Robotic Arm Malfunction Leaves Spacewalking Astronaut Temporarily Stuck

This story was updated at 6:37 p.m. ET.

HOUSTON– A pair of spacewalking astronauts working outside the International Space Station zoomed through their mission's first spacewalk today (Feb. 28) despite a system failure that temporarily shut down the orbiting lab's robotic arm while someone was riding it.

Discovery shuttle astronauts Steven Bowen and Alvin Drew wereoutside the space stationworking with a huge ammonia pump– a refrigerator-size piece of the station's cooling system– when the robotic arm went offline. Bowen, stuck holding the ammonia pump at the end of the 57-foot (17-meter) robotic arm, simply had to wait it out.

"I'm fine as long as it's not too much longer," Bowen said.

Turns out, he didn't have to wait too long. Soon, crewmates inside the station fired up a backup system.

"I've got a hot-shot station crew that moved this robotic work station in a second," station astronaut Michael Barratt of NASA radioed the spacewalkers.

Stuck on a station arm

The robotics system glitch occurred inside the station's seven-windowCupola module, which gives robotic arm operators panoramic views of the orbiting lab's exterior while moving its robotic arm. It shut down as station commander Scott Kelly and Barratt were maneuvering Bowen to his next worksite.

Kelly and Barratt quickly moved to a twin work station in the Discovery Laboratory and were able to resume their work after only a short delay. {Inside and Out: The International Space Station}

"We're only 15 minutes down, so that was a nice, quick recovery from that," said Discovery astronaut Nicole Stott, who helped choreograph the spacewalkers.

The delay pushed the spacewalkers about 20 minutes behind schedule, but Bowen and Drew managed to make up some of that time during later tasks.

Robotics officers here at NASA's Johnson Space Center were eventually able to get the Cupola work station back up and running, and kept it in a back-up mode for the rest of the spacewalk.

Space in a bottle?

Aside from the robotics control shutdown, the first spacewalk ofDiscovery's STS-133 missionwent relatively smooth. A second spacewalk is set for Wednesday (March 2).

Today's spacewalk ended at 5:20 p.m. EST (2220 GMT) for a total of 6 hours and 34 minutes of orbital work.

Bowen and Drew installed a power extension cable, moved the broken ammonia pump to a new storage point, attached a wedge under one of the station's exterior cameras and performed other maintenance activities.

Drew even captured some of the vacuum ofspace in a metal bottlefor a science experiment sponsored by Japan's space agency. The container will be returned to Earth at the end of Discovery's STS-133 mission.

Inside Discovery, Stott played the song"Message in a Bottle" by the Police to commemorate the occasion.

Big spaceships, bigger space station

While working outside, Bowen and Drew caught some unique views of the space station, which is currently home to an international collection of spacecraft from four different space fleets.

The spaceship mix includes: a European cargo ship called the Automated Transfer Vehicle 2 (ATV), a Japanese cargo vessel known as HTV-2, a Russian cargo ship, two Russian Soyuz crew capsules and the shuttle Discovery.

"I've decided the HTV and ATV are both big," Bowen joked as he stood at the tip of the station's robotic arm to retrieve the broken cooling pump module.

Today's spacewalk was Bowen's sixth and the first for Drew.

Bowen, a veteran spacewalker, was a last-minute crew replacement for astronaut Timothy Kopra, who was the STS-133 mission's lead spacewalker. Kopra wasinjured in a bicycle accidentless than six weeks before Discovery's launch, forcing him to sit out on the orbiter's historic final flight.

Kopra remained involved in today's spacewalk, however, by providing support from mission control here at the Johnson Space Center.

"You're a good man for the job," Kopra radioed to Bowen prior to the start of the spacewalk.

At the end of the spacewalk, Kopra was one of the first people to congratulate the two spacewalkers on a successful outing. He especially congratulated rookie spacewalker Drew.

"Congratulations on a stellar job on your first spacewalk," Kopra told Drew."Good job, dude."

Drew also became the 200th person in history to work in the vacuum of space, according to NASA officials.

Shortly after Bowen and Drew returned inside the space station, Mission Control radioed the station and shuttle crews to say that Discovery's STS-133 mission will be extended an extra day.

The extra day will give the crew the opportunity to complete more work on a storage module that will be attached to the station's Unity node tomorrow.

You can follow SPACE.com Staff Writer Denise Chow on Twitter@denisechowas she covers Discovery's final space voyage from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.Visit SPACE.com for complete coverage ofDiscovery's final mission STS-133.

• Gallery: Shuttle Discovery's Final Mission– STS-133
• Spacewalking Astronauts Capture Space in a Bottle
• Vote Now: The 21st Century's Greatest Space Innovators

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NASA Solar Sail Visible Over Parts of U.S. and Canada

NASA's first solar sail to circle Earth in low orbit is making regular evening passes over much of the United States and Canada over the next week, and may be visible to skywatchers if conditions are clear.

The solar sail satellite, calledNanoSail-D, is making promising passes over the 48 contiguous U.S. states and southern Canada through Monday, March 7.

NASA launched NanoSail-D in November and the satellitesuccessfully deployed its 100-square-foot polymer sail in low-Earth orbit on Jan. 20 after weeks of delay. NASA officials expect the solar sail to stay in low-Earth orbit until at least April 1– possibly through mid-May– depending on atmospheric conditions. {Photos: Spotting Spaceships and Satellites}

If you have not yet seen it, this week’s series of evening passes will likely give observers their best opportunity to sight this most unusual artificial satellite.

This is great news for die-hard skywatchers, since NASA and the skywatching website Spaceweather.com are holding aNanoSail-D space photography contestfor the best photos of the solar sail as it soars across the night sky. First prize is $500. 

What to look for

Trying to actually see NanoSail-D as it passes over your location will be a bit more difficult than trying to make a sighting of the International Space Station or one of the thousands of other man-made objects currently orbiting our planet. 

For one thing, unlike a typical satellite, NanoSail-D is a flat one-dimensional object. Like all orbiting satellites, visibility will depend on how much sunlight is illuminating it at any given moment.

