DDMA Headline Animator

Monday, October 17, 2011

NASA preparing for final shuttle launch

Wed Jul 6, 2011

NASA is getting ready for the final flight of the US shuttle program as the Atlantis orbiter is being prepared to pay its last visit to the International Space Station.

Despite existing concerns about the weather, shuttle Atlantis is set to launch at 11:26 a.m. EDT on Friday, carrying cargo and astronauts, Reuters reported.

Meteorologists have predicted a cloudy sky in central Florida on Thursday and thunderstorms right around Friday's launch time.

"I wish I had a better weather briefing for you," Air Force meteorologist Kathy Winters told reporters on Tuesday, adding that the chance of an on-time liftoff was 40 percent.

The Atlantis launch will be the final in the 30-year-old US space shuttle program and the last one from the Kennedy Space Center for a while.

"The team gets into the mode of 'this is launch countdown' and that's really the focus that everybody has," said NASA official Jeremy Graeber. "To do it one more time is a great feeling."

NASA is remodeling one of the shuttle's two launch pads for commercial purposes, hoping to use the second launch pad for a heavy-lift rocket to send astronauts and cargo to destinations beyond the space station's 220-mile-high orbit.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/187797.html.

Iran to launch bio-capsule into space

Fri Jul 8, 2011

The head of Iran's Space Agency (ISA) says the country is set for the upcoming launch into space of a bio-capsule and two more satellites by the end of the Iranian calendar year (ending March 20).

The Iranian bio-capsule will take a live creature into orbit by early September, said ISA chief Hamid Fazeli on Thursday, quoted by the IRIB.

He also said that 'Fajr' (Dawn) satellite will blast into space by summer's end and finally the student-made 'Navid Elm-o-Sanat' (Hope for Science and Technology) will be launched into orbit as early as February.

In March, Iran successfully launched Kavoshgar 4 rocket, capable of sending satellites and carrying live creatures into space.

Fazeli hailed the surge in Iran's space activities, adding that such breakthroughs have only been made possible by local expertise and endeavors.

As part of a plan to develop its space program, Iran successfully launched a satellite, dubbed Rassad (Observation), into the earth's orbit on June 15.

The Rassad satellite is the country's first space-based imaging device.

Its mission is to take photos of the earth's surface and relay them to the earth-based stations together with telemetric information.

Iran launched its first domestically-built data-processing satellite, the Omid (Hope), into orbit in 2009.

Iran is one of the 24 founding members of the United Nations' Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which was set up in 1959.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/188133.html.

Lebanon govt. wins confidence vote

Thu Jul 7, 2011

Lebanese lawmakers have given their vote of confidence to the newly-appointed government of Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

Thursday -- the third and final day of a related parliamentary discussion -- saw 68 out of 128 MPs endorsing the policy statement adopted by Mikati's government.

Mikati's government, in which the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah and its Muslim and Christian allies have the majority of the seats, was formed in June.

The parliament's confidence vote enables the government to carry out its mandate.

Ahead of the voting process, the prime minister addressed the lawmakers, vowing to preserve stability and security in Lebanon and asserting that his government is committed to national unity.

A sticking point in the preceding talks was the government's determined stance on a United States-backed UN court, which recently ruled on the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Premier Rafiq Hariri.

The pro-Western Future Television owned by the Future Movement of the victim's son Sa'ad Hariri has said the court's indictment has named four Hezbollah members.

The Hezbollah movement and its allies view the tribunal as a joint US-Israeli plot.

Mikati has also insisted that “indictments, regardless of their source, are not conclusive and that any accusations need solid evidence that cannot be doubted.”

The March 14 parliamentary coalition also led by Hariri has, however, argued that the government's policy statement lacks a commitment to the court.

The alliance had vowed to vote against the government and walked out of the session en masse just before the start of Thursday's voting process.

Lebanon's Maronite Church had urged the parliamentarians to vote for the government.

It had said that the indictment came at a time when the cabinet was working to finalize a draft of its policy statement, and that it sought to sow discord among the Lebanese political ranks.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/188019.html.

Hezbollah: STL covers up real criminal

Tue Jul 5, 2011

Hezbollah has accused a US-backed tribunal probing the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri of refusing to pursue the real criminal.

