NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) Launches, Heads for the Moon

NASA has confirmed its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) has separated from its ride into space, powered up and is communicating with ground controllers following a successful launch at 11:27 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 6, from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. LADEE is on its way to arrive at the moon in 30 days, then enter lunar orbit.

                                         

According to the LADEE mission operations team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., during technical checkouts the LADEE spacecraft commanded itself to shut down the reaction wheels used to position and stabilize the spacecraft.

"The LADEE spacecraft is working as it was designed to under these conditions -- there's no indication of anything wrong with the reaction wheels or spacecraft," said S. Pete Worden, Ames center director. "The LADEE spacecraft is communicating and is very robust. The mission team has ample time to resolve this issue before the spacecraft reaches lunar orbit. We don't have to do anything in a rush."

LADEE team members are currently analyzing the situation. Normal checkout takes a couple of days, and this anomaly may add a couple more days to the process.

"This is not an unusual event in spacecraft," Worden said. "We plan in the next few days to complete spacecraft checkout."

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), managed by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., launched at 11:27 p.m. EDT on Sept. 6 from Pad 0B at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) Launches, Heads for the Moon

NASA has confirmed its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) has separated from its ride into space, powered up and is communicating with ground controllers following a successful launch at 11:27 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 6, from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. LADEE is on its way to arrive at the moon in 30 days, then enter lunar orbit.

                                         

According to the LADEE mission operations team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., during technical checkouts the LADEE spacecraft commanded itself to shut down the reaction wheels used to position and stabilize the spacecraft.

"The LADEE spacecraft is working as it was designed to under these conditions -- there's no indication of anything wrong with the reaction wheels or spacecraft," said S. Pete Worden, Ames center director. "The LADEE spacecraft is communicating and is very robust. The mission team has ample time to resolve this issue before the spacecraft reaches lunar orbit. We don't have to do anything in a rush."

LADEE team members are currently analyzing the situation. Normal checkout takes a couple of days, and this anomaly may add a couple more days to the process.

"This is not an unusual event in spacecraft," Worden said. "We plan in the next few days to complete spacecraft checkout."

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), managed by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., launched at 11:27 p.m. EDT on Sept. 6 from Pad 0B at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.

3 Things to Remember About Data Recovery

Data recovery is something most computer users don't think about until they lose their data. However, if you are smart and you find out about it before you need it, you can put some preventative measures in place. These should help to minimise the odds of needing to recover any data in the first place.
1. Most data stands a good chance of being recovered - providing you do it properly.
As with most things in life, there are ways of doing things and ways you should avoid. For example, if you wanted to cook a sponge cake and ice it, you wouldn't slap the icing on before putting the cake in the oven, would you? Unfortunately many people take a similar approach to data loss. They will try to recover their data while having no real idea of what to do. Finding the right way to recover your information and following that path is essential in order to get it back safely.
2. The process of data recovery can be made harder if you try and rectify things on your own.
Oftentimes, when someone loses data on their hard drive, USB drive or server, they will make things worse by trying to get the data back on their own. In truth, there are some computer issues that most people can solve with a little knowledge.

Under Climate Change, Winners and Losers On the Coral Reef

As ocean temperatures rise, some species of corals are likely to succeed at the expense of others, according to a report published online on April 12 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology that details the first large-scale investigation of climate effects on corals.

"The good news is that, rather than experiencing wholesale destruction, many coral reefs will survive climate change by changing the mix of coral species as the ocean warms and becomes more acidic," said Terry Hughes of James Cook University in Australia. "That's important for people who rely on the rich and beautiful coral reefs of today for food, tourism, and other livelihoods."

In an attempt to understand the sorts of changes that may take place as the world's oceans warm, the researchers examined the coral composition of reefs along the entire length of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Earlier studies of climate change and corals have been done on a much smaller geographical scale, with a primary focus on total coral cover or counts of species as rather crude indicators of reef health.

"We chose the iconic Great Barrier Reef as our natural laboratory because water temperature varies by 8 to 9 degrees Celsius along its full length from summer to winter, and because there are wide local variations in pH," Hughes explained. "Its regional-scale natural gradients encompass the sorts of conditions that will apply several decades from now under business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions."