Astronomers measure an object's brightness in space on a reverse scale called magnitude. The lower the number of an object's magnitude, the brighter it appears in the sky. {How to Spot Satellites in Space}

So far, most observers who have gotten a look at the sail as it moved across their local sky have described it as relatively dim, with brightness estimates ranging from magnitude +4 to +8. 

To give you an idea of what this range means, under a dark, moonless sky, the threshold for naked eye visibility is considered to be magnitude +6.

So a magnitude +4 object would appear rather faint to the unaided eye. An object of magnitude +8 would only be visible using binoculars or a small telescope.  

But other observers have reported seeing NanoSail-D appear to briefly"flash" or"flare" into easy visibility, becoming as bright as magnitude +2 which is equal to Polaris (the North Star) in brightness.

Solar sail"flares"

Such sudden increases in brilliance occur when the sail turns in just the right direction to allow a glint of sunlight to be reflected directly back to the observer causing a sudden increase in brightness. And there have been a few occasions where fortuitously placed observers have witnessed even more dazzling flares. 

For example, skywatcher Arto Oksanen caught a NanoSail-D flare while observing from the Nyrölä Observatory in Finland. In the photo, which he provided to SPACE.com, it clearly shows the bright steak made when the sail appeared to briefly flare in brightness.

"I saw it in Perseus near the zenith as it brightened to negative magnitude, clearly brighter than any star in Perseus or Orion. It could have been even brighter than Sirius (the brightest star in the sky) at the peak," Oksanen said.

Oksanen estimated the flare at magnitude -2, which is roughly equal to the brightness of Jupiter, which is currently visible low in the western sky after sunset.

Another observer, George Kristiansen from the United Kingdom, saw NanoSail-D as"… a dot travelling in the right direction at the right time, but it was acting very strangely - it was sporadically flashing between visibility and invisibility with no clear period, and I even saw it flash brighter than everything else in the sky, and then back down to invisibility, in about half a second."

Because the orbit of NanoSail-D has begun to decay as it skims the top of Earth's atmosphere, future glints of sunlight from the sail could intensify in brightness to rival the bright planet Venus, or even brighter.

How can I see NanoSail-D?

You stand your best chance of catching a glimpse of NanoSail-D by knowing when it is passing over your area. TheHeavens-Above websiteprovides sighting predictions of NanoSail-D for any place on Earth over the next 10 days. 

NASA will be posting tracking maps depicting NanoSail-Dpassing over North America here. Maps for upcoming nights will be added as they become available.

Another site to try is"Real Time Satellite Tracking." There, you can not only track NanoSail-D (and a variety of other satellites) on an ever-changing world map, but you can also get 5-day sighting predictions as well.

You can also use an app (courtesy of Spaceweather.com) to get latest satellite predictions on your iPhone. Just go to:http://simpleflybys.com/. 

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

• Gallery: Spotting Satellites and Spaceships From Earth
• How to Spot Satellites
• Telescopes for Beginners

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The Bitter Side of Diet Soda: Strokes

Drinking diet soda is associated with a 50-percent increase in stroke risk, according to a study presented earlier this month at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles.

Not surprisingly, reaction to the news among dieters has been disparaging and defensive, as each person cycles through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, from denial and anger to bargaining, depression and acceptance.

"Now the health police tell us we can't drink Diet Coke," captures the tone on many of the diet blogs.

If it's any consolation fordiet-soda fans, the results presented at the meeting— based on preliminary analysis from a 2,500-person subset of the ongoing Northern Manhattan Study (NOMAS)— are far from definitive. There's no way to tell yet, for example, what ingredient would be associated with strokes or whether lifestyle choices among drinkers are the real cause.

That said, is drinking diet soda safe? Of course not, especially when it is the main source of liquid refreshment every day. You're drinking copious amounts of phosphoric acid, artificial colors, artificial flavors, and some laboratory-crafted chemical thattricks your braininto perceiving the sensation of sweet.

Diet soda is an alternative to regular soda, but neither is healthy. You are merely trading calories from sugar for chemicals of questionable nature.

Hooked on sugar

The proliferation of diet soda cuts to the core of what's wrong withthe Western diet. The Western approach is to remove the most obvious dangers from an unhealthy habit— in this case, removing the 12 teaspoons of sugar per can of fizzy waterlaced with acids, colors and flavors of uncertain origin— so that we can continue that habit in denial of other dangers.

The underlying problem is that we areaddicted to sugar; beverages without a sweetener now seem bland. For the first million years or so of pre-human and human existence, water was adequate to quench our thirst. But apparently no longer.

Hold the sugar and corn syrup and pass the aspartame. Some doctors actually encourage dieters to drink diet soda to cut calories instead of recommending zero-calorie water or tea.

We see this"short-cut" diet phenomenon also among some people who want to be vegetarian. They eat vegetarian hot dogs and other faux-meat dishes made from heavily processed soy and vegetable meal loaded with salt, sugar and fat. This is likely unhealthier than the meat they are shunning.

So, similarly, at issue is that we are so addicted to meat that meals without it no longer seem satiating. To do vegetarianism right, you'd have to learn how to cook lentils, beans, grains and other staples of a vegetarian diet, and that's too consuming for many people.

Writing on the wall

Studies on diet soda have been flawed, because researchers have discounted one important fact: Those drinking diet soda likely drink it not because they are health nuts but because they have a certain health condition. They are either overweight or diabetic. Thus, they are at risk for strokes, heart attacks and cancer regardless of the type of beverage they prefer.

One of the more impressive aspects of the NOMAS project is that researchers can control for weight and other health conditions. It's inevitable that NOMAS and similar studies will tease out the dangers of drinking too much soda in general, either diet or regular.

It is a shame the United States cannot adopt Asia's tradition of unsweetened teas, ubiquitous in shops and vending machines. But even otherwise healthy green tea in the United States is tainted with sugar or artificial sweetener— yet another example of corrupting a healthy alternative.

