Obama plan to land on asteroid may be unrealistic for 2025

By Traci Watson, Special for USA TODAYMillions of miles from Earth, two astronauts hover weightlessly next to a giant space rock, selecting pebbles for scientific research. The spaceship where they'll sleep floats just overhead. Beyond it, barely visible in the sky, is a glittering speck. It's Earth.It sounds like a science-fiction movie, but this surreal scene could, if President Obama has his way, become a reality. However, unlike Hollywood depictions in such movies as Armageddon, it's going to be a lot harder to pull off.

Almost 50 years after President Kennedy proposed sending a man to the moon "before this decade is out," Obama has set an equally improbable goal. He has proposed a 2025 date for NASA to land humans on an asteroid, a ball of rock hurtling around the sun.

The moon is 240,000 miles away. A trip to an asteroid would be 5 million miles — at a minimum.

Why go?

If the mission ever gets launched, it would mark a milestone just as significant as Neil Armstrong's "small step" on the moon, experts say. To go to an asteroid, humans would have to venture for the first time into "deep space," where the sun, not the Earth, is the main player.

An asteroid trip "would really be our first step as a species outside the Earth-moon system," says planetary scientist Andy Rivkin of the Applied Physics Laboratory. "This would be taking off the training wheels."

Asteroids have always been passed over as a destination for human explorers. Then-president George H.W. Bush wanted NASA to go to Mars, while his son, George W. Bush, chose the moon. During the past six years, NASA spent $9 billion building a spaceship, rocket and other gear to help reach the second Bush's goal of returning humans to the lunar surface by 2020.

In February, Obama took steps toward killing Bush's moon program, which was beset by technical troubles and money woes. Two months later, in a speech at Cape Canaveral, Obama announced that the astronauts' next stop is an asteroid.

So far, the Obama administration has been quiet on the need for a major sum of money to accomplish his goal. And unlike Kennedy, who used Sputnik to promote the moon mission, Obama doesn't have a geopolitical imperative to justify the goal. Congress is resisting Obama's change of direction, which could delay investment in the program.

If Obama wants to bolster his cause, there's a rationale he could cite: An asteroid could wipe out as many human lives as a nuclear bomb. The dominant scientific theory posits that dinosaurs went extinct because of a direct hit from an asteroid as wide as San Francisco. A space rock big enough to kill thousands slams into Earth every 30,000 years, according to a January report from the National Research Council.

That scenario provided the rationale for asteroid missions in various Hollywood movies, including Armageddon. The 1998 film, which starred Bruce Willis, grossed more than $200 million at box office in the U.S. and more than $500 million worldwide. It went on to be a staple on cable television.

But if Americans think they have an understanding of the challenge of going to an asteroid, they're wrong. "I loved the movie," says Laurie Leshin, a top NASA official who is involved in the early planning stages of an asteroid mission, although "it was completely inaccurate."

Obama's plans for NASA have drawn many opponents, including Armstrong, but their criticism centers on the administration's reliance on private space companies to ferry astronauts to orbit. The goal of an asteroid hasn't been questioned as much.

That doesn't mean it would be easy. Although experts agree it could be done, here are four asteroid-size reasons why life won't imitate art.

•Astronauts can't hop on a space shuttle to get there.

In Armageddon, Willis' character and his crew blast off in two modified space shuttles to reach the killer asteroid. But NASA has long planned to retire the shuttles within the next year. And even if they weren't all headed to museums, they're useless as asteroid transporters.

The shuttles were built only to circle Earth, says Dan Adamo, a former mission control engineer who has studied human missions to asteroids. They don't carry the fuel to jump into deep space, and their heat shields aren't designed to withstand the extra-high temperatures of returning from a destination other than the Earth's orbit.

What's needed instead is a giant rocket on the scale of the monstrous Saturn V — taller than Big Ben — that propelled man to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Such a project is "a difficult challenge" that will cost in the multiple billions of dollars, says Ray Colladay, a member of NASA's advisory council.

NASA spent more than $52 billion in 2010 dollars to develop and build the Saturn V. Building a 21st-century version can be done but will require a sharp increase in the NASA budget later this decade, some space experts say.

"That's the issue everybody wants to duck right now, because it's uncomfortable to face that," Colladay says.

