|  Lockheed-Boeing rocket firm poised for rare commercial launch  | By Irene Klotz Cape Canaveral, Fla (Reuters) - A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas 5 rocket is being prepared for a commercial satellite launch on Friday, a market the Lockheed Martin and Boeing partnership has said it aims to grow to as its monopoly on U.S. military launches ends. ULA has four commercial launches on its 2016 schedule, including an Earth-imaging spacecraft for DigitalGlobe, a communications satellite for EchoStar Corp and a pair of space station cargo ships for Orbital ATK, the company said. The unmanned rocket scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida will carry a communications satellite for Mexico.
| Read More » Satellites Watch Hurricane Joaquin Grow Into Category 4 Storm (Video, Images)  | As Hurricane Joaquin barrels across the Atlantic Ocean, NASA satellites are tracking the storm to determine how it will affect residents along the East Coast of the United States. A new video of the hurricane taken by NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement satellite shows a 3D view of how the storm grew and changed on Tuesday (Sept. 29). Today (Oct. 1) Joaquin reached Category 4 status, with maximum sustained winds near 130 mph (210 km/hour), according to NASA.
| Read More » Substance found to curb fuel fireballs from air and vehicle crashes  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Aiming to reduce dangerous explosions after plane crashes and truck accidents, scientists have developed a substance that can be added to fuel to curb formation of a fine mist that can erupt into a deadly fireball after a collision. Researchers said on Thursday they had created a synthetic polymer that can suppress post-crash fuel mist by making fuel droplets fall like rain rather than remain suspended in the air. As a fuel additive, it did not lessen engine power or efficiency, but lowered soot formation, they said.
| Read More » Double trouble: asteroid, volcanoes implicated in dinosaur doom  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It was a combination of calamities - an asteroid strike followed by vast volcanic eruptions half a world away - that doomed the dinosaurs and many other creatures 66 million years ago. The two events roiled Earth by throwing dust, ash and harmful fumes like carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the air, altering the climate and killing off about 75 percent of all species in one of Earth's worst mass extinctions. The researchers said the asteroid strike occurred 66.04 million years ago, plus or minus about 30,000 years.
| Read More » Fly Through Pluto Moon Charon's Giant Canyon in Spectacular New Video  | Amazing new images show the enormous canyon system on Pluto's big moon Charon in unprecedented detail. The photos were captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14. Mission team members combined some of the images into a new video that lets viewers fly over Charon's tortured surface.
| Read More » Russian Cargo Ship Arrives at Space Station  | Russia's uncrewed Progress 61 freighter, also known as 61P, docked with the space station's Zvezda service module at 6:52 p.m. EDT (2252 GMT), while the two craft were zooming together over the North Atlantic Ocean. The cargo vessel, which is stocked with more than 3 tons of food and supplies for the astronauts aboard the orbiting lab, had launched atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan just 6 hours earlier. Progress 61 will remain docked to the International Space Station (ISS) until December, when the ship will depart, full of trash, and burn up in Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, NASA officials said.
| Read More » Moon Express contracts Rocket Lab for launches to land spacecraft on the moon Silicon Valley's Moon Express Inc said it has signed up Lockheed Martin-backed Rocket Lab to launch its robotic spacecraft as it seeks to become the first private venture to reach the moon. The deal increases its chances of winning a $30 million Google Inc prize for the first privately funded lunar landing. Moon Express was awarded $1 million by Google this year as the only team shooting for the moon to flight test a prototype of its lander. Read More » Deadly piglet virus may have entered U.S. on 'reusable' feed bags: USDA By P.J. Huffstutter and Danny Na CHICAGO (Reuters) - The deadly piglet virus that killed millions of U.S. pigs over the past two years may have entered the country on large bags typically used to transport feed and other bulk products, the Agriculture Department said. The report, released on Wednesday and dated Sept. 24, said the agency does not have definitive proof of how Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv) initially arrived in the United States. The most likely scenario was that the virus came from the use of Flexible Intermediate Bulk Containers - also known as FIBCs or "tote bags", according to the report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). Read More » Student-built solar motorbikes hit the road in Kenya Surrounded by motorbikes running on polluting fossil fuels, Omondi sits astride his solar-powered rechargeable motorcycle, which uses technology developed by students from the University of Nairobi. Charles Ogingo, Robert Achoge and James Ogola – all final year students – have built a system they call Ecotran, which captures the sun's energy, stores it in batteries, and uses it to charge a motorcycle's electric motor. Read More » Atlas rocket blasts off with Mexican communications satellite By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from a seaside launch pad in Florida on Friday to put a communications satellite into orbit for Mexico. The 195-foot (59-meter) tall rocket, built and flown by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, lifted off at 6:28 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Perched on top of the rocket was the Boeing-built Morelos-3 communications satellite, a duplicate of a spacecraft lost during a Russian Proton rocket launch in May. It was the 100th launch for ULA since its formation in 2006, all of which have been successful. Read More » With Hurricane Joaquin, the Only Prediction Is Uncertainty  | As Hurricane Joaquin strengthens over the Bahamas, forecasters are split on how badly the storm could batter the U.S. East Coast, if it even makes landfall at all. "We don't know what is actually going to be felt from Joaquin. It's too early — it's still sitting in the middle of the Bahamas," said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
| Read More » Does 'The Martian' Movie Do the Book Justice? Yes. Yes, It Does  | The new movie, opening Friday, trades some of the book's nonstop danger for glorious Martian vistas and more NASA at work, and I'm not complaining. The movie "The Martian," is based on Andy Weir's book of the same name, and tells the story of an astronaut who is accidentally left behind on Mars and must struggle to survive. When watching "The Martian," all I could think was that the movie version of protagonist Mark Watney had it easy.