The bottom line is that dieters need to cycle through those Kubler-Ross stages to reach acceptance: Diet soda is no healthy alternative, and nothing beats water.

Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books"Bad Medicine" and"Food At Work." His column,Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience.

• 10 Easy Paths to Self Destruction
• 7 Ways to Raise Your Risk of Stroke
• Bad Habits: Why We Can't Stop

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Scientists scrutinize rise in baby dolphin deaths

NEW ORLEANS– Scientists are trying to figure out what killed 53 bottlenose dolphins— many of them babies— so far this year in the Gulf of Mexico, as five more of their carcasses washed up Thursday in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

It's likely to be months before they get back lab work showing what caused the spontaneous abortions, premature births, deaths shortly after birth and adult deaths said Blair Mase, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's stranding coordinator for the Gulf Coast.

"It's not like CSI where the very next day they have the results in. It doesn't work that way, unfortunately,"she said.

Calves and fetuses made up at least 85 percent of the deaths in Alabama, 60 percent or more of those in Mississippi and Florida and 20 percent in Louisiana, according to NOAA figures.

The Mississippi and Alabama deaths are in areas where bottlenose dolphins go to calve, said Moby Solangi, director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport.

Solangi said he'd never seen anything like the calf deaths, or found word of anything like it in 30 years of records from his area— Alabama, Mississippi and east Louisiana.

However, Mase said 68 dolphins that washed up in east Texas in March 2007 also included an unusually large number of calves. The bodies were too decomposed to find the cause, she said.

Although scientists are investigating whether the deaths are related to last year's huge BP oil spill, Mase confirmed that toxins from oil or chemicals used to disperse it may be a less likely cause than cold or disease. That's because only one species of dolphin— and no other kind of animal— is dying, and because the calf deaths appear concentrated in Mississippi and Alabama rather than Gulf-wide.

The dolphins found Thursday include three off Louisiana and one each off Mississippi and Alabama, NOAA spokeswoman Kim Amendola said. The bodies had not been retrieved, so ages and sizes were not known, she said.

Since Jan. 1, 19 dead dolphins have been found off Louisiana, 16 off Mississippi, 15 in Alabama and three in the Florida Panhandle. Mississippi and Alabama usually each see two to four dolphin strandings a month at this time of year, Mase said.

Solangi said only six of the 23 calves found by Wednesday in Mississippi and Alabama were in good enough condition for a necropsy, the animal version of an autopsy.

"We've collected tissues and sent them off to various laboratories for pathology and toxicology,"he said."All we can tell is some of them may have been premature, some of them were stillborn and others may have just survived for a day or two and died."

Dolphins usually calve in March and April, he said.

Mase said dolphin stranding reports have been unusually high since January 2010. Last winter's deaths probably were caused by extreme cold, she said."It was a very, very cold winter last year. We had a lot of turtle mortality, manatee mortality and dolphin mortality."

The Deepwater Horizon exploded into flames on April 20 and sank four days later. The spill response brought crews out to look for oiled wildlife and to clean the remote areas where most strandings occur, Mase said.

Because those areas are remote, there's no way to know the true numbers of dolphin strandings and deaths."The number is not absolute— just a kind of barometer,"Mase said.

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Space Shuttle Discovery By-the-Numbers: Nearly 27 Years as NASA's Space Workhorse

NASA's space shuttle Discovery may be hanging up its wings after one last mission, but it will leave a long legacy of performance in orbit that will be a challenge for any future spacecraft to match.

Discovery is NASA'soldest flying space shuttleand the most traveled winged spaceship in the fleet. It has flown more missions, and carried more astronaut crewmembers, than any of NASA's other shuttles, agency officials have said.

The shuttle isflying its final mission– STS-133– before being retired along with the rest of NASA's orbiters later this year. The 11-day mission launches today (Feb. 24) and will deliver a new storage room and humanoid robot to the International Space Station. {Gallery: Building Space Shuttle Discovery}

"Discovery has been a really remarkable vehicle for us and the program," NASA test director Jeff Spaulding told reporters this week."She still has a few more miles to go before she sleeps, though."

Here's a by-the-numbers look at Discovery's lasting legacy in space that, according to NASA, will cement the shuttle's place in the fleet's record books:

143 million:The number of miles Discovery has traveled so far, with one flight remaining. This is a distance record unmatched amongNASA's space shuttle fleet. The miles traveled by Discovery could have carried it to the moon and back 288 times, or on 1 1/2 trips to the sun.

40,000:The number of spectators NASA reportedly anticipated to have watching Discovery's final launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

17,400:The speed at which Discovery travels (in miles per hour) to remain in orbit. It's about Mach 25, or five times the speed of a bullet.

5,628:The number of orbits Discovery has flown around the Earth. During spaceflight, Discovery completes one orbit around Earth every 90 minutes.

1984:The year Discovery blasted off on its maiden space voyage.Discovery's first flightwas NASA's STS-41D mission, which launched on Aug. 30 carrying three communications satellites and an experimental solar array wing. The mission was commanded by astronaut Henry Hartsfield.

363:The number of cumulative days Discovery will have flown in space by the end of its career. Altogether, that's just over 51 weeks. Put another way, if you were to string all of Discovery's mission's together into one mission, the shuttle would be in space for almost an entire year.

246:The number of crewmembers Discovery has carried during its space career so far. According to NASA, Discovery has been the ultimate space taxi and carried the most astronauts of any shuttle.

39:The number of missions Discovery will have flown by the time it is retired.

13:The number of times Discovery will have docked with the International Space Station after it is retired.

5:The number of astronauts that marked a first-ever in space when they flew on Discovery. According to NASA, they include: the first female to ever pilot a spacecraft (former astronaut Eileen Collins); the oldest person to fly in space (former astronaut John Glenn); the first African-American to perform a spacewalk (former astronaut Bernard Harris); the first cosmonaut to fly on an American spacecraft (Russian spaceflyer Sergei Krikalev); and the first sitting member of Congress to fly in space (former Utah Senator Jake Garn).

