issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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‘Supermoon’ Tonight! Tips to See Year’s Biggest Full Moon

Biggest Full Moon

If the full moon looks a bit bigger and brighter in tonight’s sky, you’re not seeing things: It’s just the “supermoon” — the biggest moon of 2012. And there’s a meteor shower from Halley’s comet peaking tonight, too, adding to the sky show.

The full moon of May will hit its peak overnight tonight and early Sunday (May 5 and 6) just one minute after the moon makes its closest approach to Earth. The timing means the moon, weather permitting, could appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than the average full moon, an event scientists have nicknamed the “supermoon.”

The moon will be at its fullest at 11:35 p.m. EDT (0335 Sunday GMT) just after hitting perigee, the point in its orbit that brings the moon closest to Earth. The technical name for the event is a “perigee moon,” though NASA and other scientists have dubbed May’s full moon as the supermoon of 2012.

The moon will be about 221,802 miles (356,955 kilometers) from Earth, about 12.2 percent closer to our planet than when the moon is at apogee, its farthest point. The average Earth-moon distance is about 230,000 miles (384,400 km).

The last time a supermoon occurred was in March 2011. That supermoon was actually closer to Earth than the moon will be tonight by about 248 miles (400 km). [Amazing Supermoon Photos from 2011]

Big moon rising

A good time to watch is during moonrise or moonset. At these times, due to reasons astronomers don’t fully understand, the moon can appear much larger than when it is higher in the sky. But the view is actually an optical illusion (also known as the “moon illusion“).

The moon is no larger than it is when it’s overhead in the night sky and you can prove it yourself. Here’s how, when the moon is low on the horizon measure its size with a ruler or your thumb and forefinger. When it’s higher up in the sky, try again. The distances will be the same.

For observers in California, the moon will rise at about 7:37 p.m. PDT, while skywatchers with a clear horizon on the East Coast will see it rise at 7:46 p.m. EDT, though you can find the exact time for your location using the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

The extra big full moon of May can mean higher tides on Earth, an effect called “perigean tides,” but there is no chance of the supermoon posing a threat to Earth.

“In most places, lunar gravity at perigee pulls tide waters only a few centimeters (an inch or so) higher than usual,” astronomer Tony Phillips wrote in a NASA supermoon alert. “Local geography can amplify the effect to about 15 centimeters (6 inches) — not exactly a great flood.”

 Meteors from Halley’s comet

The supermoon is not the only celestial sight gracing the evening skies this weekend. Tonight, the annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower will hit its peak, promising up to 60 meteors per hour for skywatchers with optimum viewing conditions (clear weather and away from city lights).

The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is one of two “shooting star” displays created by dust left over by the famed Halley’s comet as it makes its 76-year trip around the sun. The Orionid meteor shower in October is the other meteor show from the comet.

While the supermoon is expected to outshine the fainter Eta Aquarid meteors, NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke predicts that some bright fireballs may be visible. Cooke and his observing team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center have already recorded several bright fireballs from the Eta Aquarids and are looking forward to seeing more tonight using the agency’s network of all-sky meteor cameras.

“Ideal viewing conditions are clear skies away from city lights, especially just before dawn,” NASA officials wrote in an Eta Aquarid meteor observing guide. ” Find an area well away from city or street lights. Lie flat on your back on a blanket, lawn chair or sleeping bag and look up, taking in as much of the sky as possible. After about 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adapt and you will begin to see meteors. Be patient — the show will last until dawn, so you have plenty of time to catch a glimpse.”

Views from NASA’s all-sky cameras are available to view the Eta Aquarid meteor shower remotely here: http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/allsky.html


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James Cameron Completes Record-Breaking Mariana Trench Dive

James Cameron emerges from his sub after returning from Challenger Deep

At noon, local time (10 p.m. ET), James Cameron's "vertical torpedo" sub broke the surface of the western Pacific, carrying the National Geographic explorer and filmmaker back from the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep—Earth's deepest, and perhaps most alien, realm.

The first human to reach the 6.8-mile-deep (11-kilometer-deep) undersea valley solo, Cameron arrived at the bottom with the tech to collect scientific data, specimens, and visions unthinkable in 1960, when the only other manned Challenger Deep dive took place, according to members of the National Geographic expedition.

After a faster-than-expected, roughly 70-minute ascent, Cameron's sub, bobbing in the open ocean, was spotted by helicopter and would soon be plucked from the Pacific by a research ship's crane. Earlier, the descent to Challenger Deep had taken 2 hours and 36 minutes.

Expedition member Kevin Hand called the timing of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER sub's ascent "perfect."

