In space, no one can hear you say "doh!"

Space exploration is an unpredictable business - no matter how well you plan ahead. Some mistakes cost lives, others cost money, and for some, well, we've yet to know the price we'll have to pay. But hey, it's not a mistake, it's a learning experience!

By Carmelo Amalfi

Say cheese!

American astronaut Neil Armstrong commits a huge public relations blunder when he forgets to hand the camera to ìBuzzî Aldrin during their historic adventure on the Moon. End result? No still photographs of Neil Armstrong, the first guy to set foot on the moon. When LIFE magazine wanted a cover photograph of Armstrong on the moon, they had to use one of Buzz. But as some consolation, Armstrong was reflected in Aldrin's spacesuit visor!

Miles or kilometers?

NASA's $125m mission to study the climate on Mars was destroyed in 1999 when a navigation error caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to undershoot its target altitude by 90km (54 miles). Rather than entering Mars' atmosphere at its target altitude, it came instead to within 60km of the planetís surface. The spacecraft, travelling at speeds of around 16,000 kmh was consequently torn apart in the atmosphere. The minimum survivable altitude was 85km ñ Dang! Missed by that much! A review board found the navigation error was caused when some of the spacecraft's commands were sent in imperial units rather than metric.

Rough landing

NASA appoints a mishap investigation board to find out why parachutes on its Genesis mission didn't deploy properly when the space probe returned to Earth in September 2004. It had been collecting samples of the solar wind which scientists on Earth were eager to study. The board found the likely cause was a design error involving deceleration sensors. These switches sense the braking caused by re-entry into the atmosphere, initiating the sequence leading to deployment of the parachutes and parafoil. But because the design plans didn't indicate orientation, the components were installed upside down. As a result, the $264 million mission nose-dived into the Utah desert at 300kmh.

Orbiting white elephant

Overbudget and still not finished, the International Space Station is an easy target for critics who question the usefulness of the orbiting space laboratory. An estimated $100 billion has been spent on the station when it was supposed to cost $8 billion. Part of the reason was Russia's decision to buy into the station, subsidised for mostly political reasons by the U.S. and NASA.

Oops, we transformed Mars

A NASA microbiologist confirms the presence of bacteria in the chambers used to test the Mars landers Spirit and Opportunity, now tracking across the Martian landscape. Contaminating other planets is a UN treaty breach and, according to some scientists, the gaffe may have compromised future missions to find life on Mars.

Disaster averted

A faulty thermostat triggers an explosion that almost claims the lives of US Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert while on the way to the Moon in 1970. The explosion in turn causes an oxygen tank to explode and blast to pieces parts of the command module, rendering the module virtually useless and forcing the crew to take refuge in the lunar module. Designed to carry two men, the module became a lifeboat for four days until their return to Earth. After the mishap, the Apollo programme was held up as a technical triumph in the risky business of space exploration, with no lives lost save the three men who died in the Apollo 1 disaster in 1967.

Mirror, mirror in the space

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990 with a flawed mirror while a back-up mirror sat useless in a warehouse. But in 1993 NASA turned Hubble's spherical aberration into a PR triumph when astronauts installed new components to correct the aberration in the primary mirror of Hubble's 2.4m telescope. Since then, Hubbleís images of space have captivated millions of people.

Calling Saturn

NASA engineers realised well into the US-European Cassini-Huygens mission that once the mother ship Cassini had released the European Space Agency Huygens probe in late 2004, the spacecraft could not communicate because engineers had not fully accounted for the Doppler shift in signals from the probe as it fell towards the surface of Saturn's biggest moon Titan. Engineers managed to correct the Doppler shift (by commanding Cassini to release the probe at a higher altitude) so that the Huygens lander came within range of Cassini's receivers. To make matters worse, a software command meant to switch on one of Cassini's receivers was never sent, so Cassini picked up only half the data beamed back by Huygens as it fell into Titan's atmosphere. Luckily, ground based radio telescopes - in a historic global hook-up - managed to pick up the faint signals and salvage the experiment.

A hyphen, a hyphen, my spacecraft for a hyphen

NASA's Mariner 1 never got to Venus in 1962 because someone omitted a hyphen in the software programming. A post flight review board found the omission in the data-editing programme generated incorrect guidance signals for the spacecraft. The omission of the hyphen caused the computer to execute a series of erroneous course corrections that finally threw Mariner 1 off course.

Danger on the ground

In 1964, at a Cape Canaveral assembly unit, a Delta rocket's third-stage motor had just been mated to the Orbiting Solar Observatory spacecraft in preparation for pre-launch tests when suddenly the rocket ignited. The workroom became a furnace of searing rocket exhaust fumes, burning eleven engineers and technicians, three of them fatally. An investigation found static electricity probably ignited the propellant.

Green environment
for now and future

Global warming has brought adverse changes in climate by affecting not only humans but also other living species. It is our responsibility to work for the protection of the environment and to see that the present and the future generations can make use of refreshing shade and fruits of trees

In the past, the major need of people in this world was arable land. Man did not have to think about animate things. However, now the adverse effects on forests through over population and the development of various chemical elements in the atmosphere have led to irregular rainfall and global warming. This global warming has brought changes in climate, including making perennial snow mountains melt, thereby adversely affecting not only human beings but also other living species.