4:The number of years it took tobuild the space shuttle Discovery. The shuttle was completed in October 1983 in Palmdale, Calif., and was shipped a month later to NASA piggyback atop the agency's modified Boeing 747 shuttle carrier craft. Four is also the maximum number of times the shuttle has flown in space in a single year. In 1985, Discovery set the bar for number of flights by one orbiter in one year.

3:The number of satellites Discovery carried during its first launch. Discovery was also NASA's third space shuttle built for orbital flight. It was built after the shuttles Columbia and Challenger.

2:The number of return-to-flight missions Discovery has flown to help NASA resume shuttle flights. Discovery was the shuttle that flew the STS-26 mission two years after theloss of shuttle Challengerand its crew during launch on Jan. 28, 1986. The shuttle also flew the STS-114 mission that followed the 2003 loss of shuttle Columbia and its seven-astronaut crew. That mission launched in July 2005.

1:The number of actual dockings with Russia's Space Station Mir. Discovery actually visited the Mir station twice. It was the first U.S. shuttle to rendezvous with (but not dock at) Mir in 1995. Its second and last trip to Mir was in 1998, when it actually linked up with the Russian space station.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter@tariqjmalik. Staff writer Denise Chow (@denisechow) is providing mission coverage of Discovery's final space voyage from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

• Photos: Shuttle Discovery's Final Mission - STS-133
• Video: Shuttle Discovery - NASA's Most-Flown Orbiter (Part 1)
• Vote Now: Greatest Space Innovators of the 21st Century

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Gas drillers make waves in Pa. with NFL tickets

HARRISBURG, Pa.– Members of the natural gas industry have showered campaign contributions and offers of Super Bowl tickets on some Pennsylvania officials, who say their policy decisions won't be influenced by it.

But the executive director of the government watchdog Common Cause Pennsylvania says it's human nature to be influenced. Executive Director Barry Kauffman says campaign contributions and gifts typically get the givers access to public officials.

Unlike most states, Pennsylvania has no limits on individual campaign contributions or gifts to public officials.

New Republican Gov. Tom Corbett received nearly $1 million in campaign contributions from the gas industry.

Corbett supports the expansion of drilling on state forest lands and has pledged to oppose any tax on production in the Marcellus Shale formation primarily beneath Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio. He says contributions won't influence policy decisions.

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Big Mass. utility signs deals, bypasses Cape Wind

BOSTON– The second-largest utility in Massachusetts has agreed to buy electricity from three wind power companies to help it meet renewable power mandates, but it won't be buying from a high-profile wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod.

On Friday, NStar filed contracts with the Department of Public Utilities to buy power from Hoosac Wind in Massachusetts, Groton Wind in New Hampshire and Blue Sky East in Maine.

Cape Wind, the nation's first offshore wind farm, is still trying to find a buyer for half its power. It agreed last year to a 15-year deal to sell the first half to National Grid starting at 18.7 cents per kilowatt hour, and increasing 3.5 percent annually.

If Cape Wind doesn't sell the rest of its power within the next several months, it may be forced to move ahead with a project smaller than the 130-turbine, 468-megawatt wind farm planned in Nantucket Sound.

NStar is the only other Massachusetts utility big enough to buy a large portion of Cape Wind's power. Its three deals, if approved by state regulators, would eliminate any chance that it would buy all of the power Cape Wind still has on the market, though it could conceivably buy a portion of it.

Gov. Deval Patrick's administration has backed Cape Wind vigorously, but NStar said months ago it had decided to pursue cheaper renewable energy sources.

The three contracts NStar signed, ranging from 10 to 15 years, equal about 109 megawatts of power. The prices NStar has agreed to pay for the power weren't disclosed, and NStar said such pricing is confidential.

"The contracts represent a good value for onshore wind resources for our customers,"said NStar spokeswoman Caroline Allen.

Cape Wind spokesman Mark Rodgers said the deals satisfy just a small part of the region's growing demand for renewable power, which exceeds what could be supplied by Cape Wind and all planned land wind and solar projects combined.

"Today's announcement represents only a modest portion of the total quantity of clean power that will need to be purchased,"he said.

"We remain confident that the unique features of Cape Wind, such as strong production during times of peak electric demand and its close proximity to a region that needs its electricity, will continue to make it attractive to other potential buyers,"Rodgers said.

NStar signed all three contracts Dec. 23 and filed them within a required 60-day window Friday. NStar is asking state regulators to approve the contracts within 180 days.

Though the prices on the recent deals weren't disclosed, a 10-year deal NStar has with TransCanada to buy power from a Maine wind farm is a flat 10.5 cents per kilowatt hour.

The three new contracts represent about 1.6 percent of NStar's demand, and the utility is required to secure 3 percent of its electricity demand through long-term contracts with renewable power producers by mid-2014. The company will be trying to secure more deals to meet that requirement in the coming years, Allen said.

According to the contracts, the roughly 29-megawatt Hoosac project, in Monroe, Mass., and Florida, Mass., is set to be running by July 2012, the 32-megawatt Blue Sky East wind farm in Eastbrook, Maine, is scheduled to be operating by May 2012, and the 48-megawatt Groton project in Groton, N.H., is scheduled to be operating by December 2012.

The Blue Sky deal is for 15 years, while other two are both for 10. All are fixed-priced deals, meaning the price per kilowatt hour won't increase over time. The Hoosac and Groton projects are owned by the Spanish power utility Iberdrola SA. Blue Sky is owned by Boston-based First Wind.

In a separate transaction, NStar is also seeking approval for a merger with Northeast Utilities, which would create the largest utility in New England with 3.5 million electric and gas customers in three states.

Recent comments and court filings indicate NStar's decision about Cape Wind could be a factor when the merger goes before Massachusetts regulators.

For instance, just before he left office in December, the state's former energy chief, Ian Bowles, argued that large utility mergers needed a"new standard of review"that guarantees certain public benefits, including advancing"the development of the commonwealth's solar and offshore wind resources."