NASA would also need to build a spaceship where the astronauts can live and store all the oxygen, food and water needed for a long voyage. One option is to launch a small space pod carrying the crew, then, once safely in space, unleash an inflatable habitat, Leshin says.

NASA has little practice with such a blow-up spacecraft.

•The trip takes a long, long time.

Willis and company arrive at their target asteroid in a few days, if not a few hours. Admittedly, it's streaking toward Earth at the time. NASA would prefer to go to one before it gets to that stage.

Studies by Adamo, former astronaut Thomas Jones and others show that a round trip to a target asteroid would typically take five to six months. That assumes NASA shoots for one of the 40 or so asteroids that come closest to the Earth's path in the 2020s and 2030s and relies on spacecraft similar to those NASA had designed for Bush's moon mission.

Another problem during the journey — the crew would spend months "cooking" in space radiation, says NASA's Dave Korsmeyer, who has compiled a list of the most accessible asteroids. Shuttle passengers are somewhat screened from such radiation by Earth's magnetic field. Astronauts who leave Earth's orbit have no such protection.

Space radiation raises the risk of cancer and in extreme cases causes nausea and vomiting, says Walter Schimmerling, former program scientist of NASA's space radiation program. The astronauts might need to take drugs to prevent the ill effects of radiation.

Then there's the "prolonged isolation and confinement" that the crew will have to endure, says Jason Kring of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "This crew will be more on their own than any other crew in history."

If there's an emergency halfway into the trip, the astronauts would not be able to get home in a few days, as the Apollo 13 crew did. Instead it would take weeks, if not months.

•Humans can't walk or drive on an asteroid.

Once they land on the asteroid "the size of Texas," the heroes of Armageddon run over the spiky terrain, except when they're steering two tank-like vehicles. In reality, even the biggest asteroids have practically no gravity. So anything in contact with the surface could easily drift away.

"You don't land on an asteroid," says former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, a longtime advocate of asteroid studies. "You pull up to one and dock with it. ... And getting away from it, all you have to do is sneeze and you're gone." He envisions a spaceship hovering next to the asteroid and occasionally firing its thrusters to stay in place.

Astronauts wouldn't walk on an asteroid. They would drift next to it, moving themselves along with their gloved hands.

To keep from floating into space, crewmembers could anchor a network of safety ropes to the asteroid's surface, but "that has its own risks, because we don't understand how strong the surfaces of asteroids are and whether (they) would hold an astronaut in place," says Daniel Scheeres, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado.

The minimal gravity also means that any dust the astronauts stir up will hang in a suspended cloud for a long time. Because there's no weather on an asteroid, there's no erosion to smooth the dust particles.

"It's all going to stay pretty razor-sharp. ... It's not the most friendly stuff in the universe," Korsmeyer says. Keeping humans safe as they explore an asteroid "is going to be really tricky."

•Humanity doesn't hang in the balance.

In Armageddon, NASA must send a crew to an asteroid or life on Earth will be wiped out. "Even the bacteria," says the NASA chief, played by Billy Bob Thornton.

In the real world, that irrefutable motivation is absent. By 2025, Obama's target date, there will have been four presidential elections. Any could result in the mission's cancellation, just as Obama canceled Bush's moon plan. "The politics of this is far more challenging than the engineering," Colladay says.

The Obama administration has promised to increase NASA's budget by $6 billion over the next five years, but priorities may change. The Bush administration, for example, in 2007 cut long-term funding for its own moon program by $1.2 billion.

As the deficit looms larger, "especially as the November elections come along ... I would just not be surprised if enthusiasm for some big human spaceflight mission ends," says Marcia Smith, founder of spacepolicyonline.com.

As it is, the extra $6 billion Obama has promised NASA is inadequate for all the tasks the agency is supposed to tackle, Jones says. "The declaration that we're going to deep space is not matched by budget reality," he says.

Leshin, the NASA official, responds that the agency is embarking on a research program that will lead to new, less costly technologies. The agency will build new spacecraft over a period of many years, so the costs don't pile up all at once, she says.

"If we're making progress toward goals that are exciting and important to the American people, then it should be a sustainable program," Leshin says.

She is optimistic that relatively soon, NASA astronauts will speed toward a rendezvous with an asteroid, and that it will be better than in the movies.