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Tuesday that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is covering up Israel as the real killer of Rafiq Hariri, a Press TV correspondent reported.

"The greatest injustice against former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was to say that Israel would never assassinate Hariri," Nasrallah said.

The Hezbollah leader made the remarks in a speech on the occasion of “The wounded resistance day.”

Nasrallah questioned the credibility of Daniel Bellemare, the prosecutor general of the STL, accusing some investigators, legal experts and key advisers to Bellemare of having connections with the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency.

He criticized Bellemare for ignoring strong Hezbollah documents proving Israel's involvement in Hariri's assassination, saying Bellemare did not consider any of the presented evidence as he was not able to refute any of them.

Nasrallah also accused the Western-backed March 14 coalition of promoting injustice in the country by not considering Israel as a suspect in the Hariri assassination.

Naim Qassem, deputy leader of Hezbollah, said US-Israel joint efforts to weaken the resistance through the tribunal will fail.

"The resistance (Hezbollah), which has left a mark on history and the present, will not be hindered by the Israeli-American project, the so-called tribunal, which is now behind us, and there is no going back," Qassem said.

The STL last week handed down indictments against four members of Hezbollah, accusing them of playing a role in the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri.

Nasrallah has rejected the allegations, describing them as injustice.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/187763.html.

Algerian teachers mount protest

2011-07-07

Algerian contractual and temporary teachers staged a protest action in Algiers on Wednesday (July 6th), El Watan reported. The educators called for permanent jobs when the new school year begins in September.

Source: Magharebia.
Link: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/newsbriefs/general/2011/07/07/newsbrief-03.

Indonesia: thousands of workers at Freeport mine enter 4th day of strikes

JAKARTA, INDONESIA (BNO NEWS) — Around 8,000 workers at a gold and copper mine in the eastern region of Indonesia entered their fourth day of strikes, local media reported Thursday.

Since Monday, workers at Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc’s Grasberg Mine, which is located in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, began a 7-day strike, demanding their salaries be doubled from $1.5 to $3 an hour, the Jakarta Globe reported.

Freeport Indonesia’s Labor Union chief Virgo Solossa said that out of Freeport’s eight companies, its Indonesian unit is the biggest contributor; however, workers around the world are paid between $15 and $30, which is around ten times more than those in Grasberg Mine. On Monday morning, thousands of workers marched from Timika city to Kuala Kencana, the Freeport town complex, and are planning to continue their strike over the weekend.

Meanwhile, Freeport’s regional spokesman, Ramdani Sirait, who is based in Jakarta, said the company believes the workers’ strike has no legitimate justification, making it unlawful because “it is not due to failed negotiation nor the company’s unwillingness to negotiate.”

Grasberg Mine, the world’s largest gold mine and the third largest copper mine, employs some 19,500 people. In 2006, it produced 610,800 tons of copper; 58,474,392 grams of gold; and 174,458,971 grams of silver.

The mine has been linked to regional friction, as locals argue that only a small fraction of the mine’s revenue goes to the workers and regional development. Furthermore, friction has also been linked to the mine’s environmental impact, as it is located in what used to be a small equatorial mountain glacier on the high point of Puncak Jaya, Indonesia’s highest mountain. In addition, Papua and West Papua have had an insurgency movement for the past decades, fighting for independence, and struggling to control its rich natural resources.

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

Source: WireUpdate.
Link: http://wireupdate.com/wires/18662/indonesia-thousands-of-workers-at-freeport-mine-enter-4th-day-of-strikes/.

Two Possible Sites for Next Mars Rover

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 08, 2011

NASA's next Mars rover will land either beside the site of a former river delta or beside a mountain of stacked layers. These enticing locations are the two finalists as the Mars Science Laboratory landing sites: Eberswalde crater and Gale crater.

Selection of one of those sites is anticipated this month. The mission's spacecraft, including the rover named Curiosity, is in preparation for launch in the period Nov. 25 to Dec. 18, 2011.

As a clay-bearing site where a river once flowed into a lake, Eberswalde crater offers a chance to use knowledge that oil industry geologists have accumulated about where in a delta to look for any concentrations of carbon chemistry, a crucial ingredient for life.

