Studying people on Earth is one way to learn how long-duration space missions may affect the human body. The Human Test Subject Facility at the Johnson Space Center is looking for test subjects in a series of 'bed rest' studies that will be conducted over the next ten years. A head-down tilt bed is used, with extended periods in which the participants stay in bed with their body tilted slightly downward (a minus six degrees incline). The longest stretch involves 90 days lying in bed, hard to imagine, but those interested in volunteering for these compensated studies should have a look at the Human Test Subject Facility background page. ------- Both of Saturn's poles -- and not just the southern one -- seem to be home to a set of hot cyclonic vortices. That's a bit of a surprise given the earlier belief that sunlit conditions contributed to the south pole hot spot. But the north pole has been out of sunlight since 1995. Just what are these apparently long-lasting vortices? Leigh...

You knew as soon as you opened Carl Sagan's 1973 title The Cosmic Connection that you were leaving an Earth-centric view of the cosmos behind. The title page showed, spread across both it and the facing page, a spiral galaxy. The work of Sagan friend and collaborator Jon Lomberg, the illustration included reference to Type I, II and III civilizations, the Kardashev ranking that few laymen had heard about in those days, but which Sagan's work would illuminate for an increasingly interested public. The public would have been drawn first, though, to the cover of that first edition of The Cosmic Connection. A night landscape in black and white, a solitary tree outlined against the sky. But what a sky, filled with what looked like a galaxy -- billions and billions of stars -- rising. That image encapsulated so much of the book's message. It juxtaposed our familiar terrain against something so vast, so filled with the potential other stars suggest, that you were forced to speculate on our...

Universe Today offers the latest Carnival of Space, which will have exoplanet watchers checking Steinn Sigurðsson's Dynamics of Cats site for updates on CoRoT. Almost a year into its mission, the observatory has completed its first 150-day continuous examination of the same area of sky, and the results are, so rumor has it, quite interesting. I see that CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales) is now saying that 'CoRoT will instigate a breakthrough in both of the fields of science that it applies to,' making the upcoming publication of CoRoT papers eagerly to be awaited. And you have to love this statement: ""...CoRoT is discovering exo-planets at a rate only set by the available resources to follow up the detections."

Ed Minchau offers up the latest Carnival of Space at his Robot Guy site. Centauri Dreams readers will want to look at Amanda Bauer's presentation of an image taken by the Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft. It's actually a composite showing Jupiter and a startlingly nearby Io. We've all seen Jupiter images, of course (thank you Voyager, Galileo, et al.), but take a look at this one to note the plume of the erupting Tvashtar volcano, a stunning reminder of how active this tortured little world continues to be. Space Files has a nice overview of solar sail technologies beginning with Lou Friedman's plans to develop Cosmos-2, a replacement for the lamented sail that perished in its launch attempt back in 2005. We still need to shake out this intriguing concept in space, and with NASA funding for sails in limbo, the private sector is the place to turn. Space Files gets into Japan's recent experiments (useful as we learn how to deploy various sail configurations) and ESA's GeoSail study....

By Larry Klaes The Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the States is always gloomy as people readjust to work after the long weekend. So let's do something light-hearted for today with a look at what evolution can produce in the hands of Japanese film directors. Larry Klaes considers Mothra, a tale of a small creature grown large, and the demands its unexpected size would make if such things existed in the real world. Larry has been to a 'science cabaret' inspired by the Café Scientifique movement, which brings science to the public in informal settings. What better format to convert cinematic fantasy into science? We need to get interstellar ideas into such venues. When looking for lessons in science, one might be forgiven for not considering the Japanese monster films of the latter half of the Twentieth Century as a prime source for such material. Yet a lesson in science is exactly what was extracted from one particular member of that genre, courtesy of entomologist...

Rosetta makes its reappearance at just the right time for me. The spacecraft, making its second Earth swing-by on November 13, will use its gravity assists past Earth and Mars to reach Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, deploying a lander onto the nucleus and spending two years orbiting the comet. The close approach produced the memorable image below. I thought I was too under the weather today to post anything, but Rosetta's composite shot of Earth by night offers a short, memorable subject. Look at those city lights! Image: This is a composite of four images combined to show the illuminated crescent of Earth and the cities of the northern hemisphere. The images were acquired with the OSIRIS Wide Angle Camera during Rosetta's second Earth swing-by on Nov. 13. This image showing islands of light created by human habitation was taken with the OSIRIS WAC at 19:45 CET, about 2 hours before the closest approach of the spacecraft to Earth. At the time, Rosetta was about 80,000 km...