Cape Wind, which hopes to begin generating power by 2013, is by far the state's largest offshore wind and renewable power project and been repeatedly touted by officials as a cornerstone of its emerging renewable energy industry.

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs declined to comment, citing the ongoing state review of the NStar merger with Northeast Utilites.

NStar's Allen also cited the merger review and said it would be inappropriate to comment on whether its recent contracts could affect it.

She did say the merger would be good for the state's renewable energy goals.

"A combined company will be better able to advocate on a national level and a state level for green policies,"Allen said.

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50 million'environmental refugees'by 2020, experts say

WASHINGTON (AFP)– Fifty million"environmental refugees" will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday.

"In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees," University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"When people are not living in sustainable conditions, they migrate," she continued, outlining with the other speakers how climate change is impacting both food security and food safety, or the amount of food available and the healthfulness of that food.

Southern Europe is already seeing a sharp increase in what has long been a slow but steady flow of migrants from Africa, many of whom risk their lives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain from Morocco or sail in makeshift vessels to Italy from Libya and Tunisia.

The flow recently grew to a flood after a month of protests in Tunisia, set off by food shortages and widespread unemployment and poverty, brought down the government of longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, said Michigan State University professor Ewen Todd, who predicted there will be more of the same.

"What we saw in Tunisia -- a change in government and suddenly there are a whole lot of people going to Italy -- this is going to be the pattern," Todd told AFP.

"Already, Africans are going in small droves up to Spain, Germany and wherever from different countries in the Mediterranean region, but we're going to see many, many more trying to go north when food stress comes in. And it was food shortages that put the people of Tunisia and Egypt over the top.

"In many Middle Eastern and North African countries," he continued,"you have a cocktail of politics, religion and other things, but often it's just poor people saying'I've got to survive, I've got to eat, I've got to feed my family' that ignites things."

Environmental refugees were described in 2001 by Norman Myers of Oxford University as"a new phenomenon" created by climate change.

"These are people who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems, together with the associated problems of population pressures and profound poverty," Myers wrote in a journal of Britain's Royal Society in 2001.

"In their desperation, these people feel they have no alternative but to seek sanctuary elsewhere, however hazardous the attempt."

Monday's panel cited ways in which climate change has impacted food security and safety.

Warmer winters allow pests that carry plant diseases to survive over the cold months and attack crops in the spring, soil physicist Ray Knighton of the US Department of Agriculture said.

Increased rainfall -- another result of climate change -- when coupled with more fungal pathogens can"dramatically impact crop yield and quality," said Knighton, adding that greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollutants have changed plant structures and reduced crops' defenses to pests and pathogens.

Tirado noted that floods caused by heavy precipitation can spread diseases carried in animal waste into the human food chain.

The World Health Organization has estimated that 2.2 million deaths in developing countries are caused each year by food and water-borne diseases, said Sandra Hoffmann of the US Department of Agriculture.

And yet, the global economic crisis has pushed climate change"down in priority" on governments' to-do lists, said Todd.

"If you're suffering economically, climate change is not going to be the first thing you fund.

"Any action you take will be costly, be it in terms of prestige, economics, less oil... I think it's going to take a real crisis to get world opinion to change," he added.

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Winter storm cancels hundreds of flights in Minn.

MINNEAPOLIS– Hundreds of flights at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport have been canceled as a major winter storm blows into the state.

Airport spokeswoman Melissa Scovronski (scov-RON-ski) said Delta canceled about 700 flights Sunday and other airlines have thinned out their schedules.

She says all four runways at the airport are working now, but airport officials expect they will be down to one runway by the end of the day.

Scovronski says travelers should check with their airline before going to the airport.

The National Weather Service has declared a winter storm warning for the Twin Cities with a prediction that 10 to 15 inches of snow could fall by midway Monday.

A blizzard warning for portions of west central and southwestern Minnesota has been declared through noon Monday.

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PG&E: Would not have monitored pipe differently

SAN JOSE, Calif.– The San Jose Mercury News reports that despite revelations that its records did not provide complete details of its natural gas pipeline that exploded in a suburban San Francisco neighborhood last fall, officials at Pacific Gas& Electric Co. say they would not have monitored the pipeline any differently.

PG&E spokesman Joe Molica told the newspaper that even if its records had shown a welded seam, no changes would have been made in how the utility keeps track of the pipeline in San Bruno.

PG&E officials say federal regulations establish the same guidelines for pipes with seams and seamless pipes.

Federal investigators have determined that the blast, which killed eight people and left dozens of homes uninhabitable, originated at a poorly installed weld on the seam.

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NASA Clears Shuttle Discovery for Feb. 24 Launch

This story was updated at 7:00 p.m. EST.

After an hours-long meeting at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA's top officials unanimously cleared the space shuttle Discovery for its final launch next Thursday (Feb. 24).

NASA shuttle managers made the decision today (Feb. 18) during the mission's Flight Readiness Review, where they discussed the current state of Discovery, the International Space Station, and theastronauts who will fly the orbiteron its 39th and final flight.

Following the meeting, NASA officially set the shuttle's launch date and time for Feb. 24 at 4:50 p.m. EST (2150 GMT). {Gallery: Building Space Shuttle Discovery}

"I can't say enough about the work the teams have done, they did a tremendous job," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said in a news briefing today.

Discovery is targeted to liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on the same day that the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle-2 (ATV-2) cargo ship is scheduled to arrive and dock at the space station.

Initially, NASA officials thought the space traffic jam would force mission planners to delay Discovery's launch by one day– to Feb. 25. But, NASA officials decided early in today's meeting that changing the shuttle's launch date is not necessary.

"The ATV is going to dock about six hours before we launch," said Mike Moses, NASA's shuttle integration manager. "We will have tanked the vehicle by then. If they run into a problem during docking, we still might launch that day, we might not– we'll have to talk about that one in real time."