"Jim came up in what must have been the best weather conditions we've seen, and it looks like there’s a squall on the horizon," said Hand, a NASA astrobiologist and National Geographic emerging explorer.

Before surfacing about 300 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of Guam, Cameron spent hours hovering over Challenger Deep's desert-like seafloor and gliding along its cliff walls, the whole time collecting samples and video.

Among the 2.5-story-tall sub's tools are a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a "slurp gun" for sucking up small seacreatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges. (See pictures of Cameron's sub.)

Now "the science team is getting ready for the returned samples," said NASA's Hand.

Cameron—best known for creating fictional worlds on film (Avatar, Titanic, The Abyss)—is expected to announce his initial findings later today. After analysis, full results are to be published in a future edition of National Geographic magazine.

"The Ultimate Test"

Retired U.S. Navy Capt. Don Walsh, who descended to Challenger Deep in 1960, said he was pleased to hear that Cameron had reached the underwater valley safely.

"That was a grand moment, to welcome him to the club," Walsh, said in a telephone interview from the sub-support ship.

"There're only three of us in it, and one of them—late Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard—"is dead. Now it's just Jim and myself."

Expedition physician Joe MacInnis called Cameron’s successful descent today "the ultimate test of a man and his machine."

After breaching the ocean surface, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER was first spotted by a helicopter owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a longtime Cameron friend. Allen was on the scene for the historic dive and posted live updates of the event on Twitter from aboard his yacht, the Octopus, which is providing backup support for the mission.

Science in Three Dimensions

Throughout the Mariana Trench dive, 3-D video cameras were kept whirring, and not just for the benefit of future audiences of planned documentaries.

"There is scientific value in getting stereo images because ... you can determine the scale and distance of objects from stereo pairs that you can't from 2-D images," Cameron told National Geographic News before the dive.

But "it's not just the video. The sub's lighting of deepwater scenes—mainly by an 8-foot (2.5-meter) tower of LEDs—is "so, so beautiful," said Doug Bartlett, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.

"It's unlike anything that you'll have seen from other subs or other remotely operated vehicles," said Bartlett, chief scientist for the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE project, a partnership with the National Geographic Society and Rolex. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)

Medical, Psychological Rigors

As the 57-year-old explorer emerged from the sub's coffin—tight 43-inch-wide (109-centimeter-wide) cockpit, a medical team stood at the ready.

But if recent test dives—including one to more than five miles (eight kilometers meters) down—are any indication, Cameron should be physically fine, despite having been unable to extend his arms and legs for hours, expedition physician Joe MacInnis told National Geographic News before the dive.

"Jim is going to be a little bit stiff and sore from the cramped position, but he's in really good shape for his age, so I don't expect any problems at all," said MacInnis, a long-time Cameron friend.

In addition, the sub's "pilot sphere" has a handlebar, which Cameron could use to pull himself occasionally up during the dive. "Usually, shifting position is all that's required to buy yourself another few hours," he said.

Because Cameron had prepared extensively for the dive, he should be in good psychological health, said Walter Sipes, an aeronautics psychologist at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

"He's got prior experience doing this, not just in the simulator but also training dives ... and he's an adventurer, so I really don't think they'll have any issues to worry about," said Sipes, who is not part of the expedition.

Still, if Cameron plans to conduct more dives—which the team has indicated he will—Sipes recommends he get plenty of rest in between or risk mental fatigue.

"When you start to get fatigued, you start making mistakes," he added. "And since he's down there solo, he can't afford that. He's a [potential] single-point failure."

It should be at least a few weeks before any further DEEPSEA CHALLENGE dives, as the director's next breakneck mission will take him from the middle of the Pacific to London, where he's due at a premiere of his Titanic 3-D Wednesday.

"A Turning Point"

By returning humans to the so-called hadal zone—the ocean's deepest level, below 20,000 feet (6,000 meters)—the Challenger Deep expedition may represent a renaissance in deep-sea exploration.

While remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, are much less expensive than manned subs, "the critical thing is to be able to take the human mind down into that environment," expedition member Patricia Fryer said, "to be able to turn your head and look around to see what the relationships are between organisms in a community and to see how they're behaving—to turn off all the lights and just sit there and watch and not frighten the animals, so that they behave normally.

"That is almost impossible to do with an ROV," said Fryer, a marine geologist at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics & Planetology.

Andy Bowen, project manager and principal developer of the Nereus, an ROV that explored Challenger Deep in 2009, said a manned mission also has the potential to inspire public imagination in a way a robot can't.

"It's difficult to anthropomorphize machines in a way that engages everyone's imagination—not in the same way that having boots on the ground, so to speak, can do," said Bowen, who's not an expedition member.