This dangerous situation is being taken very seriously by the world. In the past, the perennial snow mountains of Tibet had very thick snow. Older people say that these mountains were covered with thick snow when they were young and that the snows are getting sparser which may be an indication of the end of the world. It is a fact that climate change is a slow process taking thousands of years to realise its effect. Life of living beings and plants on this planet also undergo change accordingly. Man's physical structure too changes from generation to generation along with the change in climatic conditions.

Because of the growth in the population, a large number of trees are cut for fuel, and to reclaim land for agricultural cultivation. In the case of Tibet, too, the Chinese have now destroyed its ancient trees in a similar way to shaving a man's hair off. This is not simply the destruction of trees but it also means harming what belongs to the Tibetans. Similarly, the continuing decline in forests in many parts of the world is adversely affecting the already changing global climate, thus upsetting the lives, not only of mankind, but also of all living beings.

Similarly, the harmful effect on the atmosphere brought about by chemical emissions in industrialised countries is a very dangerous sign. It is the responsibility of us, who speak of the welfare of all sentient beings, to contribute towards this. To work for the protection of the environment and to see that the present and future generations of mankind can make use of refreshing shade and fruits of trees.

--www.dalailama.com

Composition
of the solar system

Our Solar System is just not composed of the Sun and planets but there are several other matters present. Galaxy looks into the facts about the Solar System and its surroundings

The sun contains 99.85 percent of all the matter in the solar system. The planets, which condensed out of the same disk of material that formed the sun, contain only 0.135 percent of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter contains more than twice the matter of all the other planets combined. Satellites of the planets, comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and the interplanetary medium constitute the remaining 0.015 percent. The following table is a list of the mass distribution within our solar system.

-               Sun: 99.85 percent

-               Planets: 0.135 percent

-               Comets: 0.01 percent

-                Satellites: 0.00005 percent

-               Minor Planets: 0.0000002 percent

-                Meteoroids: 0.0000001 percent

-                Interplanetary Medium: 0.0000001 percent

Interplanetary space

Nearly all the solar system by volume appears to be an empty void. Far from being nothingness, this vacuum of ìspaceî comprises the interplanetary medium. It includes various forms of energy and at least two material components; interplanetary dust and interplanetary gas. Interplanetary dust consists of microscopic solid particles. Interplanetary gas is a tenuous flow of gas and charged particles, mostly protons and electrons plasma which stream from the sun, called the solar wind.

The solar wind can be measured by spacecraft, and it has a large effect on comet tails. It also has a measurable effect on the motion of spacecraft. The speed of the solar wind is about 400 kilometres (250 miles) per second in the vicinity of Earth's orbit. The point at which the solar wind meets the interstellar medium, which is the ìsolarî wind from other stars, is called the heliopause. It is a boundary theorised to be roughly circular or teardrop shaped, marking the edge of the Sun's influence perhaps 100 AU from the sun. The space within the boundary of the heliopause, containing the sun and solar system, is referred to as the heliosphere.

The solar magnetic field extends outward into interplanetary space; it can be measured on Earth and by spacecraft. The solar magnetic field is the dominating magnetic field throughout the interplanetary regions of the solar system, except in the immediate environment of planets which have their own magnetic fields.

The terrestrial planets

The terrestrial planets are the four innermost planets in the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. They are called terrestrial because they have a compact, rocky surface like the Earth's. The planets, Venus, Earth, and Mars have significant atmospheres while Mercury has almost none.

The jovian planets

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are known as the jovian planets, because they are all gigantic compared with Earth, and they have a gaseous nature like Jupiter's. The jovian planets are also referred to as the gas giants, although some or all of them might have small solid cores.

--www.scinceagogo.com

Eco-Logic
Species extinction threat
vastly underestimated

Extinction risks for populations of endangered species are likely being underestimated by as much as 100-fold because of a mathematical "misdiagnosis", suggests a new study by a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher. CU-Boulder's Brett Melbourne said that current mathematical models used to determine extinction threat, or "red-listed" status, of species worldwide overlook random differences between individuals in a given population. Such differences, which include variations in male-to-female sex ratios as well as size or behavioural variations between individuals, have an unexpectedly large effect on extinction risk calculations, contends Melbourne. "When we apply our new mathematical model to species extinction rates, it shows that things are worse than we thought," explained Melbourne. "By accounting for random differences between individuals, extinction rates for endangered species can be orders of magnitude higher than conservation biologists have believed."

Farmlands too toxic for amphibians 

University of Florida (UF) zoologists have found that toads in busy suburban areas are less likely to suffer from reproductive system abnormalities than toads near farms - where some of the amphibians they examined had both testes and ovaries. The new study is likely to have wide implications for the longstanding debate over whether agricultural chemicals pose a threat to amphibians, with UF researcher Lou Guillette noting that as you increase agriculture you have an increasing number of abnormalities. Several past studies have suggested a link between herbicides commonly used in farming and sexual abnormalities in tadpoles and frogs. Such deformities may be responsible for declines in frogs documented in areas affected by agricultural contaminants, such as Sierra Nevada, California.