About the only thing that went wrong on my Washington DC trip (noted earlier here) was having to fight a persistent head cold and trying to avoid shaking hands with our eminent panelists so as not to contaminate them (I want these guys healthy, and working!). But the fates smiled Wednesday morning when I moderated "The Future of the Vision for Space Exploration," my voice back from what had been near-laryngitis the evening before, and we had a fascinating discussion in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill talking about where space exploration is going and what policy decisions loom large at the moment. Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society, presented a look at current projects to explore the Solar System, many of which are somewhat off our radar, including Indian lunar missions like Chandrayaan-1 and the Chinese lunar orbiter Chang'e I (images expected by the end of this month). Japan's space activities beyond the ongoing Hayabusa asteroid return...

By Larry Klaes Tau Zero journalist Larry Klaes looks at Jon Lomberg's stunning Galaxy Garden in Hawaii. Lomberg told Larry that working on the garden had made him appreciate on a primal level just how many objects there are in even a 'small' section of the Milky Way. So there's one answer to the Fermi Paradox: If extraterrestrial civilizations are out there, maybe they're simply too busy exploring to have gotten around to us! There is a galaxy on Hawaii. Not an actual galaxy, of course, as a typical island of stars contains many billions of suns and spans hundreds of thousands of light years. The galaxy residing on the largest of that particular chain of Pacific islands is a 100-foot wide living representation of the vast stellar realm our planet and humanity dwells in, the Milky Way. Called the Galaxy Garden, the idea for this unique project began about eight years ago in the mind of artist Jon Lomberg, who worked with Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan on his Cosmos PBS...

When we think interstellar, the possibility of a sudden breakthrough offering quick travel -- Epsilon Eridani in an afternoon -- often dominates the debate. But the second path to the stars is the more gradual migration approach that Gregory Matloff, Les Johnson and the artist C Bangs talk about in their Living Off the Land in Space (New York: Copernicus, 2007). As discussed in this article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the trio made their case at NYC College of Technology/CUNY on Thursday evening, leading off not with a starship but a prairie schooner. The point is trenchant: How can we leverage and extend existing technologies to get us into deep space without breakthroughs in physics? "In going into space, we need to think differently. All of these technologies we describe in our book could be done today," says Johnson (NASA MSFC), who manages the agency's Space Science Programs and Projects Office. Technologies such as solar sails, their great historical precedent being the...

Emily Lakdawalla is hosting the 28th Carnival of Space at her Planetary Society weblog, a compilation including plenty of coverage on Comet Holmes, the unusually active object that, New Scientist opines, may have suffered a collision with an asteroid. Intriguing speculation, though Centauri Dreams readers will probably find Music of the Spheres' entry on 55 Cancri the most interstellar-minded. Bruce looks at the similarities between that system's new planet and Allen Steele's Coyote. From the novel of the same name, it's a moon orbiting a giant planet in its star's habitable zone, a scenario tantalizingly similar to the recent discovery.

More notes on the 'wandering planet' scenario advanced by John Debes (Carnegie Institution of Washington) and Steinn Sigurðsson (Penn State), which suggests that planets ejected from their stars as their solar systems formed could conceivably keep enough internal heat to maintain an atmosphere and sustain a liquid ocean under ice. Debes' simulations show that a planet with a large moon could survive the ejection process. Noting that between four and five percent of the simulations the duo ran on an Earth-mass planet with Luna-like companion resulted in the 'Earth-Moon system surviving, Debes had this to say in an article in Sky & Telescope: "Anytime something happens in astronomy a few percent of the time, it is interesting to us because on the grand scale of things, it means it's happening a lot and people should probably know about it." Interesting indeed, because a large moon means tidal energies between moon and planet that could cause the interior of the planet to warm. Debes...

South Dakota's Homestake Gold Mine, famed for the work Ray Davis did on solar electron-neutrinos, may point toward clues in another search, the quest for dark matter. Experiments called LUX and DEAP/CLEAN are aimed at measuring the recoil of dark matter particles off ultra-pure, non-radioactive gases like purified argon and xenon. Robert McTaggart (South Dakota State University) gives the needed background: "The visible matter that we all know and love only accounts for 4 percent of the total mass in the entire Universe. Furthermore, the gravitational attraction of a spherical halo of dark matter throughout galaxies can explain why they do not fly apart given their measured rotational speeds. Physicists expect the remaining 96 percent to be made of something other than protons, neutrons, electrons, or neutrinos. This 'dark matter' should interact with normal matter via gravity and very rarely via a collision." Critical to the work is adequate shielding, a more complicated process...