Biological oceanographer Lisa Levin, also at Scripps, said that the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE program's potential for generating public interest in deep-ocean science is as important as any new species Cameron might have discovered.

"I consider Cameron to be doing for the trenches what Jacques Cousteau did for the ocean many decades ago," said Levin, who's part of the team but did not participate in the seagoing expedition.

At a time of fast-shrinking funds for undersea research, "what scientists need is the public support to be able to continue exploration and research of the deep ocean," Levin said.

Perhaps referring to his friend's most recent movie, expedition physician MacInnis called Cameron a real-world "avatar."

"He's down there on behalf of everybody else on this planet," he said. "There are seven billion people who can’t go, and he can. And he’s aware of that."

For his part, Cameron seems sure that the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER will be exploring the depths for a long time to come. In fact, he's so confident in his star vehicle, he started mulling sequels even before today's trench dive.

Phase two might include adding a thin fiber-optic tether to the ship, which "would allow science observers at the surface to see the images in real time," said Cameron, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence.

"And phase three might be taking this vehicle and creating a second-generation vehicle."

DEEPSEA CHALLENGE, then, may be anything but a one-hit wonder. To expedition chief scientist Bartlett, the Mariana Trench dive could "represent a turning point in how we approach ocean science.

"I absolutely think that what you're seeing is the start of a program, not just one grand expedition."

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Strong solar storm heading for Earth

Largest solar flares of this solar cycle in this NASA photo taken on March 6, 2012

(Reuters) - A strong geomagnetic storm is racing from the Sun toward Earth, and its expected arrival on Thursday could affect power grids, airplane routes and space-based satellite navigation systems, U.S. space weather experts said.

The storm, a big cloud of charged particles flung from the Sun at about 4.5 million miles per hour (7.2 million km per hour), was spawned by a pair of solar flares, scientists said.

This is probably the strongest such event in nearly six years, and is likely more intense than a similar storm in late January, said Joseph Kunches, a space weather specialist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This solar disturbance is a three-stage affair, or as Kunches said in a telephone interview from Boulder, Colorado: "We hit the trifecta."

These are the stages he described, with the first two already affecting Earth:

* First, two solar flares moving at nearly the speed of light reached Earth late on Tuesday. Such flares can cause radio blackouts.

* Then, solar radiation hit Earth's magnetic field on Wednesday, with possible impact on air traffic, especially near the poles, satellites and any astronauts taking space walks. This phase could last for days.

* Finally, the plasma cloud sent by the coronal mass ejection, which is basically a big chunk of the Sun's atmosphere, is expected to arrive at Earth early on Thursday.

This phase can disrupt power grids, satellites, oil pipelines and high-accuracy GPS systems used by oil drillers, surveyors and some agricultural operations, scientists said.

GPS systems used for less-refined functions, such as the turn-by-turn navigation found in many cars, should not be affected, according to NOAA's Doug Biesiecker.

Kunches said the geomagnetic component of the storm may arrive a bit ahead of schedule because it follows a previous storm that left the Sun on Sunday and is currently buffeting the Earth's magnetosphere.

"When you've already had one coronal mass ejection storm, sometimes the next coronal mass ejection storm is faster to get here," Kunches said.

These storms could produce some vivid auroras, according to experts. In the Northern Hemisphere, the aurora borealis could be visible at mid-latitudes, which in the United States could include New York, Illinois and Iowa.

Such stormy space weather is unusual in recent history, according to Harlan Spence, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire who is principal investigator on the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"These relatively large (solar) events, which we've had maybe a couple of handfuls total in the course of a decade, we've now had two or three of them, more or less right on top of each other," Spence said by telephone.

The Sun is on the ascendant phase of its 11-year cycle of solar activity, with the peak expected next year, scientists said.

"It's a clear harbinger that the Sun is waking up," Spence said. "We're trying to put this in context not only ... of what has the Sun done in the past, but what is the biggest thing the Sun is capable of and what should we be planning for in terms of extreme sorts of events in the future."

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Solar Storm Now Hitting Earth, Called Strongest Since 2005, Could Affect Astronauts

A View of Solar Storm on the surface of blazing Sun

WASHINGTON -- The sun is bombarding Earth with radiation from the biggest solar storm in more than six years with more to come from the fast-moving eruption.

The solar flare occurred at about 11 p.m. EST Sunday and will hit Earth with three different effects at three different times. The biggest issue is radiation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado.

The radiation is mostly a concern for satellite disruptions and astronauts in space. It can cause communication problems for polar-traveling airplanes, said space weather center physicist Doug Biesecker.

