Europe plans asteroid sample grab

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

Marco Polo is one of a number of competing ideas

European scientists and engineers are working on a potential new mission to bring back material from an asteroid.

The venture, known as Marco Polo, could launch in the next decade, and would be designed to learn more about how our Solar System evolved.

The plan is to select a small asteroid - less than 1km across - near Earth and send a spacecraft there to drill for dust and rubble for analysis.

Mission plans are being worked on by UK Astrium and OHB in Germany.

Both satellite manufacturers have been asked to undertake a feasibility study, to assess the type of spacecraft architecture that would be needed to carry out the project.

A final decision on whether to approve the mission will be made by the European Space Agency (Esa) in a few years' time. The mission would launch towards the end of the next decade, in about 2017.

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Esa says the mission could fly towards the end of the next decade

Asteroids are the debris left over from the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago.

Studying their pristine material should provide new insights on how the Solar System came into being and how planets like Earth evolved.

Asteroids are the rubble left over after the planets formed Rosetta probe makes asteroid pass

"We'll be looking at the best solution for getting there and back," UK Astrium's Dr Ralph Cordey told BBC News.

"We've got to look at all elements of the mission - how we would design the mission, how to design the trajectory to one of a number of possible asteroids, how to optimise that so we use the smallest spacecraft, the least fuel and the smallest rocket."

Marco Polo might work like this:

• After the launch on a Soyuz rocket from Europe's Kourou spaceport, a propulsion unit would take the mission out to its target asteroid

• The main spacecraft unit would undertake a remote-sensing campaign, gathering key information on shape, size, mass, spin and global composition

• It would then attempt to land, drilling a few cm into the surface. Up to 300g of dust and pebbles would be stored away in a sealed capsule

• After lifting off the asteroid, the spacecraft would put itself on a homeward trajectory, releasing the capsule close to Earth for a re-entry

• The capsule would land without parachutes. It would be opened in a clean facility to ensure there was no Earth contamination

Marco Polo would map the asteroid as well as grabbing a sample

Esa has an exploration roadmap for the missions it wishes to conduct in the coming years. Marco Polo is being considered under its Cosmic Visions programme, and is one of a number of competing ideas in a class of missions that could cost in the region of 300 million euros.

It is quite possible that Marco Polo, if approved, could be undertaken in partnership with Japan.

Sample return missions are of significant interest to scientists. Although in-situ measurements provide remarkable insights, so much more would be learnt if materials were brought back to Earth laboratories, where the full panoply of modern analytical technologies can be deployed.

The small return capsule would be released just prior to re-entry

An asteroid sample return mission would have huge scientific merit in its own right but it would also help develop the technology needed for the more challenging task of getting down and up from a large planetary body that has a much bigger gravitational pull - such as Mars.

Not that getting down on to a small, low-gravity body is easy. The wrong approach could crush landing legs or even result in the vehicle bouncing straight back off into space.

Such problems were amply demonstrated by the recent Japanese attempts to grab samples off the surface of Asteroid Itokawa.

It is still not clear whether Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft managed to capture any material and the probe's return to Earth is still haunted by uncertainty.

The Americans deliberately crash-landed their Near-Shoemaker probe on to Asteroid Eros at the end of the spacecraft's mission in 2001.

They have also sent the Dawn spacecraft to rendezvous with Asteroid Vesta in 2011 before going on to visit Asteroid Ceres in 2015. But these are remote-sensing ventures, not sample return attempts.

Europe, itself, is no novice in the field of asteroid study. Its Rosetta probe, which is en route to a comet, took close-up pictures of Asteroid Steins during a flyby earlier this month.

Ultimately, it is possible that astronauts could visit an asteroid. The US space agency is currently studying how this might be done; but even if approved, such a mission would not happen for many decades.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Yahoo starts front page overhaul

Randomly chosen visitors to Yahoo's website will soon be helping the web giant re-design its main page.

Those picked will give feedback to Yahoo about the different ways that information and applications can be presented to regular users.

The company hopes the revamp will boost the number of people that visit the page and improve advertising revenues.

Yahoo claims that its homepage is the most heavily trafficked on the web with more than 300 million visitors a month.

Soft choices

The last big overhaul of the Yahoo front page took place in May 2006 when it added elements to the page that let people choose what they saw when they visited.

But, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president who oversees its front door, the 2008 revamp will go further. It aims to build on the personalisation tools that let users of its My Yahoo service put together their own start page.

"A lot of people like My Yahoo but they do not want to do the work," Mr Bhat told BBC News.

The re-design will see clutter on the front page reduced in favour of a mix of static and customisable content.

How the new Yahoo page might look Enlarge Image

"It's about making a dashboard for the things you care about around the web," he said.

To help people work out which extra applications and content will be relevant Yahoo is planning to use in-house technology that helps it spot popular news stories.

While Yahoo employs human editors to compile its news stories it also uses a content optimisation engine which recommends others that readers might also want to read.

Visitors to the Yahoo homepage will be able to add suggested add-on programs to an application bar that gives them access to all the services, such as e-mail, social networking sites and video portals, they regularly visit.

Users need such a filtering tool, said Mr Bhat, because the sheer amount of information on the web means many people feel overwhelmed by it and stop trying to keep up or find new services that might prove useful.

Yahoo also plans to let third parties produce little programs that can sit in the application bar to give people access to other services.

Opinions about how to change the homepage will be sought from randomly chosen users from the UK, France, India and the US. Once the testing is complete over the next few months all regular Yahoo users will be able to opt in to the new look.

Mr Bhat said the revamp will also help it get more money out of the home page. Tightly tuned content on personal pages would help those efforts, he said.

"What advertisers want is attention," he said. "They want your attention in context."

The revamp of the main page is part of a larger plan to help the ailing web giant restore its fortunes.

In late January Microsoft made a bid to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn (£24.82bn) in an attempt to produce a web giant that could mount a credible challenge to Google.

Yahoo rejected the bid even after it was raised to $47.5bn and Microsoft ended negotiations over the deal in May.

In June Yahoo signed a deal with Google to use the search giant's advertising technology.

BY-BBC NEWS

Large Hadron Collider down for 2 months

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- The world's largest atom smasher, which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month, is more badly damaged than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider watch as the collider starts operating September 10.

Experts have gone into the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border to examine the damage that halted operations about 36 hours after its September 10 startup, said James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

"It's too early to say precisely what happened, but it seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out," Gillies said.

Gillies said the sector that was damaged will have to be warmed well above the absolute zero temperature used for operations so repairs can be made, a time-consuming process.

"A number of magnets raised their temperature by around 100 degrees," Gillies said. "We have now to warm up the whole sector in a controlled manner before we can actually go in and repair it."

The $10 billion particle collider, in the design and construction stages for more than two decades, is the world's largest atom smasher. It fires beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms around the tunnels at nearly the speed of light.

It then causes the protons to collide, revealing how the tiniest particles were first created after the "big bang," which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars, planets and everything else.

Gillies said such failures occur frequently in particle accelerators, but it was made more complicated in this case because the Large Hadron Collider operates at near absolute zero, colder than outer space, for maximum efficiency.

"When they happen in our other accelerators, it's a matter of a couple of days to fix them," Gillies said. "But because this is a superconducting machine and you've got long warmup and cool-down periods, it means we're going to be off for a couple of months."

He said it would take "several weeks minimum" to warm up the sector.

"Then we can fix it," Gillies said. "Then we cool it down again."

CERN announced Thursday that it had shut down the collider a week ago after a successful startup that had beams of protons circling in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions in the collider.

It was at first thought the failure of an electrical transformer that handles part of the cooling was the problem, CERN said. That transformer was replaced last weekend, and the machine was lowered back to operating temperature to prepare for a resumption of operations.

But then more inspections were needed, and it was determined that the problem was worse than initially thought, said Gillies.

The CERN experiments with the particle collider hope to reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. They could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle -- the Higgs boson -- which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

The LHC provides much greater power than earlier colliders.

Its start came over the objections of some who feared that the collision of protons could imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

Planet is running out of clean water, new film warns

By Brandon Griggs
CNN

(CNN) -- One sixth of the world's population does not have access to clean drinking water. More than 2 million people, most of them children, die each year from water-borne diseases.

People in India, where millions don't have access to clean drinking water, fill buckets from a supply pipeline.

