Cassini testing for water on one of Saturn's moons

Cassini testing for water on one of Saturn's moons

Three years after gigantic geysers were spied on an icy Saturn moon, the international Cassini spacecraft is poised to plunge through the fringes of the mysterious plumes to learn how they formed.

An unmanned probe will sweep through geysers on one of Saturn's moons to measure the chemical makeup.

Wednesday's flyby will take Cassini within 30 miles of the surface of Enceladus at closest approach.
The unmanned probe will be about 120 miles above the moon as it sweeps through the edge of the geysers and measures their chemical makeup.
The carefully orchestrated event will take Cassini "deeper than we've been before," mission scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute said in an e-mail.
Scientists long believed Enceladus, the shiniest object in the solar system, was cold and still because it resides hundreds of millions of miles from the sun. But recent evidence shows the Arizona-size satellite is geologically active, with a significant atmosphere and a relatively warm south pole.
In 2005, Cassini surprised scientists when it snapped images of geyser-like eruptions of ice particles and water vapor spewing from the south pole. The dramatic images effectively put Enceladus (en-SELL'-uh-duhs) on the short list of places within the solar system most likely to have conditions suitable for extraterrestrial life.
Scientists generally agree the presence of water, organic compounds and a stable heat source are needed to support primitive life.
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Previous measurements by Cassini showed the eruptions were frequent, with gases and particles venting from the surface at about 800 mph and forming plumes hundreds of miles high.
The source of the geysers is a mystery, but some theorize reservoirs of liquid water below the surface are likely supplying the ice and vapor seen in the plumes.
Until now, scientists have not been able to measure the plumes' makeup in detail. Using its particle analyzers, Cassini will calculate the density, size and speed of the various gases and particles. The spacecraft's cameras will also image the moon during the flyby.
Of particular interest is whether the plumes contain ammonia, which can keep water in liquid form and would bolster the theory that liquid water lies beneath.
"There's not much for us ... to do regarding the upcoming flyby except to hold our breaths and cross our fingers," John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, wrote on the Cassini blog.
The close encounter poses little danger to Cassini because the plume particles are small compared with the dust-size debris the spacecraft is used to flying through while orbiting Saturn, scientists said.
The Cassini mission is a collaboration between NASA and the European and Italian space agencies.

Endeavour crew set to lift off, assemble robot

Endeavour crew set to lift off, assemble robot

Astronauts bound for orbit this week will dabble in science fiction, assembling a "monstrous" two-armed space station robot that will rise like Frankenstein from its transport bed.

Endeavour commander Dominic Gorie, left, and pilot Gregory Johnson will help assemble a space robot.

Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts, who are scheduled to blast off in the wee hours of Tuesday, less than three weeks after the last shuttle flight.
They're also delivering the first piece of Japan's massive Kibo space station lab, a float-in closet for storing tools, experiments and spare parts. For the first time, each of the five major international space station partners will own a piece of the real estate.
At 16 days, the mission will be NASA's longest space station trip ever and will include five spacewalks, the most ever performed while a shuttle is docked there. Three of those spacewalks will feature Dextre, which is sure to steal the show.
With 11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet and a height of 12 feet, the Canadian Space Agency's Dextre -- short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter -- is more than a little intimidating, at least for astronaut Garrett Reisman.
"Now I wouldn't go as far to say that we're worried it's going to go run amok and take over the space station or turn evil or anything because we all know how it's operated and it doesn't have a lot of its own intelligence," Reisman told The Associated Press last week.
"But I'll tell you something ... He's enormous and to see him with his giant arms, it is a little scary. It's a little monstrous, it is."
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Dextre will be flying up aboard Endeavour in pieces, and it will be up to a team of spacewalking astronauts to assemble the 3,400-pound robot and attach it to the outside of the space station. That job will fall to Reisman, Michael Foreman and Richard Linnehan.
"I feel kind of like dad on Christmas Eve, you know, opening up this present and trying to put it together for the son or daughter and going, 'Whoa, what have I gotten myself into here with this 'some assembly required' part of the space station," Foreman said.
Reisman, who will be moving into the space station, can't wait to see Dextre rise from its shuttle transport pallet, rotating up "almost like it's Frankenstein's monster coming alive."
In reality, there's nothing sinister about Dextre. The robot, in fact, was once in the running to be the Hubble Space Telescope's savior.
Following the 2003 Columbia disaster, NASA canceled the last remaining Hubble repair mission by shuttle astronauts because of safety concerns, and considered sending Dextre up to do the job. The shuttle flight was restored after a change at NASA's helm -- it's scheduled for late summer -- and Dextre went back to being a space station assistant.
Dextre -- which cost more than $200 million -- was created by the same Canadian team that built the space shuttle and space station robot arms.
Equipped with a tool holster, Dextre is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and, ultimately, to take over some of their dangerous outdoor work.
Dextre can pivot at the waist, and has seven joints per arm. Its hands, or grippers, have built-in socket wrenches, cameras and lights. Only one arm is designed to move at a time to keep the robot stable and avoid a two-arm collision. The robot has no face or legs, and with its long arms certainly doesn't look human.
Space station astronauts will be able to control Dextre, as will flight controllers on the ground. The robot will be attached at times to the end of the space station arm, and also be able to ride by itself along the space station arm's railway.
Canadian officials said they're convinced Dextre could have pulled off the Hubble repair job, and should have no problems replacing old batteries and other space station parts.
"It's quite surprising what a robot like Dextre can do with its sense of touch and its precision," said Daniel Rey, a Canadian Space Agency engineer who heads the project.
Dextre has only three tools, for now, versus the more than 100 tools available to spacewalking astronauts, Rey said. It will probably take months to learn how to properly use the robot; its first real job could come next year.
Linnehan, who worked on Hubble in 2002, wonders just how much Dextre will be able to do.
Even though it's suited for space station maintenance, astronauts are faster, Linnehan said. As for Hubble, he said Dextre cannot compare to a human repairman because it lacks fine motor control, and cannot think and react to problems that might crop up.
That said, Linnehan acknowledges it's "a cool project" that reminds him of Japanese animation shows from decades past, namely Gigantor the space-age robot. NASA officials agree that a big part of Dextre is learning how robots operate in space, for future exploration.
Dextre, by the way, isn't necessarily a "he."
"I tend to use 'he' because I think Dextre is a masculine name," Rey said. "But it's a robot. It's tele-operated. It doesn't have artificial intelligence yet. So I need to be more careful when I say 'he.' "

Storms, shifting sands give Oregon new look at history

Storms, shifting sands give Oregon new look at history

PORTLAND, Oregon -- The storms that have lashed Oregon's scenic coast this winter have dredged up an unusual array of secrets: old shipwrecks, historic cannons, ghost forests -- even strangely shaped iron deposits.

Visitors check out a shipwreck discovered after Pacific storms washed away much of the foredune.

One of the first ships to emerge from the sands was recently identified as the George L. Olson, which ran aground at Coos Bay's North Jetty on June 23, 1944.
The shipwreck has become a tourist attraction on the southern Oregon coast. Interest became so great that authorities had to reroute traffic around the ship and post signs warning visitors to leave it alone because it is now an archaeological site.
The curiosities began showing up after December when Pacific storms pummeled the state, damaging thousands of homes and causing an estimated $60 million in damage to roads, bridges and public buildings.
Hardest hit was Vernonia, a Coast Range town of about 2,400 people, where floodwaters damaged about 300 homes, ruined schools and temporarily closed businesses.
The storms also brought high seas, which caused beach erosion. Although sands commonly shift in winter, this season appeared especially dramatic. There were reports that up to 17 feet of sand eroded away at Arch Cape.
"It's really an unusual event, the magnitude of it," said Chris Havel of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.
Other shipwrecks have emerged recently -- a wooden ship near Bandon, also on the southern coast, and another where the Siuslaw River flows into the ocean near Florence. Little is known about either ship, Havel said, and sands have reclaimed the Siuslaw wreck.
Ships aren't the only things surfacing on the coast.
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Ghost forests are groves of tree stumps, some an estimated 4,000 years old, that were engulfed by the sea. Because of shifting sands, many have suddenly popped up.
The stumps are especially impressive at Arch Cape, where locals say they haven't seen them for some 40 years, according to Tiffany Boothe of the Seaside Aquarium.
"The forest floor is actually uncovered too. You can see the floor," she said. "There's like these mud cliffs. As you're walking on it, it resembles clay. It's definitely not sand at all."
Arch Cape also was where a pair of historic cannons were recently discovered by beachcombers. The origin of the cannons, each weighing between 800 and 1,000 pounds, is not known.
State archaeologist Dennis Griffin supervised the removal of the cannons, which were placed in tanks of fresh water and burlap for preservation.
The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department does not yet know what they will do with the cannons. They possibly came from the USS Shark, a survey ship that wrecked in 1846 off the Columbia River Bar.
Strangely shaped deposits of iron -- called "red towers" -- have also emerged from beneath the sand. The orangy-red lumps, most no more than 3-feet tall, are usually buried deep beneath the sand but now dot the coastal landscape.
"These formations could be gone in the next week. That's how fast the coast changes," Boothe said.
The shipwreck of the George L. Olson was uncovered around the New Year and has drawn a great deal of attention because its origin was a mystery until recently.
After determining the wreck resembled the schooner, local archeologists delved into its history, determining where and when it went down. The facts added up, said Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Megan Harper.
But it was a local man's photograph from 1947 that really convinced the agency, she said.
"It showed him and his brothers on the shipwreck with the words 'George L.' on the hull," Harper said. "Once we saw that it was, 'Yep, that's the one."'
The George L. Olson was a 223-foot long wood-hulled schooner launched in 1917 and originally named the Ryder Hanify. It eventually wound up on the southern Oregon coast, where it hauled lumber until it ran aground.
The wreckage has drawn curious crowds, including about 3,000 visitors during a recent weekend, Harper said.
"I think there's two reasons, first, the shipwreck here is really accessible. It's easy for people to get right up to it," Harper said. "Second, this area has a real connection to maritime history, or the fishing industry and the lumber industry. So there's a neat tie to the local community and history." E-mail to a friend
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

