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Two astronauts from U.S. shuttle Atlantis crew have completed the first spacewalk of their current mission to the International Space Station, NASA said on its website.
"Spacewalkers Mike Foreman and Robert Satcher completed a 6-hour, 37-minute spacewalk at 04:01 p.m. EST [21.01 GMT] on Thursday," NASA said.
The substantive debate on the healthcare reform is in full swing and one of the center themes is the public option. President Obama wrote recently, "I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest." The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows strong, 76%, public support for public option (1). This is about essential choices and competition for accessible, affordable, and quality care; this is also about improving transparency, efficiency, value, and outcome. As a crucial component of the ongoing reform, sound Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) can be instrumental in realizing these objectives in a timely manner as the new healthcare system is been defined and will soon be implemented.The new national healthcare system with the public option will facilitate the coordination and standardization of HIT, clear lacking of which at the present is delaying and denying the broader benefits of myriad of well established information technologies from the majority of payers, doctors and patients alike. Among the exciting new derived capabilities, HIT will become interoperable, and serve as the platform for reliable comparative effectiveness study to lower cost and achieve better outcome, much more effective than relying on the existing dysfunctional silo based approaches.
Reeling from projected budget cuts totaling more than $3 billion through 2013, NASA managers and engineers working to build a post-shuttle rocket system for an eventual return to the moon are bracing for a critical review that could set the agency on a different course.
The review was ordered by the Obama administration. The chairman of the independent review panel charged with evaluating NASA's post-shuttle manned space program said Friday he will bring an open mind and "go where the facts lead" in assessing the technical and economic feasibility of the space agency's current manned space program.
Norman Augustine, former chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin, said the "Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans" committee also will assess alternatives, including different rocket systems and alternative targets for exploration. The team's report is expected by August.
NASA and Microsoft have announced plans to make planetary images and data available via the internet under a space act agreement. Through this project, NASA and Microsoft will jointly develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to make NASA content, including high-resolution scientific images and data from Mars and the moon, explorable on WorldWide Telescope, Microsoft's online virtual telescope for exploring the universe.
Under the joint agreement, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, will process and host more than 100Tb of data, enough to fill 20,000 DVDs. WorldWide Telescope will incorporate the data later in 2009 and feature imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, known as MRO.
According to NASA, the WorldWide Telescope is a Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from ground- and space-based telescopes for a rich media guided exploration of the universe.
NASA managers have postponed Space shuttle Discovery’s launch to the International Space Station (ISS) to March 15.
The planned liftoff on March 11 has been postponed due to a leak associated with the gaseous hydrogen venting system outside the external fuel tank. The system is used to carry excess hydrogen safely away from the launch pad.Discovery’s STS-119 flight is delivering the space station’s fourth and final set of solar array wings, completing the station’’s truss, or backbone.
The arrays will provide the electricity to fully power science experiments and support the station’’s expanded crew of six in May. The 14-day mission will feature four spacewalks to help install the S6 truss segment to the starboard, or right, side of the station and the deployment of its solar arrays. The flight also will replace a failed unit for a system that converts urine to potable water.
On December 4, 2008, Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and Administrator Mike Griffin publicly announced the delay of the agency’s flagship Mars 2009 mission, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).
The announcement was not entirely unexpected—difficulties with MSL had at least partly caused the resignation last year of Weiler’s predecessor, Alan Stern—but nevertheless the news rocked the planetary science community.
The actual reasons why the mission was delayed are not widely known outside the Mars community. This article addresses the technical difficulties experienced by MSL; a companion article discusses the project’s budget and management issues.
NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to studying carbon dioxide, the leading human-produced greenhouse gas driving changes in Earth's climate, has arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., to begin final launch preparations.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory arrived Nov. 11 at its launch site on California's central coast after completing a cross-country trip by truck from its manufacturer, Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va. The spacecraft left Orbital on Nov. 8. After final tests, the spacecraft will be integrated onto an Orbital Sciences Taurus rocket in preparation for its planned January 2009 launch.
The U.S. space agency NASA is gearing up for next week's launch of the space shuttle Endeavour on a mission to the International Space Station. The shuttle will service the orbiting scientific outpost and prepare it for an expansion in the spring. VOA's Jessica Berman reports.
Endeavour will blast off on November 14, ferrying almost sixteen thousand kilograms of equipment and supplies to the International Space Station. During the 15-day mission, astronauts will conduct four space walks, including operations to clean and service machinery that has been jammed for a year and interfered with the operations of the space station's solar panels.
Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape.It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.
Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says."We were very surprised," said Juan Escobar. "The power you could get from just peeling tape was enormous."
Escobar, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports the work with UCLA colleagues in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.He suggests that with some refinements, the process might be harnessed for making inexpensive X-ray machines for paramedics or for places where electricity is expensive or hard to get. After all, you could peel tape or do something similar in such machines with just human power, like cranking.
The power of the sun is to be recreated in a new £1 billion science project which aims to provide a clean and almost limitless source of energy. British scientists will this week begin work to create a nuclear fusion reactor, which will use the same powerful reactions that take place in the Sun to provide energy and, ultimately, electricity. Scientists have previously only been able to replicate the reaction inside hydrogen bombs.
Now, however, they believe they are on the verge of achieving controlled fusion in a laboratory for the first time. Laser beams with enough power to light up every home in Britain for a few microseconds will be used to heat up the nuclear fuel to millions of degrees centigrade in order to trigger the reaction.
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