We're safe! Incredible footage shows doomed NASA satellite starting its descent to Earth but experts say it will NOT hit U.S.

Nasa has said a six-ton satellite doomed to fall to Earth this week will not hit the U.S. as incredible video was captured showing the start of the spacecraft's descent.

Scientists today said that the Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS) will make its final fiery plunge on Friday afternoon when it is not due to be passing over North America.

Americans had been warned that the 20-year-old bus sized satellite could cause injuries and damage to property as it falls through the atmosphere and drops about two dozen pieces of debris on to Earth weighting up to 300lbs.

NASA set to fund space taxi systems

CAPE CANAVERAL — NASA next year will fund the development of at least two space taxi systems that could return astronauts to orbit aboard U.S. vehicles by late 2016.

The agency this week released draft terms of a contract that aims to complete designs of those systems by 2014, after which one or more would be chosen for a follow-up phase that builds and tests vehicles.

The draft request for proposals proves the agency's commitment "to outsource our space station transportation so NASA can focus its energy and resources on deep space exploration," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.

Potential providers of the outsourced crew flights, which would launch from the Space Coast, have a month to review and comment on the draft before a final version is released late this year.

A SpaceX spokesman said the company was still reviewing the draft language.

SpaceX is one of the four companies that shared nearly $270 million in NASA funding this year to advance designs of spacecraft able to fly people to and from the International Space Station.

Blue Origin, The Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp. Space Systems were the others.

The next contract phase intends to develop integrated transportation
systems, combining spacecraft with launch vehicles, escape systems and all the ground systems necessary to launch at least four astronauts to the station.

Expected to be awarded next summer, the next contract phase could be worth $1.6 billion between 2012 and 2014, NASA says.

But actual funding could be significantly lower than the total proposed in the Obama administration's 2012 budget.

Some companies and commercial space advocates fear limited funding and NASA's new contracting strategy could slow or derail the development program.

"From a technical standpoint (the companies) are proceeding well, but there's a concern about both the future funding and how the contracting is going to be structured in this next phase," said Jeff Foust, an industry analyst with Futron Corp.

NASA last week announced it would abandon the use of more simple Space Act Agreements in favor of federal contracts that some companies consider more costly and bureaucratic.

Neptune is *really* far away

Mike Brown is an astronomer, specifically one who studies Kuiper Belt Objects, those giant frozen iceballs that haunt the solar system out past Neptune.

In fact, Neptune’s biggest moon Triton has a lot of characteristics similar KBOs — it may be one captured by Neptune — so observing it gives an interesting opportunity for a compare-and-contrast study. So this past weekend Mike was using the Keck telescope in Hawaii to observe Triton along with its (adoptive?) parent planet, and took this fantastic image of the pair:

This false-color image shows the two worlds in the infrared, specifically at a wavelength of about 1.5 microns, twice what the human eye can see. Methane strongly absorbs this color of light, so where Neptune (in the upper left) looks dark you’re seeing lots of methane clouds, and where it’s bright there are clouds higher up, above the methane. Triton is in the lower right, and is bright because it’s covered in ice which is highly reflective.

Now this is all very pretty and interesting and sciencey, but if you know me at all you know there’s more to this story.

Mike tweeted about the image, and I oohed and ahhhed at it, of course. But then he tweeted again, saying he was also observing Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it was too bright to get good images using the monster 10-meter Keck telescope. It "saturated the detector" which is astronomer-speak for "overexposed".

Small distant galaxies host supermassive black holes

Using the Hubble Space Telescope to probe the distant universe, astronomers have found supermassive black holes growing in surprisingly small galaxies. The findings suggest that central black holes formed at an early stage in galaxy evolution.

"It's kind of a chicken or egg problem: Which came first, the supermassive black hole or the massive galaxy? This study shows that even low-mass galaxies have supermassive black holes," said Jonathan Trump, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Trump is first author of the study, which has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and is currently available online.

All massive galaxies host a central supermassive black hole, which may shine brightly as an active galactic nucleus if the black hole is pulling in nearby gas clouds. In the local universe, however, active black holes are rarely seen in small "dwarf" galaxies. The galaxies studied by Trump and his coauthors are about 10 billion light-years away, giving astronomers a view of galaxies as they appeared when the universe was less than a quarter of its current age.

"When we look 10 billion years ago, we're looking at the teenage years of the universe. So these are very small, young galaxies," Trump said.

The study, part of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), used a powerful new instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The "slitless grism" on Hubble's WFC3 infrared camera provided detailed information about different wavelengths of light coming from the galaxies. Spectroscopy allows researchers to spread out the light from an object into its component colors or wavelengths. With Hubble's high spatial resolution, the researchers were able to get separate spectra from the center and the outer part of each galaxy. This enabled them to identify the tell-tale emissions from a central black hole.

