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10:14 am

Judge’s Order To Shut Down NSA Phone Surveillance Reversed By Federal Appeals Court

GNN - A federal appeals court has just ruled against a 2013 decision ordering the NSA to stop its bulk metadata collection program.

The three-judge panel issued its ruling Friday, contending that conservative privacy activist Larry Klayman had not adequately argued the likeliness that his own data had been collected as a part of the metadata collection program.

Judge Stephen Williams wrote that the plaintiffs “claim to suffer from government collection of records from their telecommunications provider relating to their calls. But plaintiffs are subscribers of Verizon Wireless, not of Verizon Business Network Services, Inc.—the sole provider that the government has acknowledged targeting for bulk data collection.”

Judge Janice Rogers Brown’s separate opinion stated that the plaintiffs had failed to show a “‘concrete and particularized’ injury” in regards to the NSA program. Brown ended her opinion quoting Daniel P. Moynihan’s book Secrecy: The American Experience. “Regulations of this sort may frustrate the inquisitive citizen but that does not make them illegal or illegitimate. Excessive secrecy limits needed criticism and debate. Effective secrecy ensures the perpetuation of our institutions.’’

This court decision’s importance really isn’t as critical as it would have been before the recent legislation passed in Congress, as today’s ruling is more procedural and doesn’t touch on the program’s constitutionality. The law passed by Congress allows bulk phone data collection to continue until the end of the year, but it severely scales back the NSA’s phone surveillance program thereafter.

FEATURED IMAGE: SAUL LOEB/GETTY IMAGES

5:33 pm

U.S.-Russian crew reaches space station for year-long stay

(GNN) - A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, sending a U.S.-Russia crew to the International Space Station for a year-long flight, a NASA Television broadcast showed.

The capsule holding NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, 51, and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko, 54, and Gennady Padalka, 56, slipped into a docking port on the station’s Poisk module at 9:33 p.m. EDT/0133 GMT. The trio blasted off about six hours earlier.Kelly and Kornienko are slated to make the first year-long stay on the orbital outpost, double the current mission durations. Padalka, who is making his fifth flight, will return to Earth in September after racking up 878 days in space, setting a new record for the total amount of time anyone has spent in space.

Four Soviet-era cosmonauts lived on the now-defunct Mir space station for a year or longer, but the missions, which concluded in 1999, did not have the sophisticated medical equipment that will be used during International Space Station investigations, NASA said.

Scientists are interested in seeing how the human body fares during longer stays in space, as the United States and other countries begin planning for multi-year missions to Mars.

In addition to more exposure to radiation, astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and changes in their cardiovascular, immune and other systems.

Kelly and Kornienko will participate in a battery of experiments before, during and after their flight to assess psychological and physiological changes from being in microgravity for a year.

A third participant is Kelly’s identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who will serve as a ground-based subject for genetic and other studies.

“The classic question is ‘How much of our health and our behavior is determined by our genes, and how much by our environment?’ – the nature versus nurture discussion,” Craig Kundrot, deputy chief scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program, said in a NASA interview.

“In this case, we’ve got two genetically identical individuals and we can monitor what kind of changes occur in Mark in an ordinary lifestyle and compare that to the changes that we see in Scott in flight,” he said.

While no definitive conclusions can be made from a study of a single set of twins, scientists hope the experiments may provide clues for follow-up investigations.

The station, a $100 billion project of 15 nations, is a research laboratory that flies about 260 miles (418 km) above Earth.

(Reuters)(Editing by Ken Wills)

5:02 pm

Amazon rainforest soaking up less carbon as trees die young: study

(GNN) - The Amazon rainforest's ability to soak up greenhouse gases from the air has fallen sharply, possibly because climate change and droughts mean more trees are dying, an international team of scientists said on Wednesday.

The world's biggest rainforest has soaked up vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Plants use the heat-trapping gas to grow and release it when they rot or burn, but the report said that role in offsetting global warming may be under threat.

The study, of 321 plots in parts of the Amazon untouched by human activities, estimated the net amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the forest had fallen by 30 percent, to 1.4 billion tonnes a year in the 2000s from 2.0 billion in the 1990s.

"Forest growth has flatlined over the last decade," lead author Roel Brienen of the University of Leeds told Reuters of the findings in the journal Nature. At the same time "the whole forest is living faster - trees grow faster, die faster."

"The net carbon uptake of forests has significantly weakened," he said of the study by almost 100 experts.

Human carbon emissions in Latin America are overtaking amounts absorbed by the Amazon for the first time, the University of Leeds said in a press release.

The scientists said it was unclear if the decline would continue and if the trend applied to other tropical forests such as the Congo basin or Indonesia.

The findings are a surprise because some computer models suggest tropical forests may grow better because carbon dioxide emitted by human use of fossil fuels acts as an airborne fertilizer.

The study said increased tree deaths might be linked to severe droughts, such as in 2005.

Another possibility was that man-made carbon dioxide was making trees both grow faster and die younger and that more deaths were only now becoming apparent.

If that trend continues, the make-up of the Amazon rainforest could change. Fast-growing lianes, or tropical vines, might be among the beneficiaries, Brienen said.

Christof Bigler, a forest expert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who was not involved in the study, said fast-growing trees outside the tropics also often had shorter lifespans.

"Fast-growing trees tend to have a lower root density and might be more vulnerable to attacks by insects and pathogens," he told Reuters of his findings in Switzerland and North America.

(Reuters) (Editing by Gareth Jones)

2:56 pm

U.S. cargo ship blasts off with supplies for space station

(GNN) - An unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp Antares rocket blasted off from a seaside launch pad in Virginia on Sunday, sending a Cygnus cargo ship on its way to the International Space Station, a NASA Television broadcast showed.

