Did you know you can see the International Space Station from your house? As the third brightest object in the sky, after the sun and moon, the space station is easy to see if you know where and when to look for it.

NASA’s Spot the Station service sends you an email or text message a few hours before the space station passes over your house. The space station looks like a fast-moving plane in the sky, though one with people living and working aboard it more than 200 miles above the ground. It is best viewed on clear nights. For more information on the International Space Station and its mission, visit the space station mission pages.

Spot the Station is available worldwide to anyone with an email account or SMS-enabled phone.Several times a week, Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX, determines sighting opportunities for 4,600 locations worldwide. If your specific city or town isn’t listed, pick one that is fairly close to you. The space station is visible for a long distance around each of the listed locations.

This service will only notify you of “good” sighting opportunities - that is, sightings that are high enough in the sky (40 degrees or more) and last long enough to give you the best view of the orbiting laboratory. This will be anywhere from once or twice a week to once or twice a month, depending on the space station’s orbit. Don’t worry if there are big gaps in between sightings! A complete list of all possible space station sightings is available from Johnson Space Center.

Source: http://spotthestation.nasa.gov.

Indo-French oceanographic study satellite 'SARAL' and six foreign mini and micro spacecrafts were successfully launched on Monday by ISRO's PSLV-C20 rocket from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.
Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle(PSLV) lifted off from the first launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre at around 6 pm at the end of the 59-hour countdown and placed in the orbit the satellites about 22 minutes later.

President Pranab Mukherjee witnessed the launch from the mission control centre in Sriharikota, about 110 km from Chennai.The lift-off was rescheduled to 6.01 pm, a five-minute delay, to avoid probability of collision with space debris, a normal precautionary step in a launch mission, ISRO sources said.

The 410-kg SARAL with payloads - Argos and Altika - from French space agency CNES is meant for study of ocean parameters towards enhancing the understanding of the ocean state conditions.Besides SARAL, two micro-satellites UniBRITE and BRITE from Austria, AAUSAT3 from Denmark and STRaND from United Kingdom as also one micro-satellite (NEOSSat) and one mini-satellite (SAPPHIRE) from Canada were launched by PSLV, which yet again proved its versatality recording its 22nd successful flight in a row in its 23 missions of which the first one had failed.SARAL was injected first into the space about 18 minutes after the lift-off followed by other satellites in the space of about four minutes.

In molecular biology, biochips are essentially miniaturized laboratories that can perform hundreds or thousands of simultaneous biochemical reactions. Biochips enable researchers to quickly screen large numbers of biological analytes for a variety of purposes, from disease diagnosis to detection of bioterrorism agents.The development started with early work on the underlying sensor technology. One of the first portable chemistry-based sensors was the glass pH electrode, invented in 1922 by Hughes (Hughes, 1922). Measurement of pH was accomplished by detecting the potential difference developed across a thin glass membrane selective to the permeation of hydrogen ions; this selectivity was achieved by exchanges between H+ and SiO sites in the glass. The basic concept of using exchange sites to create permselective membranes was used to develop other ion sensors in subsequent years. For example, a K+ sensor was produced by incorporating valinomycin into a thin membrane (Schultz, 1996). Over thirty years elapsed before the first true biosensor (i.e. a sensor utilizing biological molecules) emerged. In 1956, Leland Clark published a paper on an oxygen sensing electrode (Clark, 1956_41). This device became the basis for a glucose sensor developed in 1962 by Clark and colleague Lyons which utilized glucose oxidase molecules embedded in a dialysis membrane (Clark, 1962). The enzyme functioned in the presence of glucose to decrease the amount of oxygen available to the oxygen electrode, thereby relating oxygen levels to glucose concentration. This and similar biosensors became known as enzyme electrodes, and are still in use today.
Today, a large variety of biochip technologies are either in development or being commercialized. Numerous advancements continue to be made in sensing research that enable new platforms to be developed for new applications. Cancer diagnosis through DNA typing is just one market opportunity. A variety of industries currently desire the ability to simultaneously screen for a wide range of chemical and biological agents, with purposes ranging from testing public water systems for disease agents to screening airline cargo for explosives. Pharmaceutical companies wish to combinatorially screen drug candidates against target enzymes. To achieve these ends, DNA, RNA, proteins, and even living cells are being employed as sensing mediators on biochips . Numerous transduction methods can be employed including surface plasmon resonance,fluorescence, and chemiluminescence. The particular sensing and transduction techniques chosen depend on factors such as price, sensitivity, and reusability.