"This is the first study that is capable of probing for the existence of small, low-luminosity black holes back in time," said coauthor Sandra Faber, University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and CANDELS principal investigator. "Up to now, observations of distant galaxies have consistently reinforced the local findings--distant black holes actively accreting in big galaxies only. We now have a big puzzle: What happened to these dwarf galaxies?"

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars

The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.

Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.

"This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

A research team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet.

Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star.

Memorial Image Taken on Mars on September 11, 2011

PASADENA, Calif. -- A view of a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers was taken on Mars yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

The memorial, made from aluminum recovered from the site of the twin towers in weeks following the attacks, serves as a cable guard on a tool on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and bears an image of the American flag.

The view combining exposures from two cameras on the rover is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/multimedia/pia14750.html .

The memorial is on the rover's rock abrasion tool, which was being made in September 2001 by workers at Honeybee Robotics in lower Manhattan, less than a mile from the World Trade Center.

Opportunity's panoramic camera and navigation camera photographed the tool on Sept. 11, 2011, during the 2,713th Martian day of the rover's work on Mars. Opportunity completed its three-month prime mission on Mars in April 2004 and has worked for more than seven years since then in bonus extended missions.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Additional information about Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit, is online at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/rovers

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Shirley Williams plunges NHS reforms into fresh turmoil

The future of the government's health reforms has been plunged into fresh doubt as the Liberal Democrat peer Shirley Williams raises new concerns, and secret emails reveal plans to hand over the running of up to 20 hospitals to overseas companies. The revelations come as MPs prepare to return to Westminster on Tuesday for what promises to be a crucial stage of the flagship health and social care bill.

Baroness Williams, one of the original leaders of a Lib Dem rebellion against health secretary Andrew Lansley's plans – who appeared to have been pacified after changes were made over the summer – said she had new doubts, having re-examined the proposals. "Despite the great efforts made by Nick Clegg and Paul Burstow [the Lib Dem health minister], I still have huge concerns about the bill. The battle is far from over," she said.

Writing in Sunday's Observer, Williams raises a series of issues that she says must be addressed. Chief among them is a legal doubt as to whether the secretary of state will any longer be bound to deliver "a comprehensive health service for the people of England, free at the point of need".

Some critics of Lansley believe the Tories are bent on a mission to privatise the NHS, gradually handing it to the private sector. They fear that moves to end the legal obligation on the secretary of state to deliver comprehensive services may be a deliberate part of the process.

Concerns that ministers want more private involvement will be strengthened by details of email exchanges involving senior health officials about handing the management of 10 to 20 NHS hospitals to international private companies. The emails, which were made public following a freedom of information request and were obtained by non-profit-making investigations company Spinwatch, show that officials have been planning since late last year to bring in international companies. This is despite repeated insistences by both David Cameron and Nick Clegg that there will be no privatisation of the NHS. On 16 May, Cameron said: "Let me make clear: there will be no privatisation." Clegg said: "Yes to reform of the NHS, but no to the privatisation of the NHS."

One of the emails released by the department shows that officials at the private sector firm McKinsey, which advises ministers, were in active discussion about bringing in overseas firms to take over up to 20 hospitals in return for contracts running into hundreds of millions of pounds. An email to Ian Dalton, head of provider development at the Department of Health, who is heavily involved in the reform programme, in November last year talks about "interest in new solution for 10-20 hospitals but starting from a mindset of one at a time with various political constraints".

The emails show that McKinsey is acting as a broker between the department and "international players" that are bidding to run the NHS. The documents even lay out some of the conditions required by "international hospital provider groups" for running NHS hospitals. "International players can do an initiative if 500 million revenue [is] on the table." They also need to have "a free hand on staff management". The NHS would be allowed to "keep real estate and pensions".

The Department of Health attempted to play down the significance of the emails, saying they were referring to what might be done if any one hospital trust asked for the private sector to become involved in running a failing hospital. A spokesman said: "It is not unusual for the Department of Health to hold meetings with external organisations. Any decisions to involve organisations, such as the independent sector or foundation trusts, in running the management of NHS hospitals would be led by the NHS locally and in all cases NHS staff and assets would remain wholly owned by the NHS."

But a spokesman for the public service union Unison said: "Regardless of what Cameron and Clegg say in public, it is clear that behind the scenes the government is planning to privatise the NHS. Private companies will only run hospitals if they see a profit in it. This, together with lifting the cap off the number of private patients NHS hospitals can treat, will completely change the culture of the NHS. It will be profits before patients.

"We demand that the government come clean on their plans. If this is true, patient choice is a complete sham. The move to any qualified provider is clearly about creating a market for private companies. Any MP who votes for the health and social care bill is voting for the end of the NHS."