"The first time we send humans beyond the cradle of the Earth-moon system, it's going to be extraordinary," Leshin says. "We will have gone further with humans in space than ever before. It will be an incredible first."

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Radar reveals extent of buried ancient Egyptian city

CAIRO (AP) — An Austrian archaeological team has used radar imaging to determine the extent of the ruins of the one time 3,500-year-old capital of Egypt's foreign occupiers, said the antiquities department Sunday.Egypt was ruled for a century from 1664-1569 B.C. by the Hyksos, a warrior people from Asia, possibly Semitic in origin, whose summer capital was in the northern Delta area.

Irene Mueller, the head of the Austrian team, said the main purpose of the project is to determine how far the underground city extends.

The radar imaging showed the outlines of streets, houses and temples underneath the green farm fields and modern town of Tel al-Dabaa.

Archaeology chief Zahi Hawass said in the statement that such noninvasive techniques are the best way to define the extent of the site. Egypt's Delta is densely populated and heavily farmed, making extensive excavation difficult, unlike in southern Egypt with its more famous desert tombs and temples.

The Austrian team of archaeologists has been working on the site since 1975.

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Scientists look for surviving Eskimo curlew birds

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska | Thu Jun 23, 2011 6:34pm EDT

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Federal scientists are on the lookout for the Eskimo curlew, as they work to determine if the elusive shorebird last seen two decades ago still exists.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it is seeking any information about the Eskimo curlew, a tundra-nesting bird once abundant over the skies of North and South America, which was nearly hunted into oblivion by the mid-20th century.

The agency, which made its announcement in the Federal Register on Wednesday, will review whether the bird should continue to be classified as endangered or formally designated as extinct.

The last sighting confirmed by the Fish and Wildlife Service was in Nebraska in 1987, said Bruce Woods, a spokesman for the agency.

An unconfirmed sighting -- of an adult and a chick -- was recorded in 1983 in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Woods said.

The Eskimo curlew population once numbered hundreds of thousands, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It is the smallest of four species of Western Hemisphere curlews, and is known for its long migration route from Arctic tundra breeding grounds to wintering lands in South America.

But the birds died off in drastic numbers due to overhunting, the loss of prairie habitat that was converted from grasslands to agriculture and the extinction of a type of grasshopper that made up much of their diet.

Most were gone by the beginning of the 20th century, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Despite its scarcity, the Eskimo curlew is well-known to bird lovers.

It was the subject of a classic short novel, "Last of the Curlews," that chronicled the life of a lonely Eskimo curlew waiting on the tundra for a mate and, finding none, flying solo on the long fall migration. The 1954 book was adapted into a children's animated movie in 1972.

The wildlife inquiry, to be conducted by the service's Alaska scientists, is the first such formal review of the Eskimo curlew under the Endangered Species Act, Woods said. The bird was listed as endangered prior to passage of the act. such reviews are typically completed within 12 months.

Brendan Cummings, senior attorney with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said he hopes the bird continues to be listed as endangered and not written off as extinct.

Continued listing will cost little and could help protect far-north habitat home to other birds and wildlife, he said.

"While I have my doubts, I think it would be premature to close the coffin lid on the species," Cummings said.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Greg McCune)

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Black hole shreds star, sparking gamma ray flash

An artist's impression of a growing supermassive black hole located in the early Universe is seen in this NASA handout illustration released on June 15, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/Chandra X-Ray Observatory/A.Hobart/Handout

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON | Mon Jun 20, 2011 7:31am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A monster black hole shredded a Sun-like star, producing a strangely long-lasting flash of gamma rays that probably won't be seen again in a million years, astronomers reported on Thursday.

That is definitely not the norm for gamma ray bursts, energetic blasts that typically flare up and end in a matter of seconds or milliseconds, often the sign of the death throes of a collapsing star.

"This is truly different from any explosive event we have seen before," said Joshua Bloom of the University of California-Berkeley, a co-author of research on the blast published in the journal Science.

Initially spied on March 28 by NASA's Swift spacecraft, which is trolling the universe for gamma ray bursts, this particular flash has lasted more than two months and is still going on, Bloom said in a telephone interview.