Water-related problems aren't restricted to the developing world. A harmful pesticide, banned by many European countries, remains widely used in the United States, where it runs into rivers and streams.

And one expert estimates California's water supply will run out in 20 years.

These sobering statistics come from "FLOW," a new documentary film about the world's dwindling water supply. The filmmakers and their sources argue a combination of factors, including drought and skyrocketing demand, have created a looming global crisis that threatens the long-term survival of the human race.

After premiering in January at the Sundance Film Festival, "FLOW" opened September 12 in New York and Los Angeles, California, and expands to more cities this week. The New York Times called the documentary "less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests."

As the film shows, some nations are banking on controversial technology, such as desalination plants that convert seawater into freshwater, to meet future water needs. Meanwhile, water has become a commodity that supports a $400 billion global industry -- the third largest behind electricity and oil.

CNN spoke to "FLOW" director Irena Salina and Maude Barlow, author of "Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water." Some of their answers have been condensed.

CNN: Why do we have a global water crisis?

Barlow: The demand for fresh water in our world over the next 30 years is far outstripping the supply. Not that the water isn't somewhere on the planet still -- but we have polluted it, diverted it, allowed it to get poisoned by seawater. One way or another, we have taken accessible clean water ... and we have rendered it unusable. We take massive amounts [of water] and we irrigate the desert, where it evaporates. We're pumping groundwater all over the world far faster that it can be replenished by nature. We are actually running out of fresh, clean water everywhere in the world, including here in North America. We have to give up this myth of abundance. We have come to the limits of the planet.

Is climate change exacerbating the problem?

Barlow: Oh, yes. They are intricately linked. Global warming warms up massive bodies of water, which evaporate more quickly than they should. Warming is melting all the glaciers in the world. So there's no question that greenhouse gas-induced climate change is impacting water.

Your film illustrates how in some parts of the world, the public water supply is now controlled by corporations. What's wrong with privatization of water?

Barlow: When you have a demand that's growing exponentially, and a supply that's decreasing exponentially, then whoever makes the decisions around water suddenly becomes very important. Private corporations have decided that this is more important than oil. They're going to make more money and become more powerful owning and distributing water than they can from anything else. All of these [corporate] practices mean ... the poor of the world don't have access to [affordable] clean water.

The film raises an important question: Is water a commodity, like oil, or is it a common natural resource?

Barlow: That's the essential question, and until we get that straight in the world, we're going to continue to have these conflicts. And there are going to be [more] conflicts as the big superpowers seek new water sources outside their borders. There are conflicts, obviously, between the needs of humans and nature. We're taking more than our share. We argue that if you ask the question, 'Who owns water?' the answer is that nobody owns it. It belongs to the earth. It belongs to all species. It belongs to future generations. It's a public trust and a human right.

The World Bank says it's not a human right, it's a human need -- and therefore the private sector can provide this just as well as the public sector. However, we say that ... you can't deny somebody water because they can't pay for it. And we're working right now towards a covenant at the United Nations that would declare water a human right. My country, Canada, and your country, the United States, are both in opposition to this.

There's a place for [desalination and recycling] technology, and there's a place even for the private sector, but it will all have to fit into the larger twin goals of conservation and source protection on one hand, and justice and equity on the other. Those are the twin foundations of a water-secure future. There will be no human future on this planet unless we get our act together.

If we're facing a water crisis, how do we fix it?

Salina: If world leaders, the international finance institutions, the U.N. and other governmental organizations really wanted to solve the problems related to water, they would take immediate action at the national and international levels. We would see a U.N. treaty that guarantees people sufficient potable water. We would see the G8 nations step up and provide resources for the provision of water to the urban and rural poor.

If our own leaders were serious about solving problems, we would not allow corporations to discharge pollutants into our water sources. And if they were serious about solving water problems -- instead of spending billions on developing technologies that clean up pollution -- we would be using resources to prevent water pollution in the first place. It will take political will. It will also take efforts on our part as individuals and communities.

What do you hope your film accomplishes?

Salina: The film is a first step to bring some awareness. You plant the seed of awareness, then action can take place. People deeply, passionately care about their water. It's not like Americans don't care. But they need to have the tools [to get involved]. A year from now [we hope] that maybe people will look at water differently. It's coming, drop by drop. That's how we make change.