The 133-foot-tall (41-meter-tall) rocket lifted off at 12:52 p.m. EDT/1652 GMT from a commercially operated launch pad at NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility on the Virginia coast.

Perched on top of the rocket was a Cygnus spacecraft, built by Orbital Sciences in partnership with Italy’s Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture of Thales SA and Finmeccanica SpA.

The freighter was loaded with more than 3,660 pounds (1,660 kg) of food, science equipment and supplies for the space station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 264 miles (425 km) above Earth. The capsule was slated to reach the orbital outpost on Wednesday.

The mission is the second of eight station cargo runs by Orbital Sciences under a $1.9 billion contract with NASA.

Orbital Sciences made its first cargo run to the station in January. It has not yet announced other customers for its medium-lift Antares rocket, a two-stage booster that relies on Russian-built AJ-26 engines to power its first stage.

Orbital Sciences named the Cygnus ship launched on Sunday the SS Janice Voss, a tribute to Voss, a five-time shuttle astronaut and former Orbital Sciences engineer who died of breast cancer in 2012.

The capsule is expected to remain berthed at the space station for about a month. Once unloaded, it will be filled with garbage and items no longer needed by the station crew and redirected into the atmosphere for incineration.

(Reuters)(AIP)(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

6:22 pm

NASA launches flight to test new Mars-landing technology

WASHINGTON: After several postponements due to bad weather, NASA Saturday finally sent a flying-saucer-like test vehicle high into the skies to try out technologies that could one day be used to land on Mars.

The US space agency launched its "Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator" vehicle, which includes two new devices for testing -- an inflatable device for deceleration and a "mammoth parachute" for landings.

The disk-like LDSD, attached to a giant helium balloon, launched from the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai at 1840 GMT, and was expected to reach an altitude high enough to conduct the trials in two to three hours.

To land on Mars, NASA has been employing a parachute system dating back to the 1970s, but with heavier spacecrafts, new equipment is needed.

The new technologies are being tested at extremely high altitudes similar to those in Mars´ upper atmosphere.

Once the balloon, the largest every deployed, fully inflates while rising through the atmosphere, it will be the size of a football field.

Upon reaching an altitude of 120,000 feet (36,600 meters), it will then let go of the vehicle, whose rocket will kick in and carry the system to 180,000 feet.

Traveling there at about 3.8 times the speed of sound, the first test will occur, with the deployment of a doughnut-shaped tube, the Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, which will slow the vehicle to 2.5 times the speed of sound.

Then the mammoth parachute will carry the vehicle back to earth for a water landing -- only 40 minutes after release from the balloon.

NASA has two more LDSD flights planned for testing the two technologies.

"If our flying saucer hits its speed and altitude targets, it will be a great day," LDSD project manager Mark Adler said.

Strong winds had forced NASA to postpone the flight, originally slated for a two-week launch window in early June. (AFP)

11:26 pm

U.S.-Russian space trio lands safely despite bad weather

An American astronaut and two Russians who carried a Sochi Olympic torch into open space landed safely and on time on Tuesday in Kazakhstan, defying bad weather and ending their 166-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

http://www.globalnewsnetwork.tk/2014/03/us-russian-space-trio-lands-safely.html

Russian astronaut Oleg Kotov holds an Olympic torch as he takes it on a spacewalk as Russian astronaut Sergei Ryazansky gives instructions outside the International Space Station in this still image taken from video courtesy of NASA TV, November 9, 2013.

"We have a landing!" read a huge TV screen at Russia's Mission Control outside Moscow as the descent capsule hit the frozen ground at 0924 (0324 GMT) southeast of the town of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan.

"Safe arrival back on Earth," said a NASA TV announcer while all-terrain rescue and recovery vehicles were shown trundling across a snowy steppe to the Soyuz TMA-10M capsule. "The crew are reported to be in good health," NASA said.

Inside the capsule were former ISS commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineers Sergei Ryazansky and Michael Hopkins from NASA. The trio launched together into space on September 25.

Shortly afterwards, the space travelers were seated in semi-reclined chairs in the deep snow and covered with blue blankets to protect them from strong gusts of wind.

Kotov, the most experienced astronaut in his crew, was shown waving his left hand with a palm black from the soot of the descent capsule, which was charred on re-entry.

Rookie Hopkins smiled as a doctor checked his pulse.

In addition to working on 35 science experiments, Kotov and Ryazansky carried the unlit Olympic torch for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games outside the station during a spacewalk on November 9.

They left behind a small crew headed by Japan's Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese national to command the station. Three more crew members are due to arrive later this month.

Severe weather in Kazakhstan had threatened to delay the Soyuz's landing.

Before their undocking from the ISS, fog and low visibility had prevented airborne rescue and recovery teams from getting to Zhezkazgan, a town about 90 miles from the remote landing site on the windswept flatlands, a Russian space industry source said.

But Russian officials decided to go ahead with the landing after reviewing weather forecasts and the status of recovery crews.

"There's a lot of snow on the ground and temperatures are hovering in the single-digits (Fahrenheit)," said NASA mission commentator Dan Huot.

Due to severe weather conditions, it was decided not to set up an inflatable tent for routine medical tests at the landing site. Instead, the crew underwent just quick tests before being flown by helicopters straight to the local Kazakh town of Karaganda, where a formal welcome ceremony would be held.

The U.S.-Russian space partnership so far has not been affected by tensions over Ukraine. The countries lead the 15-nation space station programme.

The $100 billion research complex, which flies about 260 miles above Earth, has been permanently staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since November 2000.

(Reporting by Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Irene Klotz in Cape Canaveral, and Dmitry Solovyov in Almaty; Editing by Steve Gutterman, Eric Walsh and Ken Wills)