China's Olympic hopes turn on Yao's injury

China's Olympic hopes turn on Yao's injury

BEIJING, China -- Yao Ming's season-ending injury prompted shock and concern in his native China on Wednesday, though hopes were high he would still make August's Beijing Olympics.

Yao Ming speaks to reporters Tuesday after it was announced he would miss the rest of the NBA season.

The emotional response highlights the NBA star's role as the world's best known Chinese athlete and far and away the most popular sports figure in China.
For many Chinese, Yao embodies the country's collective hopes for global competitiveness and international acceptance. While China is not considered a leading Olympic medal contender in basketball, the 2008 Olympic hosts see Yao as one of the faces of the games and are counting on him to lift the event's global profile.
"The only thing offering Yao Ming any solace at this time is that his injury will not force him to miss the Beijing Olympics of his dreams," leading newspaper Titan Sports said in a front page article.
China's Basketball Association called a snap news conference Wednesday afternoon to discuss Yao's condition, portraying the development almost as an issue of national security.
"This is highly sensitive, so don't send any foreigners" to attend the news conference, the association's deputy director, Hu Jiashi, told The Associated Press, without explaining further.
Spokesmen for the Chinese Olympic Committee said they had no immediate comment.
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The Houston Rockets and NBA All-Star center was ruled out for the season Tuesday with a stress fracture in his left foot, dealing a major blow to his team's playoff hopes.
While word of Yao's injury arrived too late for most Chinese newspaper deadlines, it was a leading item on the main national midday television news report.
Doctors blamed the injury on accumulated stress on the bone, rather than any single incident. Titan said the true cause was the Rockets' failure to provide a reliable substitute for Yao, forcing him to play long minutes every game.
"In fact, exhaustion was really the major reason behind Yao Ming's injury," the paper said.
Yao's injuries elicit major concern among Chinese sponsors and television stations broadcasting Rockets games, since viewership tends to fall dramatically when he is not playing.
Apart from Yao, the Chinese national team also boasts former Dallas Mavericks center Wang Zhizhi, the first Chinese player in the NBA, along with 2.11-meter (6-foot-11) power forward Yi Jianlian of the Milwaukee Bucks.

Clinton, Obama clash over campaign tactics in debate

Clinton, Obama clash over campaign tactics in debate

CLEVELAND, Ohio --Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparred with each other over negative campaigning, health care and free trade Tuesday, a week before primaries in Texas and Ohio could either effectively seal the nomination for Obama or throw the contest wide open again with a strong Clinton performance.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off Tuesday in the final debate before the March 4 primaries.

