The Columbia Accident Investigation Board is drawing together some of the nation’s most experienced investigators and safety experts from the aviation, naval nuclear propulsion, medical, scientific and academic communities to determine the cause of the February 1, 2003 space shuttle accident.
Securing steel cables around the floors of existing buildings may be an effective way to prevent a catastrophic collapse caused by a terrorist bomb, according to test results released by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, and four of his civil engineering graduate students have successfully tested a system that would shift the gravity load of a collapsing floor to supporting cables if a column were destroyed by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, or a terrorist bomb.
An Ohio astronomer and her colleagues have detected a type of hot gas in space that could account for part of the “missing” matter in the universe. A gas cloud, one trillion times more massive than our sun and more than 150 times hotter, surrounds our local group of galaxies, the astronomers reported in the journal Nature. Though vast, this gas cloud is only part of larger rivers of gas that wind between all the galaxies of the universe.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken the first stab at a “periodic table” of the protein structures – an organized map of the building blocks used over and over again to construct the billions of complex proteins that make up life on Earth. The three-dimensional map depicts similarities and differences among the building blocks, letting scientists visualize the universe of possible protein structures – the many possible twists, turns and folds – and see evolutionary changes that may have occurred with time.
UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez announced more than four years ago that a monstrous black hole resides at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 24,000 light years away, with a mass more than 2 million times that of our sun. Some astronomers greeted the announcement with skepticism, and proposed exotic forms of matter as alternatives. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting Feb. 16 in Denver, Ghez reported that the case for the black hole has been strengthened substantially, and that all of the proposed alternatives can be excluded.
Dutch researchers in an international team of astronomers have discovered a star which will explode in the near future. The star is located in the constellation Cassiopeia. The researchers have published their findings in the February 2003 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
In a modern-day odyssey of exploration, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory endured grueling shifts on remote ocean drill rigs to get frozen cores of mud. Then came painstaking lab work, analyzing the microbial inhabitants of the deep seafloor sediment. The reward: discovering new life and gaining new insight into the microscopic creators of the largest frozen methane pools on the planet.
In the late afternoon of Friday 31 January, a final trim manoeuvre nudged the Artemis satellite into its assigned position in geostationary orbit, completing a most remarkable satellite recovery operation which has lasted 18 months.
The universe had a period of “Dark Ages,” starting approximately half-a-million years after the Big Bang, and NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has revealed the end of the Dark Ages. “We detected the end of the Dark Ages about 200 million years after the Big Bang,” said Edward L. Wright, professor of astronomy at UCLA, who helped develop key data analysis techniques for WMAP. “There were enough bright stars and quasars at that time to fill the universe with ultraviolet light and a haze of cosmic electrons. This is nearly 700 million years earlier than any of these objects has been seen before. WMAP measurements have enabled us to detect the era when the first stars formed.”
NASA scientists have discovered how an intricate martian network of streams, rivers and lakes may have carried water across Mars. Using new three-dimensional data from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft and a powerful state-of-the-art computer code that ‘models’ overland water flow, scientists visualized the complex flow of martian water. These data, acquired by the laser altimeter on board the spacecraft, provided highly accurate, three-dimensional topographic views of Mars.
UCLA and NASA have partnered to combine the latest advances in biology and engineering at the Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration (CMISE), which officially opens on Monday, Feb. 10. CMISE will meld the molecular world with aerospace technology to create minuscule monitoring systems, or a “lab on a chip,” that could make research safer and more efficient on earth and in space.
Astronomy undergraduates have serendipitously discovered a new class of star that thrills astronomers who specialize in a relatively new field called “asteroseismology.” Astronomers worldwide will collaborate in continuous observations of one of these newly found stars for several weeks in May 2003. “Astronomers are always looking for new and better ways to study stars,” said Elizabeth Green, University of Arizona assistant staff astronomer at Steward Observatory, who with her students discovered the new class of stars. They have found sub-dwarf B stars that pulsate like Jell-O, quivering in space through cycles that typically last an hour.
If an impact from space debris was a factor in the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, NASA had been given ample warning. A report published in 1997 predicted a scenario that has disturbing parallels with what may have befallen the spacecraft. Written by an expert panel convened by the US National Research Council, Protecting the Space Shuttle from Meteoroids and Orbital Debris, warns that debris impacts that penetrate the leading edge or underside of a shuttle wing or fuselage might not be immediately critical or detectable.
NASA today released the best “baby picture” of the Universe ever taken; the image contains such stunning detail that it may be one of the most important scientific results of recent years. Scientists used NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to capture the new cosmic portrait, which reveals the afterglow of the big bang, a.k.a. the cosmic microwave background.