Last week, space shuttle program managers met and unanimously agreed to proceed toward the orbiter's targeted launch. Officials also discussed the possibility of adding a bonus photo session to the flight, in which the Russian Soyuz capsule will undock from the space station and fly around to snapphotographs of Discoverywhile the ship is docked to the fully completed orbiting lab.

Theunique photo opportunitywas discussed during today's Flight Readiness Review (FRR), but aNASA officials confirmed today that a final decision on the matter will not be made prior to Discovery's launch.

"It's okay from a flight readiness review standpoint, but it's really up to the team to see what happens," Gerstenmaier said.

Discovery's STS-133 mission is an 11-day flight to deliver a humanoid robot and a new storage room to the International Space Station. The mission has already been delayed months because of fuel tank problems. It will be the final flight of shuttle Discovery before NASA retires its three-orbiter fleet later this year.

NASA is ending itsspace shuttle programthis year after 30 years of spaceflight to make way for new exploration plans that call for sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s.

Once the shuttle fleet retires, NASA will rely on unmanned spacecraft built by Europe, Russia and Japan to deliver cargo to the space station until American-built commercial spacecraft become available.

You can follow SPACE.com Staff Writer Denise Chow on Twitter@denisechow.

• Building Space Shuttle Discovery
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Scientists Monitor Killer Mice… From Space

NASA satellites hovering hundreds of kilometers above the Earth may now be able to track a very terrestrial threat: mice. 

According to a new study published Wednesday (Feb. 16) in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, satellite images showing changes in vegetation (food for mice) can be used to predict the risk of mouse-borne disease outbreaks. Flourishing vegetation generally means a mouse baby boom, and that, in turn, meansmore rodents carrying hantavirus, a respiratory disease that can be fatal when spread to humans.

The method"potentially could be applied to any animal that responds to vegetation," study co-author Denise Dearing, a biologist at the University of Utah, said in a statement."It would have to be calibrated against each specific species of rodent and the disease, but it's really powerful when it's done."

Other diseases spread from wild animals to humans include rat-bite fever,Lyme diseaseand bubonic plague, Dearing said.

Hantavirus and hantanauts

Hantavirus is an ailment spread when peopleinhale dustcontaining mouse feces or urine. Only 503 human cases of hantavirus were reported between 1993 and 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the disease is serious: About 36 percent of cases were fatal.

Dearing and her colleagues wanted a way to not just track outbreaks, but to predict them. The research team set about collecting two types of data. First, they trapped hundreds of mice during six field expeditions over three years. Each mouse was tagged and tested for the disease before being released.

When trapping first began, the researchers feared contracting hantavirus by handling the trapped rodents. To protect themselves, they initially donned biohazard suits that look like spacesuits, earning the nickname"hantanauts." After medical researchers learned that hantavirus isn't easily transmitted by handling mice (people usually get it when cleaning out dusty, enclosed spaces contaminated with mousefeces), the research team was able to ditch the suits.

Second, the team pulled data from MODIS, or the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, a sensor on NASA's Terra satellite. The MODIS images of the field area in Juab County, Utah, were analyzed to measure the green light reflected by plants' leaves and the infrared light that plants absorb. More green and less red meant more vegetation.

Disease-monitoring from space

The researchers expected the mouse population to surge after vegetation peaked, but they didn't know how long it would take. They tested correlations between vegetation and the number of trapped and infected mice at about three-and-a-half months after a vegetation peak, one year after, and one year and three-and-a-half months after.

They found that the mouse population boomed one year after a vegetation surge and then boomed again three-and-a-half months after that. The proportion of hantavirus-infected mice trapped didn't change, but the absolute number of infected mice went up along with the population.

"You can think of it as a kind of air drop of food for the mice," study co-author Thomas Cova, a geography professor at the University of Utah, said in a statement."It's rained and suddenly there's just so much food that they're rich. They get fat, population density goes up, and about a year-and-a-half later, population peaks."

Because the satellite vegetation images so clearly predict mouse population booms, health officials could use the information to pinpoint wherehantavirus outbreaksare most likely to occur.

"Although the focus of this work is hantavirus in deer mice, it contributes to our broader understanding of how to monitor the spread of infectious diseases from space, which in the long run could save lives," Cova said.

You can followLiveScience Senior Writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter@sipappas.

• Top 10 Mysterious Diseases
• Predicting the Next Major Virus
• Inside Look: How Viruses Invade Us

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Montana governor threat: shoot wolves now, ask questions later

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters)– Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer declared on Wednesday he was ready to order state game officials to kill off entire wolf packs in defiance of federal protections under the Endangered Species Act.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the two-term Democrat cited his authority as governor to uphold citizens' rights"to protect their property and to continue to enjoy Montana's cherished wildlife heritage and traditions."

Schweitzer said he was driven to act out of an urgent need to assist ranchers and sportsmen left unable to control wolves posing a serious threat to livestock and elk herds.

"If there is a dang wolf in your corral attacking your pregnant cow, shoot that wolf. And if its pals are in the corral, shoot them, too," Schweitzer told Reuters in a telephone interview.

His letter comes as rising tensions over wolves in the Northern Rockies, including Idaho and Wyoming, are playing out in the courts, Congress and state legislatures.

"I cannot continue to ignore the crying need for workable wolf management while Montana waits, and waits, and waits," Schweitzer wrote.

Last week, federal wildlife officials proposed letting Idaho kill off scores of wolves in what would be the largest government-sanctioned wolf culling in that state since the animals were reintroduced to the Rockies in the mid-1990s.

Schweitzer is threatening to act without seeking federal approval in advance, to order state wildlife agents to"respond to any livestock depredation by removing whole (wolf) packs that kill livestock wherever this may occur."

The governor said he would allow ranchers themselves to kill any wolves that attack their livestock, and to do so without the need for an investigation by wildlife officials.

An estimated 1,700 wolves roam parts of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, all of them generally protected from sport hunting.

Asked if he felt he was violating federal law, Schweitzer said his attorneys had reviewed his letter and advised him that his decrees were"well within our powers."

