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Backdropped by a night time view of the Earth and the starry sky, the Space Shuttle Endeavour is photographed docked at the International Space Station on May 28, 2011.
On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy laid out a vision for "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Six months later, Charles Stark Draper responded to that call, volunteering his services as an Apollo crewmember.
With today's crops, it would be possible to feed the 2050 global population of nine billion people. But agricultural land will have to be used optimally. And this demands solid economic and institutional preconditions. Food prices will probably eventually rise. This was discussed by Professor Martin van Ittersum on 12 May 2011 at the ceremony at which he accepted the post of Professor of Plant Production Systems with a personal chair at Wageningen University.
What would it take to make a manned mission to Mars a reality? A team of aeronautical and textile engineering students from North Carolina State University believe part of the solution may lie in advanced textile materials. The students joined forces to tackle life-support challenges that the aerospace industry has been grappling with for decades.
Johnson's research has taken her to Kanngiqtugaapik (Clyde River) on Baffin Island, Nunavut. There, she has been finding out how Inuit communities are adapting to climate change, and what contributions they are able to make to the development of policies and programs that affect them.
(AP) -- Endeavour's six astronauts have checked the systems they need to bring NASA's next-to-last space shuttle flight to an end.
New Zealand's earthquake-devastated Canterbury region faces an almost one-in-four chance of another powerful tremor in the next 12 months, government scientists said Tuesday.
The weather forecast looks "promising" for the US shuttle Endeavour's nighttime landing to end its final mission, scheduled for 2:35 am (0635 GMT) on Wednesday, NASA said.
Copenhagen Suborbitals hopes to launch the world’s first amateur-built rocket for human space travel and have announced an upcoming launch window for their Tycho Brahe capsule. The window extends from June 1-14, 2011 and they are currently shooting for Thursday, June 2 for an unmanned suborbital test flight, according the their website. The group is headed by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, and their HEAT 1-X rocket is being prepared for launch from a steel catamaran in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Denmark.
Greenhouse-gas emissions by the 27 members of the European Union fell by 7.1 percent in 2009 over 2008, driven by economic recession but also a switch to renewable energy, the European Environment Agency (EAA) said on Tuesday.
The Atlantic hurricane season kicks off Wednesday with elevated threats to the United States and nations around the Caribbean, the latest forecasts show.
Fires, felling and agriculture are whittling Europe's forests down into isolated patches, threatening to speed up desertification and deplete wildlife, a UN report warned Tuesday.
US astronaut Mark Kelly, who is commanding the shuttle Endeavour's final space flight, said Tuesday he is concerned about a drain of NASA talent once the US shuttle program ends later this year.
In addition to its damaging effect on the environment and its illegal smuggling into developing countries, researchers have now linked e-waste to adverse effects on human health, such as inflammation and oxidative stress – precursors to cardiovascular disease, DNA damage and possibly cancer.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the Canadian MOST microsatellite, a team of researchers from the Universite de Montreal and the Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Quebec has made a stunning observation. As they'll report at this week's CASCA 2011 meeting in Ontario, Canada, the team has observed significant changes in the depth of the atmospheric eclipses in the 30-day binary WR+O system CV Serpentis, suggesting a never before seen change of mass-loss rate of the WR component by 70%.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Neutron stars are the unimaginably dense corpses of what were once much more massive stars that died while being ripped apart in a supernova explosion. Their average density is typically more than one billion tons per teaspoonful, even denser than the nucleus of an atom that is composed of protons and neutrons. Because these densities can never be reproduced on the Earth, these objects are great extraterrestrial laboratories for the study of how matter and exotic particles behave under extreme conditions.
(PhysOrg.com) -- New research shows that international plans to pay developing countries to reduce tropical forest destruction may increase rural poverty because critical income streams to rural people have been ignored.
Research from North Carolina State University shows that so-called biodegradable products are likely doing more harm than good in landfills, because they are releasing a powerful greenhouse gas as they break down.
A NASA-led research team has used a variety of NASA satellite data to create the most precise map ever produced depicting the amount and location of carbon stored in Earth's tropical forests. The data are expected to provide a baseline for ongoing carbon monitoring and research and serve as a useful resource for managing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Japanese and Canadian astronomers are working together to develop a new satellite capable of detecting and imaging high- and low-energy X-ray emissions from space.
A fish-eye lens attached to an electronic still camera was used to capture this image of NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff during the mission's fourth STS-134 spacewalk.
Climate change is expected to alter the global industry in fruits and nuts dramatically as tree crops such as pistachios and cherries struggle in the rising temperatures, researchers said.
Carbon emissions are at their highest ever levels, stoking fears of a global temperature rise over the "dangerous" two degrees Celsius threshold, according to data cited by the Guardian newspaper.
This image shows the radar reflectivity from the National Weather Service Doppler Radar in Birmingham, Ala. at 5:10 p.m. CDT on April 27, 2011, as a supercell thunderstorm moved across the city. The radar reflectivity is overlaid upon Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or ASTER, satellite data acquired on May 4, 2011, showing the damage track resulting from for the EF-4 tornado associated with the storm as it passed through the city and continued northeast toward Birmingham, Ala.
(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time since his landing on Tuesday, ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli was again in the public eye yesterday at a press conference. A smiling Paolo talked about his ride back to Earth and how he was feeling gravity again after his long stay in space.
Accurate precipitation forecasts are crucial to predicting flooding and to ensuring fresh water supply for human consumption. Being able to estimate the inflow of water into reservoirs is also essential to the efficient generation and distribution of hydroelectric power.
Spiral galaxies are one of the most captivating structures in astronomy, yet their nature is still not fully understood. Astronomers currently have two categories of theories that can explain this structure, depending on the environment of the galaxy, but a new study, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, suggests that one of these theories may be largely wrong.
Endeavour and its crew of six left the International Space Station and headed home to close out NASA's next-to-last shuttle flight, pausing just long enough Monday to perform a victory lap and test equipment for a future interplanetary ship.
The three massive solar panels that will provide power for NASA's Juno spacecraft during its mission to Jupiter have seen their last photons of light until they are deployed in space after launch. The last of the Jupiter-bound spacecraft's panels completed pre-flight testing at the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla., and was folded against the side of the spacecraft into its launch configuration Thursday, May 26. The solar-powered Juno spacecraft will orbit Jupiter's poles 30 times to find out more about the gas giant's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.
Prior to taking a new telescope into space, engineers must put the spacecraft and its instruments through a "spin cycle" test for durability to ensure they'll still work after experiencing the forces of a rocket launch. Finding out they don't work once they're in orbit is too late. The structure that houses the science instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope is undergoing that cycle of tests during the weeks of May 23 and 30 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This structure is called the Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, are shedding new light on some of the oldest parts of the Milky Way, suggesting life in the stellar nursery wasn't quite as simple as astronomers had thought.
(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Michigan astronomers examined old galaxies and were surprised to discover that they are still making new stars. The results provide insights into how galaxies evolve with time.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
