Year: 2013

NORTH LAS VEGAS (TIP): An inflatable space pod to be attached to the International Space Station in a couple of years will be like no other piece of the station. Instead of metal, its walls will be made of floppy cloth, making it easier to launch (and then inflate). Nasa said it had signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow Aerospace to build the module, which could reach the space station as soon as 2015.

That is a bargain-basement price compared with most equipment the US and other countries send into space, and the Bigelow agreement could serve as a model for how Nasa puts together missions at lower costs by using a Kmart strategy: buying offtheshelf pieces instead of developing its own designs. “This programme starts a relationship that we think, and we hope, is going to be meaningful between Nasa and ourselves,” Robert T Bigelow, the chief executive of Bigelow Aerospace, said at a news conference here at the company’s headquarters.

Low-Earth orbit, he said, is the “first target,” but larger modules could be used for stations in deep space or for habitats on the Moon. “We have ambitions to get to the Moon someday, to have a base there,” Bigelow said.The fold-up , blow-up approach solves the conundrum of how to build something voluminous that can be packed into the narrow payload confines of a rocket.

The soft sides of the module , called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or Beam, will allow it to be scrunched like a Tshirt in a suitcase. At the space station, it will be attached to an air lock and then inflated like a balloon and expanded by a factor of 10 to its full size — about 13 feet long and 10 feet in diameter, with about 560 cubic feet of space inside.

At least initially, it will remain empty as Nasa gathers data about its characteristics, including temperature and protection against micrometeorites. The balloonlike structure is carefully designed not to pop.

The fabric walls will consist of several layers including Vectran , a bulletresistant material. Even if punctured by a highspeed meteorite, the fabric does not tear. A hole in a metal structure in space, by comparison, can cause explosive decompression as air rushes out. When the Beam module reaches the space station, astronauts might go to it to seek solitude: engineers expect it will be the quietest spot there.

The fabric walls absorb sound vibrations instead of transmitting them. Beam revives a concept that Nasa developed more than a decade ago for an inflatable four-story crew quarters on the space station. Congress halted the work as the station’s construction costs grew sharply.

Bigelow licensed the technology from Nasa and set up his factory in North Las Vegas, investing over $250 million of his own money. The company has already launched two unmanned prototypes into orbit, showing that they can remain inflated for years.

LOS ANGELES (TIP): Nasa’s Curiosity rover is preparing to drill the Martian surface and is driving towards a flat rock with pale veins that may hold clues to a wet history on the Red Planet. It’s the most highly anticipated milestone since the sixwheel, nuclear-powered rover landed near the Martian equator five months ago on its two-year prime mission, investigating whether the planet ever offered an environment favourable for microbial life.

If the rock meets rover engineers’ approval when Curiosity rolls up to it in coming days, it will become the first to be drilled for a sample during the mission, Nasa said. “Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission’s most challenging activity since the landing. It has never been done on Mars,” said Mars science laboratory project manager Richard Cook. “The drill hardware interacts energetically with Martian material we don’t control. We won’t be surprised if some steps in the process don’t go exactly as planned the first time through,” Cook said in a Nasa statement. Curiosity first will gather powdered samples from inside the rock and use those to scrub the drill. Then the rover will drill and ingest more samples from this rock, which it will analyse for information about its mineral and chemical composition.

MUMBAI (TIP): More than a century after it went missing, the fossil of what has been regarded as India’s first recorded dinosaur has been rediscovered in Kolkata, according to a top scientific journal. The recovery of Titanosaurus Indicus, or the Indian Tital reptile, was possible due to a collaborative programme between the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and the University of Michigan, according to the latest issue of Current Science (Vol. 104, No. 1, Jan. 10, 2013, Pg. No. 34), brought out by the Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences. The missing dinosaur, untraceable for nearly a century, was finally found at the GSI headquarters in Kolkata, says the magazine. The fossil was originally discovered by WH Sleeman in the Jabalpur area of central India in 1828. However, it was only half a century later – in 1877 – that its importance came to light as a new genus and species of sauropod dinosaur known as Taitanosaurus Indicus, first identified by Richard Lydekker.

At that time, the world had identified only 115 dinosaur species or less than 10 percent of the 1,401 species known by 2004. Passing safely through many hands for over half a century, it suddenly went missing though a cast of the specimen was in London’s Natural History Museum. Later, in the early 1900s, many more discoveries of dinosaur fossils were made by scientists such as Charles Metley and Durgasankar Bhattacharji around the original site in Jabalpur excavated by Sleeman.

The magazine says there are many Indian dinosaur specimens that are missing, including both large and small specimens of sauropod and theropod dinosaurs. Prime among the missing specimens include the head and skeletal parts of the stocky-limbed large Theropod Lametasaurus Indicus, Indosaurus Matleyi, Indosuchus Raptorius, parts of Jainosaurus Septentrionalis and the small Noasaurid Theropod Laevisuchus Indicus and many Theropod limb bones.