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department, Kendra Barkoff, said the administration of President Barack Obama agreed that wolf numbers have recovered and should be managed by the states, but"the governor's letter is not the answer."

The government in 2009 removed the wolf from the list of endangered species in Montana and Idaho, but environmentalists sued, and a federal judge in Montana last August ordered wolf protections restored in those two states.

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Greg McCune)

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Twisted Tropics: Growth of Vines Imperils Ecosystem

Trees are the backbone of a forest, but in tropical forests throughout the Americas, trees appear to be losing ground to the woody vines that climb them in a race to reach the sunlight above. This shift could have important implications for tropical ecosystems and for the globe, according to researchers.

"This is the first major structural change in tropical ecosystems that we have witnessed. That is key," said Stefan Schnitzer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Schnitzer is one of the two researchers who pulled together evidence from eight studies that, collective, show a pattern of woody vine growth in American tropical and subtropical forests.

"That is going to have cascading effects on things like species diversity, tropical forest functioning in carbon storage and whole forest water use— really important and practical things that will change the way these forests work," said Schnitzer, who is also a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

Evidence climbs

The first evidence of this pattern emerged in 2002, when a 23-year study showed that woody vines were becoming more abundant relative to trees in the Amazon rain forest, northwest South America and Central America. Since then, other studies have shown an increase in woody vines in Panama, French Guiana and the Bolivian Amazon. For instance, on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, the relative abundance of vines in tree crowns has more than doubled over the past 40 years.

In places like these, the vines are native species, but farther north in subtropical places such as Florida and South Carolina, invasive species, like the infamous kudzu, contribute to the problem, Schnitzer said.

The colder weather of higher latitudes keeps the vines in check, write Schnitzer and his fellow researcher, Frans Bongers from Wageningen University in The Netherlands, in an article published online today (Feb. 14) in the journal Ecology Letters.

The researchers speculate about possible causes: Drier weather in the tropics may aid vines, which, unlike trees, can continue to grow during the dry season. Woody vines are also adept at taking advantage of disturbances in the forest, such as openings created when a tree falls. Once they find a gap, their growth rate far exceeds those of trees. Logging and other human alterations to forests may give woody vines an advantage, and there is also evidence that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere— the most prominent greenhouse gas— may benefit woody vines more than trees, they write.

And not only do woody vines possess all these advantages; the presence of more woody vines appears to slow tree growth and increases tree death.

An altered ecosystem?

As the world faces global warming linked to increased greenhouse gas emissions, tropical forests provide an important"carbon sink," by tying up the carbon from the dominant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide in their wood as they grow, according to Schnitzer.

By interfering with the growth of trees, and increasing tree deaths, the vines reduce the amount of carbon the trees can sequester, but the vines themselves have less wood and store less carbon than the trees they are replacing.

"Vines use tree architecture to ascend to the light. They are more like structural parasites. They use trees to get their leaves to the sun, they don't store very much carbon," he said.

It's possible an increase in woody vines could change the nutrient dynamics of forests, in part because of differences between their leaves and the leaves of tropical trees, all of which ultimately fertilize the forest floor. Water dynamics may also be affected because woody vines appear to exhale more water vapor through their leaves during dry times, researchers said.

The growth of woody vines does not appear to be a worldwide phenomenon, however. Two studies in Africa found evidence of decreases or stable growth.

You can follow LiveSciencewriter Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry.

• Earth Checkup: 10 Signs of the Planet's Health
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• Journey into the Tropical Andes

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BP faces new oil spill lawsuit by Ohio, NY funds

NEW YORK (Reuters)– State pension funds in Ohio and New York filed an amended complaint against BP Plc seeking to recover investment losses due to the Gulf Coast spill, when BP shares tumbled by nearly half, wiping out more than$90 billion of value.

The funds filed the case in the U.S. District Court in the southern district of Texas seeking compensatory and punitive damages against the oil company.

The complaint argues that BP made misstatements regarding the safety processes it put in place, leading investors to believe it had a lower risk profile and inflating its stock.

The two pension funds were named lead plaintiffs in the case in December.

BP declined comment on the suit.

(Reporting by Michael Erman; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Gary Hill)

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India Asked to Partner in NASA's Proposed'MoonRise'Mission

Indian media is reportingthat the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has been approached by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to partner with NASA in aproposed robotic mission to the lunar South Pole region.

The robotic mission is called MoonRise and is one of three candidate missions to be chosen later this year as part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Other candidates include a mission to Venus and another to an asteroid. Previous missions under the New Frontier program include New Horizons, currently in route to Pluto, and JUNO, which would orbit Jupiter.

MoonRise, if selected by NASA, would land in the South Pole Aitkin Basin on the lunar surface with the primary mission of collecting at least a kilogram of rock and soil samples and returning them to Earth for further analysis. The SPA Basin is considered scientifically significant as it is the result of an ancient impact by an asteroid, one of the largest and oldest in the Solar System. It would provide a window into the history of lunar impacts stretching back four billion years.

According to NASA, MoonRise's over all science goals include:

"Determine the SPA Basin impact chronology.

"Investigate processes associated with formation of large impact basins.

"Investigate the materials excavated from the deeper crust and possibly the mantle of the Moon within the SPA Basin.

"Determine the rock types and distribution of thorium and implications for the Moon's thermal evolution.

"Sample and analyze basaltic rock and volcanic glass, which record the composition and chemical evolution of the Moon's far-side mantle beneath the SPA Basin."

If chosen as the next New Frontiers mission, the MoonRise probe would launch from the Kennedy Space Center in October 2016, for a slow, spiral trajectory that would take it to the moon by March 2017. The portion of MoonRise containing the lunar sample would return to Earth in August 2017.

India's role in the mission would be to launch a lunar orbiter similar to the Chandrayaan-I. The lunar orbiter would provide an overall analysis of the MoonRise landing site as well as conduct a further remote examination of the Moon during a planned five year mission.