What makes this even stranger is that the black hole, located in the constellation Draco (The Dragon) about 4 billion light years, or 24 sextillion miles (38.62 sextillion km) -- 24 followed by 21 zeroes -- from Earth, was sitting quietly, not eating much, when a star about the mass of our Sun moved into range.

"We have this otherwise dormant black hole, not gobbling up an appreciable amount of mass, and along comes this star which just happens to be on some orbit which puts it close to the black hole," Bloom said.

FEEDING FRENZY

"This was a black hole which was otherwise quiescent and it sort of has an impulsive feeding frenzy on this one star," he said.

Bloom figures this may happen once per black hole per million years.

This kind of behavior is different from what active black holes generally do, which is to suck in everything their vast gravity can pull in, even light. Most galaxies, including our Milky Way, are thought to harbor black holes in their hearts.

Black holes are invisible, but astronomers can infer their existence because the material they pull in lights up before it gets sucked in.

In this case, though, the black hole feasted on one star -- about the same mass as our Sun -- with such relish that it tore the star apart before gulping it down. As it did so, the black hole emitted powerful gamma ray jets from its center as bits of the dying star were turned into energy.

The black hole's gravitational pull was so great that it exerted what's called a tidal disruption on the passing star.

Astronomers could use this observation to help them learn more about how black holes grow, Bloom said.

"We still don't understand how black holes and the universe grow," he said. "We think most black holes start off as being no more than the mass of our Sun ... How they go from 10 solar masses to a billion solar masses is critical."

There is a strong connection between the mass of black holes and the mass of the galaxies that host them, with black holes feeding on gas and stars that come near.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Tiny camera reveals inside of ancient Mayan tomb

The inside of a tomb of a Mayan ruler, that has been sealed for 1,500 years, is seen in southern Mexico, in this handout photograph released by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) June 23, 2011. A tiny remote-controlled camera was used to peer inside the tomb, revealing red frescoes, pottery and pieces of a funerary shroud made of jade and mother of pearl. The tomb was discovered in 1999 inside a pyramid among the ruins of the Mayan city of Palenque in the hills of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. But until now archeologists had not been able to access the vault believed to hold the remains of a Mayan ruler who lived between AD 431 and 550, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a release on Thursday.

Credit: Reuters/INAH/Handout

MEXICO CITY | Thu Jun 23, 2011 10:23pm EDT

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A tiny remote-controlled camera peered inside the tomb of a Mayan ruler that has been sealed for 1,500 years, revealing red frescoes, pottery and pieces of a funerary shroud made of jade and mother of pearl.

The tomb was discovered in 1999 inside a pyramid among the ruins of the Mayan city of Palenque in the hills of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

But until now archeologists had not been able to access the vault believed to hold the remains of a Mayan ruler who lived between AD 431 and 550, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a release on Thursday.

By dropping the small camera 16 feet deep through a small hole at the top of the pyramid, researchers were able to get the first view of the intact tomb.

"The characteristics of the funeral site show that the bones could belong to a sacred ruler from Palenque, probably one of the founders of a dynasty," said archeologist Martha Cuevas.

The tomb's walls are painted in a rich red with paintings of Mayan figures. The Mayans flourished between AD 250-900 and Palenque is one of the most important Mayan archeological sites.

(Reporting by Rachel Uranga, writing by Cyntia Barrera, editing by Anthony Boadle)

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Scientists develop new approach for cancer vaccine

By Kate Kelland

LONDON | Mon Jun 20, 2011 10:35am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have developed a technique that uses a library of DNA taken from organs in which tumors can form and harnesses the body's immune response to create a vaccine designed to treat cancer.

In a study published in the journal Nature Medicine on Sunday, researchers from Britain and the United States said that in early tests in mice with prostate cancer, their experimental vaccine was able to shrink tumors, suggesting it could be developed in the future into a treatment for cancer patients.

"Using the immune system to treat cancer is a very exciting area at the moment," Alan Melcher of Leeds University, who co-led the study, said in an interview. "What we've done is to develop a new approach which builds on a promising foundation."

He said the method could potentially be used against other forms of cancer such as skin or breast cancer, but added that the research was at an early stage and it would be several years before a vaccine could be developed for testing in humans.

Immunotherapy treatments -- medicines that enlist the help of the body's immune system to fight disease -- are a relatively new form of potential cancer treatment.