At the other option, the mountain inside Gale crater could provide a route for the rover to study a transition from environments that produced clay deposits near the mountain's base to later environments that produced sulfate deposits partway up the slope.

The spacecraft will arrive at Mars in August 2012. Researchers will use the rover's 10 science instruments during the following two years to investigate whether the landing area has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Two_Possible_Sites_for_Next_Mars_Rover_999.html.

Atlantis to carry next-generation vaccine candidate on last space voyage

by Richard Harth - Science Writer: The Biodesign Institute
Tucson AZ (SPX) Jul 08, 2011

On July 8, at approximately 11:26 a.m. EDT, the space shuttle Atlantis will streak skyward from the Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A, for one last mission. While the STS-135 flight marks the end of the space shuttle's glory days, its final trip may open a new era of research into infectious diseases, thanks to space bound experiments conducted by Dr's. Cheryl Nickerson, and Roy Curtiss III, along with their colleagues at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute.

Nickerson, a microbiologist and authority on infectious pathogens, has been using spaceflight or spaceflight analogues since 1998 as an exploratory platform for investigating the processes of infection. Her provocative approach to microbial research has already paid rich dividends.

In earlier experimental missions, Nickerson's team demonstrated that conditions of microgravity present aboard the space shuttle have the potential to increase the disease-causing capacity or virulence of microbes like Salmonella-a major causative agent of food-borne illness.

Further, her research demonstrated that spaceflight globally altered gene expression in Salmonella and other pathogens in critical ways that were not observed during culture on Earth, and were governed by a master switch regulating this response.

"Our earlier work showed the potential for spaceflight to provide novel insight into the mechanisms of microbial virulence that may lead to innovations in infectious disease control here on Earth," she said.

Curtiss, director of the Biodesign Institute's Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, has engineered an experimental vaccine strain, which will fly aboard Atlantis on its journey to the International Space Station Laboratory. By removing the disease-causing components of Salmonella and incorporating a key protective antigen from Streptococcus pneumoniae, Curtiss has produced a powerful oral vaccine against pneumonia, that has shown promise in phase 1 human clinical trials. The ability of spaceflight to enhance the efficacy of this recombinant attenuated Salmonella vaccine, or RASV, will be the focus of the Atlantis mission.

Current experiments aboard STS-135 will build on decades of earlier research by Nickerson and Curtiss, in attempts to improve the effectiveness of RASVs. These vaccines exploit Salmonella's renowned infectious capacity in order to produce a strong, system-wide immune response.

In addition to the defensive response to Salmonella, the vaccine recipient also marshals an immune response to secondary disease antigens studded on the pathogen's surface membrane-in this case, antigens to pneumococcus, the causative agent of pneumonia.

"Many breakthroughs in life sciences research and translational advancements to the healthcare setting, have been achieved through studying the response of biological systems to extreme environments," Nickerson says.

The extreme environment in the present study is the reduced gravity present during spaceflight, which alters a fundamental physical property encountered by living cells, known as fluid shear.

Fluid shear refers to the physical forces exerted on cells by the extracellular liquids surrounding them. Previous experiments by Nickerson aboard the space shuttles Endeavor and Atlantis showed that changes in fluid shear due to microgravity induced important cellular responses in pathogens, including unique alterations in gene expression and virulence.

Nickerson notes that the responses of pathogenic cells to microgravity may be closely correlated with their behavior during infection here on earth, where the effects of low fluid shear environments present in the body are believed to contribute to virulence.

Such pathogen responses, however, may often evade detection in conventional in vitro experiments on earth, where gravity may be masking this effect. In the current study, this approach is being applied to Salmonella vaccines.

Because RASVs can be produced against a wide variety of human and animal pathogens, the outcome of this research could influence the development of vaccines against many other diseases in addition to pneumonia

Unlike existing anti-pneumococcal vaccines, Curtiss' RASV may be given orally and acts to stimulate mucosal, humoral and cellular immunity, offering enhanced protection. Diseases due to Streptococcus pneumoniae include community-acquired pneumonia, otitis media, meningitis, and bacteremia, and are responsible for some 10 million fatalities per year.