Debating at Cleveland State University, Clinton repeated angry claims from the campaign trail that Obama mischaracterized her stances on health care and NAFTA in political material mailed to voters in Ohio.
"I have a great deal of respect for Sen. Obama, but we have differences," she said. "In the last several days, some of those differences in tactics and choices that Sen. Obama's campaign has made regarding fliers and mailers and other information that has been put out ... have been very disturbing to me."
The mailers, which Obama defends, claim that Clinton's health care plan would force people who don't want insurance to buy it. They also say she has been inconsistent on NAFTA, which many in industrial states like Ohio blame for shipping blue-collar jobs overseas. Watch the candidates' exchange over health care »
Clinton said her health plan would cover everyone and would be affordable to everyone. While she has made multiple statements saying NAFTA has helped the economy in some parts of the United States, Clinton said she has always said it needs to be improved to provide better labor and environmental protections in Mexico and Canada. If that happened, she said, fewer American jobs would go overseas.
She blasted the health care mailing in particular, saying it's "almost as if the health insurance companies and the Republicans wrote it."
Obama said the mailings are common practice in political campaigns and raise valid differences between his stances and Clinton's. He said he, too, has been targeted by negative Clinton advertisements.
"Sen. Clinton has consistently sent out negative attacks on us," he said. "We haven't whined about it because I understand that's the nature of these campaigns.
"But to suggest that our mailer is somehow different to the kind of approach Sen Clinton has taken throughout this campaign certainly is not accurate."
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With Obama having won 11 statewide contests in a row and a recent set of national polling suggesting he has the support of 50 percent of Democrats to her 40 percent, Clinton has sharpened her attacks on Obama in the past week.
According to CNN estimates, Obama leads Clinton in the delegate race, 1,360 to 1,269. In all, 2,025 delegates are needed to seal the Democratic nomination.
Even Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, has suggested that if she does not win in Ohio and Texas, her campaign will face a dramatically difficult challenge keeping up with the surging Obama. Rhode Island and Vermont also hold primaries on March 4.
Clinton denied knowledge of a photograph of Obama wearing Somali tribal garb that was provided to The Drudge Report Web site Monday. Matt Drudge wrote that the photo was leaked to him by the Clinton campaign in what Obama called an effort to reinforce false notions that he is either foreign-born or a Muslim.
The picture was taken during a 2006 visit to Africa by the senator. It is common for political leaders to be given gifts and asked to wear traditional garb on such trips.
Clinton denied any knowledge of the photo coming from one of her staff.
"So far as I know, it did not," she said. "That's not the kind of behavior that I condone or expect from the people working in my campaign."
Obama, a senator from Illinois, said he believes her.
"I take Sen. Clinton at her word that she knows nothing about the photo," he said.
As in many of their debates, health care was a prime focus with the first 16 minutes of the debate devoted to it. The two staked out familiar themes -- Clinton saying her plan would guarantee health coverage for all Americans and Obama touting a plan he says would make it affordable for everyone but not require them to buy it if they don't want it.
Responding to a question on NAFTA in which moderator Tim Russert listed comments he said show Clinton once supported the agreement, the New York senator appeared to lash out at media bias against her -- a claim members of her campaign have made repeatedly -- and in favor of Obama.
"I just find it kind of curious that I keep getting the first question on all of these issues," she said before, referencing a "Saturday Night Live" skit, she added, "Maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow.

First details & photo's GeForce 9800 GTX

The first rumored specs and photo's on NVIDIA's new flagship product, the GeForce 9800 GTX slowly start to form.
Appearantly the GeForce 9800 GTX (G92) comes with a 12-layer PCB (P392). This card is clocked at 673MHz for core and 1683MHz for the shader domain with 128 Shader cores; while memory clock is set at 2200 MHz. The memory interface is 256-bit with 512MB of 136-pin BGA GDDR3 memory onboard.
It comes with two DVI-I and one HDTV-out. There are two SLI connectors and two 6-pin PCIe power connector. The card employs the CoolerMaster TM67 cooler where the fan is rated at 0.34A, 4.08W, 2900rpm, 34dBA. The total board power is 168W.

Pakistan move knocked out YouTube

Pakistan move knocked out YouTube

An apparent move by the Pakistani government to block YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, knocked out access to the site worldwide for more than two hours, Internet analysts say.