Radiation from Sunday's flare arrived at Earth an hour later and will likely continue through Wednesday. Levels are considered strong but other storms have been more severe. There are two higher levels of radiation on NOAA's storm scale – severe and extreme – Biesecker said. Still, this storm is the strongest for radiation since May 2005.

The radiation – in the form of protons – came flying out of the sun at 93 million miles per hour.

"The whole volume of space between here and Jupiter is just filled with protons and you just don't get rid of them like that," Biesecker said. That's why the effects will stick around for a couple days.

NASA's flight surgeons and solar experts examined the solar flare's expected effects and decided that the six astronauts on the International Space Station do not have to do anything to protect themselves from the radiation, spokesman Rob Navias said.

A solar eruption is followed by a one-two-three punch, said Antti Pulkkinen, a physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Catholic University.

First comes electromagnetic radiation, followed by radiation in the form of protons.

Then, finally the coronal mass ejection – that's the plasma from the sun itself – hits. Usually that travels at about 1 or 2 million miles per hour, but this storm is particularly speedy and is shooting out at 4 million miles per hour, Biesecker said.

It's the plasma that causes much of the noticeable problems on Earth, such as electrical grid outages. In 1989, a solar storm caused a massive blackout in Quebec. It can also pull the northern lights further south.

But this coronal mass ejection seems likely to be only moderate, with a chance for becoming strong, Biesecker said. The worst of the storm is likely to go north of Earth.

And unlike last October, when a freak solar storm caused auroras to be seen as far south as Alabama, the northern lights aren't likely to dip too far south this time, Biesecker said. Parts of New England, upstate New York, northern Michigan, Montana and the Pacific Northwest could see an aurora but not until Tuesday evening, he said.

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Comet defies death, brushes up to sun and lives

Comet to Sun

WASHINGTON (AP) — A small comet survived what astronomers figured would be a sure death when it danced uncomfortably close to the broiling sun.

Comet Lovejoy, which was only discovered a couple of weeks ago, was supposed to melt Thursday night when it came close to where temperatures hit several million degrees. Astronomers had tracked 2,000 other sun-grazing comets make the same suicidal trip. None had ever survived.

But astronomers watching live with NASA telescopes first saw the sun's corona wiggle as Lovejoy went close to the sun. They were then shocked when a bright spot emerged on the sun's other side. Lovejoy lived.

"I was delighted when I saw it go into the sun and I was astounded when I saw something re-emerge," said U.S. Navy solar researcher Karl Battams.

Lovejoy didn't exactly come out of its hellish adventure unscathed. Only 10 percent of the comet — which was probably millions of tons — survived the encounter, said W. Dean Pesnell, project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which tracked Lovejoy's death-defying plunge.

And the comet lost something pretty important: its tail.

"It looks like the tail broke off and is stuck" in the sun's magnetic field, Pesnell said.

Comets circle the sun and sometimes get too close. Lovejoy came within 75,000 miles of the sun's surface, Battams said. For a small object often described as a dirty snowball comprised of ice and dust, that brush with the sun should have been fatal.

Astronomers say it probably didn't melt completely because the comet was larger than they thought.

The frozen comet was evaporating as it made the trip toward the sun, "just like you're sweating on a hot day," Pesnell said.

"It's like an ice cube going by a barbecue grill," he said.

Pesnell said the comet, although only discovered at the end of November by an Australian observer, probably is related to a comet that came by Earth on the way to the sun in 1106.

As Comet Lovejoy makes its big circle through the solar system, it will be another 800 or 900 years before it nears the sun again, astronomers say.

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Solar Storms Are "Sandblasting" the Moon, NASA Study Hints

Solar Storm

The moon gets periodically "sandblasted" by intense solar storms that can strip tons of material from the lunar surface, a new NASA study suggests.

The sun is constantly emitting charged particles, or ions, in all directions in a stream called the solar wind. Scientists previously knew that solar ions can collide with and eject material on the moon's surface in a process dubbed sputtering.

But a new computer simulation finds that this sandblasting effect kicks into high gear during intense bursts of solar plasma—charged gas—known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

A strong CME can hurl about a billion tons of solar particles at up to a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) an hour in a cloud that is many times the size of Earth.

Normal solar wind is made up mostly of lightweight protons—hydrogen atoms that have been stripped of their electrons. But CMEs contain a much higher percentage of heavier ions such as helium, oxygen, and even iron.

These heavier atoms slam into the moon with greater force than protons, so they can dislodge a larger number of atoms from the surface.

"We found that when this massive cloud of plasma strikes the moon, it acts like a sandblaster and easily removes volatile material from the surface," study co-author William Farrell, leader of the Dynamic Response of the Environment At the Moon, or DREAM, team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.

