The Phoenix lander’s first and foremost dig to the Martian soil for scientific projection was delayed Wednesday as of a communications glitch on a spacecraft the relays commands out of Earth to the red planet.

The orbiting Odyssey satellite headed to safe mode and failed to send instructions to Phoenix to claw to the permafrost to searching the web for evidence of the producing blocks of life, argued Chad Edwards, primary telecommunications engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

It’s the moment cycle a relay crisis has delayed the lander’s schedule. The earliest glitch happened two days following it landed, when an additional satellite, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, turned off its radio.

Engineers got the job done to fix the hassle with Odyssey, that plans to keep offline until Saturday, Edwards said. A preliminary researching revealed the protected mode was likely triggered by high-energy particles from space interrupting the satellite’s computer memory.

“The lander is fine,” Edwards said.

Phoenix set reduced in Mars’ northern latitudes to article whether the polar locations is fit of supporting primitive life. It communicates in Earth for the duration of Odyssey and the Reconnaissance Orbiter, that lead daily passes throughout the lander to send commands and beam coming back images.

With Odyssey temporarily out of service, engineers imparted upon the Reconnaissance Orbiter to be the middleman between the lander and Earth.

Phoenix had constructued to dig the mainly of 3 shallow pits north of at which it landed and dump the dirt to a efficient oven, at which it can be baked and studied now week. The first the lander can commence the excavation might be Thursday, when new commands will be able to be sent up.

The red sunlight to scrape the Martian surface came subsequent to an full preventing of Phoenix’s 8-foot robotic arm and a greater number of scientific instruments.

“It’s utterly an incredibly science-rich location,” declared primary scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who heads the three-month, $420 million mission.

Before the actual work, Phoenix had playtime in the Martian dirt, working at two practice works so faced scooping up and subsequently dumping out fistfuls of soil. The tests yielded an intriguing scientific find: In both cases, the loose soil was mixed amongst grey bits who scientists presume are either surface ice or salt deposits.

Phoenix zeroed in on 3 ones to the properly of the test dig sector the present scientists hold playfully named Baby Bear, Mama Bear and Papa Bear, in the wake of the “Goldilocks” fairy tale.

For the earliest dig, scientists need the lander to cut to the Baby Bear site at an angle, dig three-tenths of an inch to the permafrost and drag the dirt to the arm’s scoop covet a backhoe.

Then Phoenix can swing its robotic arm 90 amounts and wait for a great deal more instructions to lessen the scoopful of dirt to a minute oven calculated to heat the sample and look over the vapors for traces of organic compounds, argued Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, a robotic arm engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Although the oven’s spring-loaded doors did not utterly open as scientists hoped, Smith claimed it will be able to not be a problem. Over the following a good number of days, Phoenix is able to scoop up soil from what i read in the larger number of two ones for its microscope and wet chemistry lab to analyze.

Phoenix cannot detect fossils or residence microbes. Instead, it could poke to the soil and ice to survey whether liquid water continually existed and whether there are any organic compounds, people containing carbon and hydrogen atoms. Scientists largely agree the water, organics and a heat source are needed for a habitable environment.

Twin rovers overly hold carried on roaming pretty near the Martian equator from the time of 2004 undergo uncovered evidence this water in the wake of flowed at or pretty near the surface of ancient Mars.

“We’re easily making an exploratory stage here,” Smith claimed that week. “Our instruments are not planned to decode DNA molecules. … We’re becoming for the obvious factors the present are able to make it easier for livlihood to prosper in now environment.”

Astronomers have spotted a dusty disk in a four-star solar system that could be home to a planet in the making.
 
Using the infrared eyes of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers spotted the swirling disk around a pair of stars in the quadruple-star system HD 98800, located 150 light-years away in the constellation TW Hydrae.
If a planet did form in the disk, its sky would be bathed in the light of four suns. One pair of suns would blaze brightly, while the other pair, gravitationally bound to the first pair, would appear as little more than faint pinpoints of light.
The finding will be detailed in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
So-called “circumstellar” disks like the one that rings HD 98800 can be the birthplace of planets. Most disks are smooth and continuous, but Spitzer detected a gap in the HD 98800 disk that could be evidence of one or more immature “protoplanets” carving out lanes in the dust.
“Planets are like cosmic vacuums,’ said study team member Elise Furlan of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They clear up all the dirt that is in their path around the central stars.”
Quadruple sunsets
The researchers spied two separate belts of material in the circumstellar disk. One belt sits at 1.5 to 2 astronomical units (AU) from the binary stars and likely consists of fine dust grains. The other is located about 5.9 AU away from and is probably made up of asteroids or comets. (One AU is equal to the distance between the Earth and the sun.) A swath of near-empty space separates the two belts, inside of which a budding planet might roam.
Alternatively, the researchers think the gap could be caused by a gravitational tug-of-war between the system’s four stars. The other two stars are also doubled up, and the two binary pairs are separated by about 50 AU-slightly more than the distance between our sun and Pluto.
“Typically, when astronomers see gaps like this in a debris disk, they suspect that a planet has cleared a path,” Furlan said. “However, given the presence of the diskless pair of stars sitting 50 AU away, the inward-migrating dust particles are likely subject to complex, time-varying forces, so at this point the existence of a planet is just speculation.”
Not uncommon
The stars that make up each stellar doublet orbit around each other, and the two pairs circle one another as well.
Worlds with multiple sunsets are not uncommon. Astronomers used to think that strong gravitational forces from multiple stars might interfere with planet formation, but recent surveys have revealed that the dusty debris disks that function like nurseries for new planets are as common around double star systems as they are around single ones. A few triple-star systems are even known.
“Since many young stars form in multiple systems, we have to realize that the evolution of disks around them and the possible formation of planetary systems can be way more complicated and perturbed than in a simple case like our solar system,” Furlan said.

