Science and technology news blog

Saturn’s giant moon has lakes and a “water” cycle remarkably similar to Earth’s, new evidence suggests.

But Titan’s lakes aren’t made of water. Instead, they probably consist of liquid methane, which plays the role of water in Titan’s superchilled climate, the researchers say.

The lakes were discovered by radar mapping when the Cassini spacecraft, now orbiting Saturn, did a close flyby of northern Titan last July.

The flyby revealed dozens of large, dark patches resembling lakes, up to 40 miles (70 kilometers) in diameter. (See more Saturn photos from Cassini.)

When the lakes were first discovered, the scientists noticed riverlike drainage channels that probably conducted moisture from the surrounding highlands.

This indicates that the lakes were fed by methane rains falling at higher elevations, said Ellen Stofan, lead author of a study in yesterday’s issue of the journal Nature.

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The doughty Mars rovers will celebrate their third anniversary on the Red Planet with new software that will make them smarter and more independent.

Spirit and Opportunity will have improved image processing capabilities that will help them search out dust devils and other weather patterns. A new navigation system will allow the rovers to spot hazards and figure out how to avoid them without help from controllers on Earth.

Until now, if the rovers encountered an obstacle, all they could do was back up and try a different direction. Sometimes the rover could not find a solution, said John Callas, the project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“With this new capability, the rover could find its way through a maze,” he said.

The twin rovers continue to defy all expectations for their longevity. When Spirit landed on Jan. 3, 2004, and Opportunity followed three weeks later, experts hoped they would last through their planned mission of 90 Martian days, which are 37 minutes longer than Earth days.

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A French-designed satellite was put in orbit yesterday on the first space-based mission to seek planets with Earth-like conditions that could sustain life beyond the solar system.

A Russian Soyuz rocket put Corot, a 300kg (660lb) craft with a 12-inch telescope and two cameras, in an orbit of 500 miles altitude passing over the Earth’s poles. The satellite, designed by the French national space agency and supported by the European Space Agency, is to monitor 120,000 stars during its 30-month mission.

This should enable it to find many as yet unknown planets. Ground-based observatories have already discovered more than 200 “exoplanets” outside the solar system.

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Russia will cooperate with China on space projects, but will not transfer sensitive technologies that could enable Beijing to become a rival in a future space race, the head of the Russia’s space agency said Tuesday.Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov said that Moscow and Beijing would cooperate with China in robotic missions to the moon. He added, however, that Russia would maintain restrictions on sharing technology.

“The Chinese are still some 30 years behind us, but their space program has been developing very fast,” Perminov said at a news conference. “They are quickly catching up with us.”

Russia sold China the technology that formed the basis of its manned space program, which launched its first astronaut in 2003 and two others in 2005. The Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft closely resembles the Russian Soyuz.

The next Chinese manned space flight is due next year. China also wants to send up a space station and land a robot probe on the moon by 2010.

Perminov said that Russia would cooperate with China in space exploration strictly within the framework of a bilateral agreement that doesn’t envisage exporting Russian space technologies.

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A NASA satellite captured a new kind of explosion that appears to be the birth of a new black hole.

Scientists are using NASA satellite data to study a new type of cosmic explosion called a hybrid gamma-ray burst. The scientists believe that this hybrid blast is likely signaling the birth of a new black hole.

It is not yet clear exactly what kind of objects exploded or merged to cause the new black hole. This hybrid burst exhibits properties of the two known classes of gamma-ray bursts yet possesses features that remain unexplained.

Gamma-ray bursts represent the most powerful known explosions in the universe. Yet they are random and fleeting, never appearing twice. Scientists have only recently begun to understand their nature. Such bursts typically fall into one of two categories, long or short. The long bursts last more than two seconds and appear to be from the core collapse of massive stars forming a black hole.

Most of these bursts come from the edge of the visible universe. The short bursts, which are under two seconds and often last just a few milliseconds, appear to be the merger of two neutron stars or a neutron star with a black hole, which subsequently creates a new or bigger black hole.

Satellites can be used to help predict where wildfires are likely to occur, a study reports. By studying shrublands in California, US researchers found that Nasa orbiters can accurately detect factors which contribute to fires developing.

The authors said Earth observation satellites could monitor plant moisture and the ratio of dead to live material, and provide data on potential hotspots.

The findings appeared in the journal Geophysical Research (Biogeoscience).

“This represents an advance in our ability to predict wildfires using data from recently launched instruments,” said lead author Dar Roberts, from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“We have come a long way in just the past five to 10 years and continue to gather much better data on the variables critical in wildfire development and spread.”

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THE first comet samples ever returned to Earth reveal that in its early days the solar system was a hectic place.

Contrary to accepted notions, material from across its reaches was mixed in a vast protoplanetary disk of dust.