Sam Wise offers the latest Carnival of Space (#25) on his Sorting Out Science blog, which if you haven't seen (I hadn't) you must. We're obviously dealing with a voracious reader, for what we have here is a collection of noteworthy topics -- the Allen Telescope Array, asteroid deflection and Cassini findings are particularly germane to Centauri Dreams readers -- that Sam has researched over a range of weblogs, giving us perspectives on all these matters. All done with a wit and intelligence that prompts me to add Sorting Out Science to our list of links.

A note from James Benford, soon to be followed by e-mail from other interstellar advocates, tells me of the death of Robert Bussard. The creator of the Bussard ramjet concept, Bussard (1928-2007) died of cancer in Santa Fe just a few days ago. Benford, who knew Bussard for forty years, recalls his open attitudes and deep technical insight, adding "He was still sharp as a pin into old age." We should all be so lucky. Recently we've seen a lot of discussion about Bussard's fusion ideas, but it's the ramjet that I return to as I think about him. If you collect classic papers, as I do, here's one for you: Bussard's "Galactic Matter and Interstellar Spaceflight" in Acta Astronautica 6 (1960), pp. 179-94. Imagine a scoop created by a magnetic field that sucks in interstellar hydrogen ionized by a forward-firing laser. The result is fed into a fusion reactor. Get the vehicle up to about six percent of light speed and you could light that engine, with presumably amazing results. At least,...

What better way to represent the gorgeous clouds of the Orion Nebula than with hibiscus flowers? Or how about our Sun as a small jewel on the speckled leaf of a gold-dust croton plant? If this sounds surreal, it is, but it's also a description of part of the Galaxy Garden, a 100-foot in diameter map of the galaxy on the grounds of the Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary on Hawaii's Big Island. Astronomy artist Jon Lomberg used galactic maps from Leo Blitz (UC Berkeley) to design the project, a leafy, immersive experience accurate enough to satisfy the most demanding. A collaborator of Carl Sagan, illustrator of most of his books and articles, and designer of the cover for the Voyager Interstellar Record, Jon's accuracy shows through in every botanical detail. Image: Dracaena trees represent globular star clusters, spherical groups of "only" hundreds of thousands of stars, making them too small to be called galaxies. Most of the clusters have orbits that carry them far above and far below...

A Carnival of Space essential, from the 22nd iteration of the weekly roundup, is Universe Today's look at color in astrophotography. Is space really the gorgeous place suggested by many images from both terrestrial and space-based telescopes? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A revealing quote on Hubble imagery from Zolt Levay (Space Telescope Science Institute): "For one thing [color] is somewhat meaningless in the case of most of the images, since we generally couldn't see these objects anyway because they are so faint, and our eyes react differently to colors of very faint light." How images passed through various filters are produced is a fascinating topic that brings a needed reality adjustment after viewing some spectacular scenes. The Carnival always offers good material, but Universe Today's piece makes for prime late week reading.

Franklin Chang-Diaz, astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra Rocket Company, intends to test the VX-200 VASIMIR prototype in January. VASIMIR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) offers much greater fuel efficiency than conventional chemical rockets, working with hot plasma heated by radio waves and controlled by a magnetic field. Technology Review talks to Chang-Diaz about the prototype and the flight version to follow in this interview. And here's where Chang-Diaz see us going in the long-term: I think lots of people are going to be moving into space. I think we will be populating the moon, building enclaves of research and even money-making ventures there. Just last month, Ad Astra signed an agreement with Excalibur Exploration Ltd., a British company, to mine asteroids [when the time is right]. I believe there will be a huge demand for resources, particularly water, from asteroids and comets, because taking water from the earth is going to be very expensive. We're probably...

Apropos of our recent speculations about planets without stars, this short podcast from Earth & Sky discusses dark planets within our galaxy able to sustain life, at least for a while. The scenario, developed by John Debes (Carnegie Institution) and Steinn Sigurðsson (Pennsylvania State): A planet with a large moon passes near a giant world like Jupiter. The team's simulations show the Earth-moon system ejected into interstellar space, with the possibility of a thick atmosphere and large tidal forces keeping the place warm for more than a hundred million years. ------- ESA's latest backgrounder on the Don Quijote candidate mission lays out a plan to rendezvous with an asteroid and orbit it, monitoring its shape, mass and gravitational field. A second spacecraft would then be sent to impact the asteroid at about 10 km/s, while the first vehicle monitors the result, looking for changes in the asteroid's trajectory. Mission planners have considered oft-mentioned Apophis as one of...