An Internet cafe in Islamabad, Pakistan

The outage followed a letter sent Friday evening by the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to Internet service providers, ordering them to prevent people in Pakistan from visiting YouTube.
The authority cited a "highly blasphemous" video featuring right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
The block was intended to cover only Pakistan but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, The Associated Press cited Renesys Corp, an Internet monitoring company, as saying.
What happened was that Pakistan Telecom established a route that directed requests for YouTube videos from local Internet subscribers to a "black hole," AP cited Renesys as saying. It then published that route to its international data carrier, PCCW of Hong Kong, which accepted, AP quoted Todd Underwood, vice president of Renesys, as explaining.
The move also coincided with the temporary shutdown Friday evening of Aaj TV, a Pakistani television cable and satellite channel, after it reportedly upset President Pervez Musharraf. Since declaring a nationwide state of emergency on November 3, he has taken independent television stations off the air; they would later be allowed to resume service.
In YouTube's case, it was completely inaccessible on Sunday from 10:48 a.m. PT to 12:51 p.m. PT (11:48 p.m. Sunday to 1:51 a.m. Monday in Pakistan), said Shawn White, a spokesman for Keynote Systems, a San Mateo, California-based Internet-performance monitoring company.
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Keynote Systems' monitoring of major Web sites like YouTube includes attempting to access them every 15 minutes from computers in 35 cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas, White said.
"I was kind of surprised that something like this could happen, especially globally," said White, calling the outage the most high-profile Internet blackout he remembers in his 12 years with the company. "It just further illustrates just how fragile the Internet can be.
"There are a lot of protocols and checks and guidelines in place that all of these international Internet service providers are supposed to follow," White said. "In this scenario, it's like someone made a change and didn't realize the change they were making was going to affect everyone around the world."
White added that his company's monitors additionally noted about a one-hour period -- starting at about 7 a.m. PT on Monday -- during which YouTube service slowed down dramatically. He said the cause of that slowdown wasn't yet clear.
In a statement released on Monday, YouTube did not mention the Pakistani government's move to block access to the site but attributed the outage on Sunday to an issue related to its site in Pakistan.
"Traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," the statement said.
"We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan," YouTube added. "We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."
In a statement on its Web site, the PTA said the video had "the potential to cause more unrest and possible loss of life and property across the country."
"PTA believes that the said footage absolutely stands against the values of religious tolerance and peaceful co-existence arousing deep anguish and distress across the Muslim world."
Wilders, a far-right Dutch lawmaker, announced last month that he would release an anti-Islam film. Both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have expressed concern that the film would spark global protests and riots.
The Pakistan government is asking YouTube to remove the "objectionable content," said Nabiha Mehmood, a spokeswoman for the PTA.
The government said it decided to block the video after senior representatives from several ministries of the Pakistani government met, according to a statement on the PTA Web site.
The authority sent the letter to Internet service providers after the meeting, Mehmood said, adding that the government would reinstate access to the video-sharing site if YouTube complied with the request.
The decision in Pakistan received mixed reactions.
"Some people are quite upset and screaming. They say they have been using YouTube regularly," said Wahal us Siraj, one of the founders of the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, and chief executive officer of Micronet Broadband. "There are others who say that YouTube is full of videos... that are damaging to the character of children."
Roughly 3 million to 5 million of Pakistan's 165 million people have Internet access, according to Siraj's association.
The recent reprinting in European newspapers of the controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed that sparked worldwide protests two years ago has inflamed emotions further. Watch Pakistanis denounce the drawing »
The 3-year-old YouTube has exploded in popularity by letting ordinary people post their own videos online and watch videos that others have posted. The Web site's growth also has spawned efforts around the world to regulate it.
Authorities in Brazil, China, Iran, Morocco, Myanmar, Syria and Thailand have blocked access to YouTube in the last few years, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press advocacy organization.
The countries acted after concluding that YouTube videos were subversive (China), immoral (Iran), embarrassing to well-known figures (Brazil) or critical of a country's king (Thailand), the group said.
Governments also have sought to regulate user-supplied Internet content to stymie allegations that they abuse human rights, the group said.
A few months ago, YouTube, responding to complaints, took down videos posted by an award-winning Egyptian human rights advocate that showed what he described as police abuse. About five months later, after media reports, YouTube restored his account and let him continue posting videos.
YouTube is a subsidiary of Google Inc., which bought the site in 2006 for nearly $1.7 billion.