Pneumonia poses a particular threat to newborns and the elderly, who may fail to mount an effective immune response after receiving current anti-pneumococcal vaccines.

The current experiments planned for Atlantis' final mission represent an interesting twist in Nickerson's research into microbial virulence and modes of infection, which she has pursued with longtime collaborator Mark Ott, a senior microbiologist at the Johnson Space Center and a Co-Investigator on the RASV flight experiment.

Again, the pathogen of choice is Salmonella, but here, the invader has been genetically re-engineered to protect from infectious disease, rather than to cause it. The outcome of this research has the potential for better protecting astronauts, who are keenly vulnerable to infection during spaceflight, as well as to help engineer better therapeutics for infectious diseases on earth.

Specially designed growth chambers containing the vaccine strain will travel with Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station. During spaceflight, crewmembers will activate the samples, while simultaneously, an earthbound sample will be grown under otherwise identical conditions.

The spaceflight cultured RASV strain, upon its return, will be evaluated against the control sample and analyzed for its ability to protect against pneumococcal infection.

Nickerson and Curtiss hope that results from the RASV spaceflight study will offer important clues for producing a more protective anti-pneumococcal immune response, while limiting undesired side effects.

Although the space shuttle program now enters retirement, space-based research into infectious diseases and vaccinology will continue, thanks to the newly signed Space Act Agreement between the National Laboratory Office and the Biodesign Institute, which will grant routine access to the ISS for continuing research. Nickerson is enthusiastic about spaceflight research and the significant clinical potential for the current study:

"It is incredibly exciting to me that we have the opportunity to utilize spaceflight as a unique research and development platform for novel applications with potential to help fight a globally devastating disease."

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Atlantis_to_carry_next_generation_vaccine_candidate_on_last_space_voyage_999.html.

US lawmakers vote to kill Hubble successor

Washington (AFP) July 7, 2011

In a fresh blow to NASA's post-shuttle aspirations, key US lawmakers voted Thursday to kill off funding for the successor to the vastly successful space-gazing Hubble telescope.

The US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science approved by voice vote a yearly spending bill that includes no money for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The move -- spurred on by belt-tightening in cash-strapped Washington -- still requires the full committee's approval, the full House's approval, the Senate's approval, and ultimately President Barack Obama's signature.

But the relatively mild dissents in the committee, which said in a terse statement this week that the project "is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management," suggests the JWST faces an uphill fight to survive.

The vote struck a blow at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's goals with the space shuttle program about to end after 30 years, and Obama's decision to axe a new plan to return astronauts to the moon.

NASA plans to lay out a budget that "will allow us to launch the Webb telescope in this decade," deputy administrator Lori Garver told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"We will be working with Congress to assure them we can manage this program and develop the most amazing space telescope," she said, calling the JWST "a perfect example of reviewing the unknown and reaching for new heights."

In February, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin told lawmakers the JWST had careened billions of dollars over budget.

Initial estimates put the cost of the telescope, designed to help the hunt for knowledge about early galaxies in the universe, at $1.6 billion, but now the total price tag has ballooned to $6.5 billion, he said.

NASA has repeatedly pushed back the telescope's launch date, now set for 2018 at the earliest.

The project, initially named the Next Generation Space Telescope, is designed to look deeper into space than the Hubble Telescope, and would also venture farther than the Earth-orbiting Hubble, launched in 1990.

Some Democrats on the panel voted against the bill, and lawmakers often wait until the full committee takes up legislation to offer amendments to protect cherished projects.

The vote came one day after Obama, in an unprecedented question and answer session with Twitter users, said NASA needs new technology breakthroughs to revitalize its mission to explore the universe.

"We are still a leader in space exploration, but, frankly, I have been pushing NASA to revamp its vision," Obama said, as the shuttle Atlantis geared up for its final mission.

Obama, who axed NASA's Constellation program that would have sent astronauts back to the moon, said the United States should move beyond the space travel models it used in the Cold War-era race to the moon in the 1960s.

JWST is an international collaboration grouping NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/US_lawmakers_vote_to_kill_Hubble_successor_999.html.