2012 DA14 is a near-Earth asteroid with an estimated diameter of 50 meters (160 ft) and an estimated mass of 190,000 metric tons. It was discovered on February 23, 2012, by the Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra, Granada in Spain seven days after passing 0.0174 AU (2,600,000 km; 1,620,000 mi) from Earth. Calculations show that on February 15, 2013, the distance between the asteroid and the center-point of Earth will be 0.0002276 AU (34,050 km; 21,160 mi). The asteroid will pass 27,700 km (17,200 mi) from the surface of Earth.This is a record close approach for a known object of this size.

Asteroid 2012 DA14, as it’s called, is too small to see with the naked eye even at its closest approach around 7.25 p.m. GMT (12.55 a.m. IST, Saturday), over the Indian Ocean near Sumatra.The best viewing locations, with binoculars and telescopes, are in Asia, Australia and eastern Europe. Even there, all anyone can see is a pinpoint of light as the asteroid zooms by at 28,000 kmph. As asteroids go, DA14 is a shrimp. The one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was about 10 km across. But this rock could still do immense damage if it struck, releasing the energy equivalent of 2.4 million tonnes of TNT and wiping out 1,950 sq. km.Scientists are certain it won’t impact Earth. And chances are extremely remote it will run into any of the satellites orbiting 36,000 km up. Most of the solar system’s asteroids are situated in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and remain stable there for billions of years. Some occasionally pop out, though, into Earth’s neighborhood.The flyby provides a rare learning opportunity for scientists eager to keep future asteroids at bay and a prime-time advertisement for those anxious to step up preventive measures.

PUMA Headgear

NASA engineer Dan Dietrich and a team of scientists at Glenn developed the Portable Unit for Metabolic Analysis (PUMA) to monitor 

the oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production rates of astronauts exercising during long missions. The portable unit was designed to give the crew the ability to move around the spacecraft without being tethered to a large immovable unit. 

PUMA measures six components to evaluate metabolic function: oxygen and carbon dioxide partial pressure, volume flow rate, heart rate, and gas pressure and temperature. From those measurements, PUMA can compute the oxygen uptake, carbon dioxide output and minute ventilation (average expired gas flow rate). A small, embedded computer takes readings of each sensor and relays the data wirelessly to a remote computer via Bluetooth.

Image Credit: NASA

Astronomers using a CSIRO radio telescope have taken the Universe's temperature, and have found that it has cooled down just the way the Big Bang theory predicts.
Using the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, NSW, an international team from Sweden, France, Germany and Australia has measured how warm the Universe was when it was half its current age."This is the most precise measurement ever made of how the Universe has cooled down during its 13.77 billion year history," said Dr Robert Braun, Chief Scientist at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.Because light takes time to travel, when we look out into space we see the Universe as it was in the past — as it was when light left the galaxies we are looking at. So to look back half-way into the Universe's history, we need to look half-way across the Universe.

How can we measure a temperature at such a great distance?The astronomers studied gas in an unnamed galaxy 7.2 billion light-years away [a redshift of 0.89].The only thing keeping this gas warm is the cosmic background radiation — the glow left over from the Big Bang.
By chance, there is another powerful galaxy, a quasar (called PKS 1830-211), lying behind the unnamed galaxy.Radio waves from this quasar come through the gas of the foreground galaxy. As they do so, the gas molecules absorb some of the energy of the radio waves. This leaves a distinctive "fingerprint" on the radio waves.From this "fingerprint" the astronomers calculated the gas's temperature. They found it to be 5.08 Kelvin (-267.92 degrees Celsius): extremely cold, but still warmer than today's Universe, which is at 2.73 Kelvin (-270.27 degrees Celsius).According to the Big Bang theory, the temperature of the cosmic background radiation drops smoothly as the Universe expands. "That's just what we see in our measurements. The Universe of a few billion years ago was a few degrees warmer than it is now, exactly as the Big Bang Theory predicts," said research team leader Dr Sebastien Muller of Onsala Space Observatory at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden

Earlier this week, NASA announced the development of a mining robot called RASSOR: the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot. RASSOR has been designed to assist in extracting water, ice and fuel from soil on the moon – all essential resources for future human habitation.

And the reality is, if we want to achieve our dreams of exploring the solar system, robots will be the means.With the exception of a few select missions, human space flight is in a prolonged hiatus. It has languished in low-Earth orbit over the past four decades and is likely to continue languishing for many more.The International Space Station, or ISS (take a guided tour) continues in its orbit 400 kilometres up. And China will soon visit the moon. But for more distant destinations, we’ve realised that radiation and bone loss would harm space travellers for life.There are as yet no cures to the adverse physical effects of space travel, so humans remain bound to Earth, and possibly the moon, for now. Instead, we will use robots for the heavy lifting.As our space minions, robots are expanding humanity’s understanding of the solar system without endangering life and limb.A robot just showed there is water ice on Mercury. Robots have taught us that Saturn’s moons are a wild collection of oddities. And if you haven’t heard about Curiosity – officially the Mars Science Laboratory – and its exploits, you must live on another planet

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The formation of the Antarctic ozone hole has caused changes in the way waters in the southern oceans mix, with possible impacts on climate change, a new study suggests.To trace the movement of ocean waters from the surface into the ocean interior - a process known as ventilation - researchers analysed ocean concentrations of a chemical that was used in hair spray cans, refrigerators and air conditioning systems before it was phased out in the 1990's because it was destroying the ozone layer.

The study, by an international team which includes Associate Professor Mark Holzer, a mathematical scientist at UNSW, is published today in the journal Science.They found that surface waters are mixing into the subtropical deeper ocean at a higher rate than 20 years ago, while the reverse is true for waters closer to Antarctica. Dr Holzer said the find was consistent with the fact that surface westerly winds in the southern hemisphere, which drive the ventilation of the southern oceans, have strengthened in recent decades. Other studies have attributed this wind intensification to the thinning of the ozone layer.

“It is fascinating that changes in the stratosphere have had an effect down to at least 1500 metres depth in the ocean,” said Dr Holzer, from the School of Mathematics and Statistics in the Faculty of Science.
The movement of surface waters into the deeper ocean governs the ocean’s uptake of heat, oxygen and carbon from the atmosphere. “And all of these are potentially important for changes in the global climate. Ventilation is the way the ocean communicates with the atmosphere,” Dr Holzer said.

The team, led by Professor Darryn Waugh, of Johns Hopkins University, used measurements made in the southern oceans in the early 1990s and in the mid- to-late 2000s of a chemical compound called chlorofluorocarbon-12, or CFC-12. CFC-12 was first produced commercially in the 1930s and its concentration in the atmosphere increased rapidly until the 1990s, when it was phased out by the Montreal Protocol that governs ozone-depleting compounds. Higher concentrations of CFC-12 than predicted for an unchanging ocean were found in deep water from about 25 to 45 degrees south, reflecting an increased influx of surface water to these latitudes in the past 20 years. The study concluded the opposite was the case for polar deep waters, where there has been increased upwelling.

Dr Holzer said the use of CFC-12 was an interesting twist: “The very substance that contributed to destroying ozone is helping us figure out what is happening in the oceans.” Professor Waugh said that recovery of the ozone layer during the next 50 years could slow down the changes in ocean ventilation, but continued increases in greenhouse gases could also have an effect on ventilation.The combined impact of these two factors on the oceanic uptake of heat and carbon remained an “open question”. “Any changes in southern ocean circulation have the potential to change the global climate,” Professor Waugh said.