Glue like the kind that mussels use to glom onto rocks has been combined with the stickiness seen in gecko feet to form a new adhesive dubbed geckel that could one day bind wounds closed and help robots climb walls underwater.
Geckos are lizards with the remarkable ability to scamper up walls, peeling their feet on and off surfaces repeatedly, like a sticky note. Such wall-crawling is enabled by pads on each foot, densely packed with fine hairs that are split at their ends. The split ends increase the amount of contact gecko feet have with surfaces, making them stick more. Flies and other insects also use this strategy.
Still, when submerged underwater, the stickiness of gecko feet is dramatically reduced. Water and other liquids are generally the enemy of adhesives, as anyone knows who has tried to stick a bandage on a bleeding cut. But Northwestern University materials scientist Phillip Messersmith knew mussels had glue that worked extraordinarily well underwater, keeping them anchored onto rocks even while pounded by huge waves.
Messersmith and his colleagues first imitated gecko foot hairs by fabricating arrays of silicone pillars each roughly 400 billionths of a meter across, or roughly the width of a wavelength of violet light. Next, they coated these flexible pillars with a very thin layer of a synthetic glue that mimics how mussel proteins work.
Underwater, this new geckel performs roughly 15 times as well as a gecko foot would underwater. On dry surfaces, geckel is about three times stickier than a gecko foot above water is.
Although geckel performs better than a gecko foot would underwater, it “is many times lower in adhesion than, say, what a mussel achieves in its native environment,” Messersmith said. Still, he noted temporary adhesives often proved quite useful—real geckos could not scurry up walls if they remained permanently stuck onto them, for instance. Indeed, geckel remains sticky even when pulled on and off walls more than 1,000 times, findings detailed in the July 19 issue of the journal Nature.
Messersmith suggested adhesive tapes of geckel could help close wounds without the use of sutures, or find use in water-resistant bandages or drug-delivery patches. “Also, they could be used in unmanned vehicles such as robotics for exploration, rescue and other activities in dry or wet environments where adhesion to surfaces is challenging,” he told LiveScience.
Messersmith did caution they only tested how sticky their geckel was over very small areas. “We need to be able to scale up the adhesive fabrication to large areas, and whether our findings will hold over larger areas will have to be demonstrated,” he said. “We are starting to work on this already.” They also plan on tinkering with pillar shape and artificial mussel glue composition to improve stickiness.

According to a recent piece in The New Yorker by the physician-journalist Atul Gawande, if you want to have better quality of life as you age, these three things will have a dramatic effect:

1. Practice yoga or any form of exercise that will help your balance
2. Try to limit your prescription medicines to no more than four
3. Lift weights

And why these three? The single most serious physical risk that the elderly face is an injury from falling. According to Gawande’s piece, “Each year, about three hundred and fifty thousand Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, forty per cent end up in a nursing home, and twenty per cent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.”  

My 94-year-old grandmother died in the hospital a few days after falling down the stairs. So when I read Gawande’s piece, I began to think more critically about other members of my family and how they had died.  

The second directive - limit your meds - also struck home for me.  A few years ago, when an elderly relative died, I discovered that she had a whole counter full of different medications, at least fifteen different drugs - any one of which could have made her jittery and dizzy. The combination of them all must have been numbing and disorienting. My relative had had several falling incidents before she died, and now I wonder if there wasn’t a relationship between her intake of medicines and the falls.  

Another friend, Beth, whose father recently died, told me a similar story. Her 84-year-old mother, who had been alert and energetic before her father’s death, slipped into a kind of lethargy that was predictable after such a shock but extremely precipitous, and had Beth exploring various nursing home options for her mother.

When Beth called her mother’s doctor, she discovered that the doctor had changed the dosage on one of her mother’s medicines not long before her father had died. The doctor had been unaware of her mother’s newly altered state - and after adjusting the dosage downward, Beth’s mother went back to her usual lively self. The crisis was averted.

Gawande’s piece was a wake-up call for me. I guarantee you that now I will be far more vigilant in getting specific details on the possible side effects of various kinds of drug interactions. And I will do everything in my power to make certain that I never need to be on more than four medications at a given time.