| Read More » 'The Martian' and Reality: How NASA Will Get Astronauts to Mars  | NASA wants the world to know that putting boots on Mars is not just a sci-fi dream. Setting up a crewed outpost on Mars is NASA's chief long-term goal in the realm of human spaceflight. Indeed, the space agency's operational robotic Mars craft — the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, and the orbiters Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) — can be seen as scouts for the human pioneers to come, NASA officials say.
| Read More » Snakes Use 'Leg Genes' to Make Phalluses  | Snakes lack limbs, but new research finds that they still have DNA crucial to limb development lurking in their genomes. A new study, published today (Oct. 1) in the journal Developmental Cell, reveals that the same genetic snippets that control the outgrowth of limbs (called enhancers) during embryonic development in mammals are crucial to the development of the phallus in both mammals and reptiles — including legless snakes. "It tells us that we are a little bit myopic in thinking about what these limb enhancers are doing in mammals," said study leader Doug Menke, a genetics researcher at the University of Georgia.
| Read More » All Ears! What Human Ancestors' Hearing Was Like  | Human ancestors that lived about 2 million years ago had hearing abilities similar to those of chimpanzees, but their ears had some slight differences that made their hearing more humanlike, a new study finds. The finding — based on virtual models of early hominin (the ancestors of modern humans), modern chimp and human ears — suggests that, unlike chimps, these now-extinct human ancestors had a remarkable sensitivity to high-frequency sounds. "[The hominins'] hearing pattern is similar to a chimpanzee['s], but slightly different," said lead researcher Rolf Quam, an assistant professor of biological anthropology at Binghamton University in New York.
| Read More » Bronze Age Britons Mummified Their Dead, Analysis Reveals  | The rainy climate of the British Isles might not seem like the best place to preserve human bodies through time, but a new scientific analysis of ancient bones reveals that Bronze Age Britain was a mummy hotspot. Specifically, archaeologists found that human remains had been preserved in various ways during the Bronze Age, a period lasting from about 2200 B.C. to 750 B.C. "The results demonstrate that Bronze Age populations throughout Britain practiced mummification on a proportion of their dead, although the criteria for selection are not yet certain," the researchers wrote.
| Read More » General Electric producing science fiction podcast series  | In a sign that what is old is new again, U.S. conglomerate General Electric Co is producing its own science fiction podcast series in an effort to raise its profile among a younger, tech-savvy audience. GE, in partnership with The Slate Group's podcast network Panoply, is running "The Message," a fictional eight-episode podcast that will follow the decoding of a 70 year-old message from outer space. "It's science fiction meets real science," said Andy Goldberg, GE's global creative director.
| Read More » General Electric producing science fiction podcast series  | In a sign that what is old is new again, U.S. conglomerate General Electric Co is producing its own science fiction podcast series in an effort to raise its profile among a younger, tech-savvy audience. GE, in partnership with The Slate Group's podcast network Panoply, is running "The Message," a fictional eight-episode podcast that will follow the decoding of a 70 year-old message from outer space. "It's science fiction meets real science," said Andy Goldberg, GE's global creative director.
| Read More » Vaccines May Protect Kids Against Strokes, Too Parents have yet one more reason to vaccinate their children: Routine immunizations may reduce the risk of childhood stroke, according to a new study. Childhood strokes are rare, estimated to affect between three and 13 children per 100,000. The new study, led by Dr. Heather Fullerton of University of California, San Francisco, confirmed previous findings that minor infections may trigger acute ischemic strokes in children who are at risk. Read More » 30-Foot Fingernails: The Curious Science of World's Longest Nails  | A man in India earned a Guinness World Record this week for doing, well, nothing at all. He didn't eat a bunch of hot dogs or jump off a building. All he did was forgo basic hygiene, by growing out his fingernails for an astonishingly long time.
| Read More » ULA needs relief on Russian engines before GPS launch bid: CEO CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, on Friday said it would not bid in a U.S. Air Force competition to launch a GPS satellite unless it received some relief from a ban on use of Russian rocket engines. ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno told reporters in Cape Canaveral, Florida, that the company was seeking a partial waiver on trade sanctions enacted last year that ban U.S. military use of the Russian RD-180 engine that powers ULA's primary workhorse Atlas 5 rocket. Bruno said the company needed a decision on that issue before it could submit a bid for the GPS launch competition, which marks the first time in nearly a decade that launches of large U.S. military and satellites will be opened to competition. Read More » Ring in Oktoberfest with These Space Beers  | In 2014, the Oregon-based Ninkasi Brewing Co. sent vials of brewer's yeast on a rocket to more than 70 miles (112 kilometers) above the Earth. The final product is an imperial stout called Ground Control, which has now been taste-tested and approved by members of the Space.com staff (check out the video). Ground Control is available to the public, but if you can't find it in your area, we have a long list of cosmic-themed beers to make your Oktoberfest a little more out-of-this-world.
| Read More » NASA Satellite Spies Hurricane Joaquin Replacing an Eye  | Hurricane Joaquin, a Category 4 storm that is currently battering the central Bahamas, appears to be replacing its eye, according to weather forecasters. New satellite views of the intense hurricane appear to show the storm's eye obscured, which could indicate that a new eye is forming around the old one, NASA said. This process, known as eyewall replacement, occurs naturally in powerful tropical cyclones.
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