Initial analysis of some of the 1000 particles collected from Comet 81P/Wild 2 by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft show that the icy object is a mix of rubble from the hot inner reaches of the solar system to the very edge of interstellar space.

“Many people imagined that comets formed in total isolation from the rest of the solar system. We have shown that’s not true,” said mission leader, astronomer Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle.

“As the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, material moved from the innermost part to the outermost part,” he said. “I think of it as the solar system partially turning itself inside out.”

Along with nearly 200 scientists from around the world, Professor Brownlee reported details of their work in seven papers published overnight in the journal Science.

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Flight controllers tried additional “wiggle” tests late today to shake a hung-up guide wire loose and clear the way for full retraction of a partially folded solar array. As with earlier tests, results were inconclusive but the Discovery astronauts said they would be willing to stage a repair spacewalk if mission managers conclude a quick repair is necessary and can be safely carried out.

“We have a great view of what’s going on with the array up there from the shuttle flight deck,” said station commander Mike Lopez-Alegria. “My perspective looking at it from the inside last time was it doesn’t need much coaxing. You’ve probably heard us use the analogy of trying to fold a map. As you know, at times when you’re folding a map it’s helpful to poke it here and there. I think our approach will be not very different from that, although we’ll be poking gently.”

NASA’s Mission Management Team met today to discuss a variety of options to fully retract the P6-4B solar array wing. The wing currently is retracted a little more than half way with at least one guide wire hung up on a grommet that seems to be preventing the slats in a solar blanket from folding smoothly.

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A $50,000 (25,000) competition has been launched to find the best way to tag a 400m-wide asteroid.

The Apophis space rock is set to make a close pass of Earth in 2029 and scientists would like to confirm that it poses no danger to our world.

The Planetary Society will give a prize to the designers of a mission that would allow the huge asteroid’s orbit to be tracked with the most precision.

The competition has support from the US and European space agencies.

“The threat of a strike from asteroids is always a very low probability at any given time, and yet bad things will happen,” said the Planetary Society’s director of projects, Bruce Betts. “We need to know whether Earth’s name is on it,” he told BBC News.

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Photographs from an unmanned NASA craft suggest that underground water occasionally rises and flows across Mars’ frigid terrain, further raising the prospect that the Red Planet hosts conditions suitable for life, scientists announced Wednesday.Bright streaks, appearing within the past seven years in two gullylike areas in the southern hemisphere of the planet, triggered the scientific excitement. Previous photos suggested water flow that had taken place hundreds of millions of years ago rather than anything that scientists could conceive of happening during their lives.

“Liquid water is of high interest to folks interested in looking for life in our solar system and beyond,” said Kenneth Edgett, a scientist at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, which operates the camera aboard the 10-year-old Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.

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NASA says it plans to build a permanently occupied base on the moon, most likely at the lunar north pole.

The habitat will serve as a science outpost as well as a testbed for technologies needed for future travel to Mars, and construction will follow a series of flights to the moon scheduled to begin by 2020.

“We’re going for a base on the moon,” Scott “Doc” Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, said from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.

Plans for what the base will look like and what astronauts would do there have yet to be determined. Similarly, NASA has not projected a date when the base would go into operation.

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After two weeks of futilely searching for the Mars Global Surveyor, NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory officials said Tuesday that the missing spacecraft was probably lost forever.

In its 10-year career, the probe has sent back more than 240,000 images of the red planet, providing the first strong evidence that water flowed there as recently as 100,000 years ago.

It also charted weather cycles and mapped landing sites for the two rovers now operating on the Martian surface.

“We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

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AFTER years of debate on how to dispose of unwanted clutter from the International Space Station, NASA has come up with the answer: simply open the back door and fling it out.

The space agency that has long drilled its astronauts and international partners in the merits of responsible waste management is to relax its rules and allow the station’s crew to jettison selected items of superfluous gear and broken equipment.

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Something a mysterious force called dark energy has been pulling the universe apart for most of its existence, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope announced Thursday.

Dark energy, which acts like gravity in reverse, has been yanking stars and galaxies toward the cosmic frontier for at least nine billion years, or two-thirds of the 13.7 billion years the universe has been around, according to the findings.

Previous observations with Hubble working with increasingly more powerful ground-based observatories had revealed that dark energy’s repulsive force began out-muscling gravity’s tug five to six billion years ago. Those observations suggested dark energy was something that emerged as the universe matured.

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A freaky storm two-thirds the diameter of Earth and unlike anything ever seen has been spotted on Saturn.

The tempest, some 5,000 miles wide (8,000 kilometers), has an oddly human-looking hurricane-like eye. But it is very different from a terrestrial hurricane, scientists said Thursday.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft photographed the huge storm. It swirls with 350-mph winds at the ringed planet’s south pole.

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