Williams also raises worries about the extent to which the role of the private sector is being expanded. "I am not against a private element in the NHS, which may bring innovatory ideas and good practice, provided it is within the framework of a public service …" she writes. "But why have they tried to get away from the NHS as a public service, among the most efficient, least expensive and fairest anywhere in the world? Why have they been bewitched by a flawed US system that is unable to provide a universal service and is very expensive indeed?"

She adds: "The remarkable vision of the 1945 Attlee government, of a public service free at the point of need for all the people of England, should not be allowed to die."

John Healey, Labour's shadow health secretary, said: "As David Cameron's government railroads the health bill through parliament, MPs are being denied their constitutional role to properly scrutinise his plans for the NHS. The prime minister has already done a political fix with Nick Clegg on the health bill, and now he's trying to force it through with a procedural fix."

Space Shuttle Era

NASA's space shuttle fleet began setting records with its first launch on April 12, 1981 and continues to set high marks of achievement and endurance. Starting with Columbia and continuing with Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, the spacecraft has carried people into orbit repeatedly, launched, recovered and repaired satellites, conducted cutting-edge research and built the largest structure in space, the International Space Station.

As humanity's first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle pushed the bounds of discovery ever farther, requiring not only advanced technologies but the tremendous effort of a vast workforce. Thousands of civil servants and contractors throughout NASA's field centers and across the nation have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to mission success and the greater goal of space exploration.

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Shuttle Atlantis fueled-up in hope of launch

Despite a dismal forecast, NASA managers decided early Friday to load the shuttle Atlantis with rocket fuel and to press ahead for an attempted launch of the orbiter on the program's 135th and final mission.

Liftoff is targeted for 11:26:46 a.m. Eastern, but with a 70 percent chance of stormy weather, mission managers held open the option of standing down later Friday morning, depending on actual conditions.

CBS Space Place: For the latest news on the shuttle mission

"Mike Moses, the mission management team chair, said some people might call it silly to try and play in the rain this morning, but he said we're going to absolutely try for tanking," said countdown commentator Allard Beutel.

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"But throughout the overnight and closer to the dawn early morning hours, between six and seven o'clock, they'll keep their eyes on the forecast, of course, all night long, but around that time, they'll start getting a very focused look on the weather and see whether it's the right thing to proceed towards launch or whether the forecast really is getting worse. We'll look at perhaps standing down at that point."

Hoping for the best, engineers began pumping super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen through transfer lines to pad 39A at 2:01 a.m. Eastern. Routed through Atlantis' main engine plumbing to condition the hardware to cryogenic temperatures, the propellants then flowed into oxygen and hydrogen reservoirs in the shuttle's huge external tank. The fueling procedure was to last about three hours.

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NASA's Hubble Makes One Millionth Science Observation

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope crossed another milestone in its space odyssey of exploration and discovery. On Monday, July 4, the Earth-orbiting observatory logged its one millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanet's atmosphere 1,000 light-years away.

"For 21 years Hubble has been the premier space science observatory, astounding us with deeply beautiful imagery and enabling ground-breaking science across a wide spectrum of astronomical disciplines," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. He piloted the space shuttle mission that carried Hubble to orbit. "The fact that Hubble met this milestone while studying a faraway planet is a remarkable reminder of its strength and legacy."

Although Hubble is best known for its stunning imagery of the cosmos, the millionth observation is a spectroscopic measurement, where light is divided into its component colors. These color patterns can reveal the chemical composition of cosmic sources.

Hubble's millionth exposure is of the planet HAT-P-7b, a gas giant planet larger than Jupiter orbiting a star hotter than our sun. HAT-P-7b, also known as Kepler 2b, has been studied by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler observatory after it was discovered by ground-based observations. Hubble now is being used to analyze the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere.
"We are looking for the spectral signature of water vapor. This is an extremely precise observation and it will take months of analysis before we have an answer," said Drake Deming of the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Hubble demonstrated it is ideally suited for characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets, and we are excited to see what this latest targeted world will reveal."

Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, aboard space shuttle's Discovery's STS-31 mission. Its discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of astronomical research from planetary science to cosmology. The observatory has collected more than 50 terabytes of data to-date.

Hubble's odometer reading includes every observation of astronomical targets since its launch and observations used to calibrate its suite of instruments. Hubble made the millionth observation using its Wide Field Camera 3, a visible and infrared light imager with an on-board spectrometer. It was installed by astronauts during the Hubble Servicing Mission 4 in May 2009.

"The Hubble keeps amazing us with groundbreaking science," said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA. "I championed the mission to repair and renew Hubble not just to get one million science observations, but also to inspire millions of children across the planet to become our next generation of stargazers, scientists, astronauts and engineers."

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. Goddard manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. in Washington.