Meet China's First Female Astronaut--Maybe

China Realtime Report--

China is getting ready to send a woman into space for the first time in a mission that will also represent the country’s first manned docking mission with its Tiangong-1 space station.

The mission, announced just a few days ago, is moving forward rapidly: The Shenzhou-9 manned spacecraft to be used in the mission has already been strapped to its carrier rocket and the rocket already moved to the launch pad at a satellite launch center in northwest China.

All that remains is to choose the woman who will be on board when spacecraft shoots skyward.

On Tuesday, in what may or may not be a sign that the decision has been made, the state-run China Daily published a profile of 34-year-old fighter pilot Liu Yang, one of the two candidates tipped as the most likely to go where no Chinese woman has gone before.

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Last November’s launch of the unmanned Shenzhou 8; this month, China said, it will launch Shenzhou 9, using the same kind of rocket but this time carrying three astronauts—one female.

SpaceX Dragon docking with the International Space Station video

ULA wants NASA to accelerate commercial crew decision

The head of United Launch Alliance (ULA) would like to see NASA speed up the timetable for downselecting a company or companies to develop commercial crew systems, Florida Today reports. ULA CEO Michael Gass, speaking at a press conference Tuesday marking the joint venture’s fifth anniversary, noted that ULA has agreements with three commercial crew developers—Blue Origin, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada—to provide launch services for their proposed commercial crew vehicles. (Those companies account for three of the four firms with funded second-round Commercial Crew Development, or CCDev-2, awards from NASA; SpaceX, which proposes to use its own Falcon 9 rocket, is the fourth.) While those agreements would appear to be ringing endorsements of ULA’s launch capabilities, Gass said it hinders ULA from taking steps to support any single company, including investing in them.

“Why would you continue to invest when one of three of your investments could only be the potential winner?” Gass asked, according to the report. He added it would be “helpful” if NASA made a decision earlier on the vehicle or vehicles it will support full-fledged development of. Gass was also critical of the limited funding provided for the program in FY 2012, with its original request of $850 million cut by more than half to $406 million. “We talk about wanting to close the gap and not be dependent on foreign sources only, but then we don’t fully fund the capability.”

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Russian Mars Probe Phobos-Grunt remains silent in Earth's Orbit

From Spaceflight Now--

By Stephen Clark

Russia officially remained silent on the status of its beleaguered Phobos-Grunt Mars probe Friday as concerns grew that the toxic fuel-laden spacecraft could crash back to Earth by December.

File photo of Phobos-Grunt during launch preparations. Credit: Roscosmos

Efforts to salvage the Phobos-Grunt mission Wednesday and Thursday were unsuccessful, but the Russian space agency issued no updates on the recovery following an initial statement after launch.

Phobos-Grunt is still circling Earth at an altitude between 128 miles and 210 miles after launching Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

After being shot into orbit by a Zenit rocket, the 29,000-pound spacecraft was supposed to fire its engines twice to accelerate to escape velocity, the speed required to overcome Earth's gravity and head for Mars.

But neither rocket burn occurred, and Russian engineers don't know why. Phobos-Grunt's rocket pack was scheduled to fire over South America, out of range of Russian ground tracking sites.

Russia did not request support from European and U.S. communications stations in the Americas before the mission, but ESA ground sites in South America and Australia have been listening for radio signals from Phobos-Grunt.

Phobos-Grunt was heading to the Martian moon Phobos, where it would touch down, gather a half-pound of samples and return them to Earth in a shielded re-entry capsule.

With no success so far in reviving the $163 million mission, experts are more convinced Phobos-Grunt will crash somewhere on Earth in the next few weeks. For now, Russia plans to keep trying.

Major General Vladimir Uvarov, a former space expert in the Russian military, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper he has lost optimism in Phobos-Grunt's chances for recovery.

"In my opinion, the Phobos-Grunt probe has been lost. This probability is very high. At any rate, it is much higher than the chances for reactivating the probe," Uvarov told the newspaper.

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Do neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light?

From Nature News--By: Geoff BrumfielHas OPERA found super-speedy neutrinos? Photo credit:CERN

Neutrino results challenge cornerstone of modern physics.

An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics — that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.

The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 metres underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. It is designed to study a beam of neutrinos coming from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory located 730 kilometres away near Geneva, Switzerland. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. But they are all around us — the Sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second.

The 1,800-tonne OPERA detector is a complex array of electronics and photographic emulsion plates, but the new result is simple — the neutrinos are arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light allows. "We are shocked," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and OPERA's spokesman.

Breaking the law

The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. If neutrinos are travelling faster than light speed, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of science — that the rules of physics are the same for all observers — would be invalidated. "If it's true, then it's truly extraordinary," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN.

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