'Street-View' Comes to the World's Coral Reefs

Scientists are taking the public with them to study the world's coral reefs, thanks to 360 degree panoramas from Google's underwater street-view format. Results from this pioneering project -- which will allow ecologists to harness people power to discover how coral reefs are responding to climate change -- will be presented at INTECOL, the world's largest international ecology meeting, in London this week.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland leads the research associated with the Catlin Seaview Survey. The Survey uses image recognition technology to automatically assess creatures on the seabed; so far it has already taken hundreds of thousands of images on the Great Barrier Reef and in the Caribbean.

"This new technology allows us to rapidly understand the distribution and abundance of key organisms such as corals at large scales. Our expeditions in 2012 to the Great Barrier Reef recorded over 150 km of reef-scape using these methods," he says.

The project is now being expanded by building citizen science into the research, which he hopes will raise awareness and provide more data. "We are planning to involve online citizens to help us count a wide range of organisms that appear in the high-definition images. Anyone with access to a computer will be able to help us log creatures such as stingrays, turtles, fish and Crown of Thorns starfish."

Around the World in Four Days: NASA Tracks Chelyabinsk Meteor Plume

Atmospheric physicist Nick Gorkavyi missed witnessing an event of the century last winter when a meteor exploded over his hometown of Chelyabinsk, Russia. From Greenbelt, Md., however, NASA's Gorkavyi and colleagues witnessed a never-before-seen view of the atmospheric aftermath of the explosion.

Shortly after dawn on Feb. 15, 2013, the meteor, or bolide, measuring 59 feet (18 meters) across and weighing 11,000 metric tons, screamed into Earth's atmosphere at 41,600 mph (18.6 kilometers per second). Burning from the friction with Earth's thin air, the space rock exploded 14.5 miles (23.3 kilometers) above Chelyabinsk.

The explosion released more than 30 times the energy from the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. For comparison, the ground-impacting meteor that triggered mass extinctions, including the dinosaurs, measured about 6 miles (10 kilometers) across and released about 1 billion times the energy of the atom bomb.

Some of the surviving pieces of the Chelyabinsk bolide fell to the ground. But the explosion also deposited hundreds of tons of dust up in the stratosphere, allowing a NASA satellite to make unprecedented measurements of how the material formed a thin but cohesive and persistent stratospheric dust belt.

"We wanted to know if our satellite could detect the meteor dust," said Gorkavyi, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who led the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "Indeed, we saw the formation of a new dust belt in Earth's stratosphere, and achieved the first space-based observation of the long-term evolution of a bolide plume."

Gorkavyi and colleagues combined a series of satellite measurements with atmospheric models to simulate how the plume from the bolide explosion evolved as the stratospheric jet stream carried it around the Northern Hemisphere.

How Plants Know to Send Roots Down and Leaves Up

VIB researchers at Ghent University discovered how the transport of an important plant hormone is organized in a way that the plant knows in which direction its roots and leaves have to grow. They discovered how the needed transport protein turns up at the underside of plant cells. The discovery helps explain how plants grow, and how they organize themselves in order to grow.

Versatile hormone

It is known for a long time that the plant hormone auxin is transmitted from the top to the bottom of a plant, and that the local concentration of auxin is important for the growth direction of stems, the growth of roots, the sprouting of shoots. To name a few things; auxin is also relevant to, for instance, the ripening of fruit, the clinging of climbers and a series of other processes. Thousands of researchers try to understand the different roles of auxin.

In many instances the distribution of auxin in the plant plays a key role, and thus the transport from cell to cell. At the bottom of plant cells, so-called PIN proteins are located on the cell membrane, helping auxin to flow through to the lower cell. However, no one thoroughly understood why the PIN proteins only showed up at the bottom of a cell.

Endocytosis

An international group of scientists from labs in five countries, headed by Jirí Friml of the VIB-department Plant Systems Biology at Ghent University, revealed a rather unusual mechanism. PIN proteins are made in the protein factories of the cell and are transported all over the cell membrane. Subsequently they are engulfed by the cell membrane, a process called endocytosis.

The invagination closes to a vesicle, disconnects and moves back into the cell. Thus the PIN proteins are recycled and subsequently transported to the bottom of the cell, where they are again incorporated in the cell membrane. It is unclear why plants use such a complex mechanism, but a plausible explanation is this mechanism enables a quick reaction when plant cells feel a change of direction of gravity, giving them a new ‘underside’.