"The model predicts 100 to 200 tons of lunar material—the equivalent of ten dump truck loads—could be stripped off the lunar surface during the typical two-day passage of a large CME."

Once ejected, about 90 percent of sputtered moon particles escape into space, where they become ionized and are drawn into the solar wind, said study co-author Rosemary Killen, also of NASA Goddard.

"The material is in atomic form," Killen added in an email to National Geographic News. "It is not meteoric and does not produce meteor showers" on Earth.

Sputtering Can Help Probe Moon's Chemistry?

CMEs are most likely to happen during solar maximum, a period of high magnetic activity on the sun that occurs about once every 11 years.

"The more active the sun, the more often coronal mass ejections take place," said Richard Elphic, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in California who was not involved in the study.

"You can have at the height of solar maximum a [large] CME maybe every week or so, and in some cases every few days. And that might be followed by a couple weeks of quiet."

Right now the sun is ramping up toward the next predicted solar maximum in 2013—which might aid research that uses sputtering to reveal clues about lunar chemistry.

A new moon orbiter scheduled to launch in 2013, called the Lunar Atmosphere And Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, could test the new model's predictions.

If the simulation is correct, then CME sputtering should loft lunar surface atoms to LADEE's orbital altitude, around 12 to 30 miles (20 to 50 kilometers).

"As the LADEE project scientist," Elphic said, "my excitement is in using these CME 'scavenging events' as active probes of the sputtering process, to learn what [types of atoms] are liberated and how long they stick around before equilibrium returns."

Moon Landing Footprints in No Danger

While the new model hints that the amount of lunar material stripped off by sputtering is more than scientists had thought, the amount of lost material is still very small compared to the total mass of the moon.

Also, the loss of lunar surface material is more or less balanced by incoming particles from micrometeorites, meteors, and the solar wind itself.

That means Earth's only natural satellite—and the features on it—are in no danger of being eroded away anytime soon. (Also see "The Moon Has Shrunk, and May Still Be Contracting.")

"The astronaut's footprints will still be there in recognizable form after a million years—if we're still around to see them," Elphic said.

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NASA rover launched to seek out life clues on Mars

Video, Reuters

(Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Florida on Saturday, launching a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered NASA rover toward Mars to look for clues on what could sustain life on the Red Planet.

The 20-story-tall booster built by United Launch Alliance lifted off from its seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 10:02 a.m. EST (3:02 p.m. GMT).

It soared through partly cloudy skies into space, carrying NASA's Mars Science Laboratory on a 354-million mile (556 million km), nearly nine-month journey to the planet.

"I think this mission is an important next step in NASA's overall goal to address the issue of life in the universe," lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told reporters shortly after the launch.

The car-sized rover, nicknamed Curiosity, is expected to touch down on August 6, 2012, to begin two years of detailed analysis of a 96-mile (154-km) wide impact basin near the Martian equator called Gale Crater.

The goal is to determine if Mars has or ever had environments to support life. It is the first astrobiology mission to Mars since the 1970s-era Viking probes.

Scientists chose the landing site because it has a three-mile-high (4.8-km high) mountain of what appears from orbital imagery and mineral analysis to be layers of rock piled up like the Grand Canyon, each layer testifying to a different period in Mars' history.

The rover has 17 cameras and 10 science instruments, including chemistry labs, to identify elements in soil and rock samples to be dug up by the probe's drill-tipped robotic arm.

'LONG SHOT'

The base of the crater's mountain has clays, evidence of a prolonged wet environment, and what appears to be minerals such as sulfates that likely were deposited as water evaporated.

Water is considered to be a key element for life, but not the only one.

Previous Mars probes, including the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, searched for signs of past surface water.

"We are not a life-detection mission," Grotzinger said. "We have no ability to detect life present on the surface of Mars. It's an intermediate mission between the search for water and future missions, which may undertake life detection."

With Curiosity, which is twice as long and three times heavier than its predecessors, NASA shifts its focus to look for other ingredients for life, including possibly organic carbon, the building block for life on Earth.

"It's a long shot, but we're going to try," Grotzinger said.

Launch is generally considered the riskiest part of a mission, but Curiosity's landing on Mars will not be without drama.

The 1,980-pound (898 kg) rover is too big for the airbag or thruster-rocket landings used on previous Mars probes, so engineers designed a rocket-powered "sky-crane" to gently lower Curiosity to the crater floor via a 43-foot (13-meter) cable.

"We call it the 'six-minutes of terror,'" said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, referring to the landing. "It is pretty scary, but my confidence level is really high."

Curiosity is powered by heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium. It is designed to last one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.

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