An immunotherapy drug called ipilimumab, or Yervoy, made by Bristol-Myers Squibb, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in March as the first drug to help advanced melanoma patients live longer.

And last April, the FDA approved Dendreon Corp's Provenge, a therapeutic vaccine designed to stimulate the immune system to attack prostate cancer.

CELLS

Unlike traditional vaccines, therapeutic vaccines are not designed to prevent disease, but to treat it. They contain genes to stimulate the immune system to produce proteins called antigens, which activate the immune system to kill cancer cells.

Several drugmakers are trying to develop cancer vaccines but the work is proving difficult because each tumor has specific proteins and identifying the right antigens is tricky. There are also concerns that if more genes are used to increase the chances of producing successful antigens, this might trigger an immune response that is too strong for the body to handle.

Working with scientists from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Melcher's team made a vaccine made from a virus which they genetically engineered to contain a "library" of DNA including multiple fragments of genes -- and therefore many possible antigens.

They found that this approach did not send the immune system into overdrive. Instead, the range of DNA meant the vaccine was able to target the tumor through many routes, they said.

Importantly, the DNA library was harvested from the same organ as the tumor, Melcher explained. This meant that the immune system "self-selected" the cancer antigens to respond to and did not react against other healthy parts of the body.

"The biggest challenge in immunology is developing antigens that can target the tumor without causing harm elsewhere," he said. "By using DNA from the same part of the body as the tumor ... we may be able to solve that problem."

Melcher said his team now planned to develop the technique further and have an experimental vaccine ready for testing in humans within a few years.

SOURCE: bit.ly/kXu1yI Nature Medicine, online June 19, 2011.

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Astronauts practice for NASA's last shuttle launch

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Jun 23, 2011 4:39pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Four U.S. astronauts in bright orange spacesuits climbed aboard their spaceship on Thursday to practice the launch of NASA's last space shuttle on a cargo run to the International Space Station.

The flight of Atlantis is targeted for liftoff on July 8 and will close out NASA's 30-year-old space shuttle program. The program is ending due to high operating costs and to free up funds to develop spacecraft that can travel beyond the space station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations that orbits 220 miles above Earth.

The shuttle will deliver a year's worth of food, clothing, science gear and equipment to the station in case commercial cargo carriers hired to replace the shuttle are delayed.

NASA limited the number of astronauts on the final shuttle flight to four, rather than the six or seven typically assigned. That will accommodate the smaller Russian Soyuz capsules that will serve as the Atlantis crew's lifeboats.

Since the 2003 Columbia accident, NASA has had a second shuttle in waiting, ready to mount a rescue mission should a crew find their ship too damaged by launch or orbital debris strikes to fly back through the atmosphere for landing.

Columbia was destroyed as it glided through the atmosphere for landing. Its heat shield was damaged by a piece of foam insulation that fell off the fuel tank and hit the shuttle during launch. Seven astronauts were killed when the shuttle broke apart over Texas and Louisiana.

There are no more shuttles available for rescue missions, so the last shuttle crew would rely instead on the three-seater Soyuz capsules to ferry them home, one at a time over a year.

Being short-handed means the crew had to revamp how they operate the shuttle and handle cargo transfers to the space station.

"The overall workload is pretty high," said Atlantis astronaut Sandra Magnus, who will oversee the crew's work on the station.

"We've had to do a lot more cross-training than normal for a shuttle crew," she added. "You end up being a little bit more of a jack-of-all-trades."

Speaking to reporters by the launch pad where Atlantis is being prepared for flight, shuttle commander Chris Ferguson said on Wednesday that he and his crewmates have had little time to dwell on the significance of the final shuttle mission.

"I hate to see the space shuttle go away, I really do, but I think that there are some events historically that have led to this and it's probably appropriate," Ferguson said.

NASA will rely on Russian crew transports while it supports private U.S. industrial efforts to develop space taxis, but it will be at least five years before those are ready to fly.

Cargo hauls are being turned over to Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences Corp, which are expected to start deliveries to the space station next year. Station freight services also are provided by the Russian, Japanese and European space agencies.

NASA will set a firm launch date for Atlantis on June 28. The flight is scheduled to last 12 days. If the shuttle flies as planned on July 8, landing day would fall on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Eric Walsh)

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