The NASA portion of the mission is designed to cost no more than $700 million, exclusive of launch costs. The Indian lunar orbiter would cost about $150 million.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written onspace subjectsfor a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.

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Summary Box: Seahawk Drilling seeks bankruptcy

BANKRUPTCY DEAL: Seahawk Drilling Inc. said it has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to sell its fleet of offshore drilling rigs to competitor Hercules Offshore Inc. for $105 million in a stock and cash deal.

THE REASON: Houston-based Seahawk said it's been hurt by a slowdown in Gulf of Mexico drilling following the BP oil spill last April. The government has imposed tough new rules and standards that have sharply slowed offshore drilling.

WHAT IT MEANS: If the bankruptcy plan is approved by the court and regulators, Seahawk Drilling will cease operations as an independent company. It wasn't immediately clear what will happen to the company's 494 employees.

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NASA Discusses Space Shuttle Photo Op for Next Mission

NASA officials met today (Feb. 11) to discuss whether to add a bonus photo session to the upcoming flight of space shuttle Discovery, which is set to make its final trip to the International Space Station later this month.

Shuttle program managers talked about the possibility of having the Russian Soyuz capsule undock from the space station and fly around the space station to snap photographs of Discovery while the ship is docked to the completed orbiting lab.

The discussion was part of a program-level flight review to check if Discovery is ready for its final spaceflight. The mission is slated to launch on Feb. 24 and NASA will conduct one last review of Discovery's preparations on Feb. 18 before clearing the shuttle for launch.

No firm decision on the photo opportunity has been made, but"it is being evaluated by all programs involved, including the station partnership," NASA spokesman Kyle Herring told SPACE.com in an e-mail.

A similar shuttle-space station photo session occurred in 1995 when cosmonauts on a Soyuz photographed Discovery's departure from the Russian space station Mir during NASA's first shuttle flight to that space station. But it has never been performed at the International Space Station.

Program managers at Johnson Space Center in Houston and other NASA centers reviewed Discovery's status, as well as that of its STS-133 astronaut crew and the flight and launch control teams. The meeting ended with a unanimous recommendation to proceed to the agency's readiness review meeting, which is scheduled for next Friday (Feb. 18).

At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., engineering teams have completed work to change a hydrogen gas vent seal on Discovery's external fuel tank. Workers at Launch Pad 39A successfully replaced the seal earlier this week, despite dropping a tool during the repair work.

The accident occurred late Tuesday (Feb. 8), when a tool known as a feeler gauge, which is made up of 13 thin strips of metal held together by a screw, came apart. No one was injured by the falling metal strips, and shuttle technicians closely inspected Discovery overnight and the next day.

Minor foam damage to the backside of the external tank was identified, but it will not need any repair work, NASA officials said. All components from the dropped gauge were located.

No further work is planned at the launch pad this weekend, NASA officials said.

Back at JSC, STS-133 mission specialists Steve Bowen and Alvin Drew spent the day rehearsing procedures for the mission's first spacewalk in a giant underwater simulation facility called the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.

The STS-133 mission will be Discovery's 39th and final flightbefore the space shuttle fleet is retired. The mission has faced numerous delays, first as the result of a hydrogen gas leak, and later because of cracks that were found on the shuttle's fuel tank. The replacement of the hydrogen vent seal this week was the second time that seal has been replaced since Discovery's first launch attempt was scrubbed in early November.

On the upcoming flight, Discovery will deliver a new storage room and humanoid robot assistant to the International Space Station. The 11-day mission will also include two spacewalks.

NASA plans to fly three remaining shuttle missions (including Discovery's STS-133 flight) before the agency retires its orbiter fleet later this year. The space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to deliver supplies and a billion-dollar astrophysics experiment to the International Space Station in mid-April.

A third shuttle flight, the STS-135 flight of shuttle Atlantis, is slated to deliver cargo and space parts to the space station in June. While the flight was approved by President Obama and Congress last year, it is still awaiting funding approval from a congressional appropriations committee.

You can follow SPACE.com Staff Writer Denise Chow on Twitter@denisechow.

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Have Saudis Overstated How Much Oil Is Left?

While the world remains transfixed by the Egyptian revolt, a crisis with equally profound global consequences is quietly brewing elsewhere in the Middle East: WikiLeaks this week released U.S. diplomatic cables suggesting that Saudi Arabia may have vastly overstated its oil reserves - if true, that could dramatically accelerate the arrival of the long-feared"peak oil"moment, when oil production hits its final high before slowly declining, keeping prices rising for the foreseeable future and slowing global economic growth. But not all industry analysts are convinced by the claims in the cables.

The diplomatic cables from the U.S. embassy in Riyadh between 2007 and 2009 cite a former senior executive of Saudi Arabia's state-run Aramco oil company as revealing to American officials that the country's official estimate of 716 billion barrels of oil reserves is, well, hogwash; the real figure is about 40% lower than that, according to the oil executive, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist who until 2004 headed Aramco's exploration department - a seemingly impeccable source. WikiLeaks released the four cables on Tuesday.

As a private citizen no longer representing the company, Husseini was apparently free to speak candidly. And in a November 2007 meeting with the U.S. economic officer in Riyadh, he broke the sobering news that the country's reserves were nowhere near as big as officials were claiming."First, it is possible that Saudi reserves are not as bountiful as sometimes described,"the U.S. Consul General John Kincannon in Riyadh wrote to State Department officials in Washington, reporting on Husseini's analysis,"and the timeline for their production not as unrestrained as Aramco and energy optimists would like to portray."(Read"Is Peak Oil Coming Soon?")

Consider the implications: For years the Opec cartel of oil producing countries - of which Saudi Arabia is by far the most powerful member - as well as Western officials and oil traders have insisted that world will have enough oil for the foreseeable future. That's because Saudi Arabia was believed to be able to pump as much as 12.5 million barrels a day - and that it has"spare capacity"(a term frequently used by oil analysts) to pump on to the market quickly to fill any shortfall of supply from elsewhere caused by war, natural disasters or other unforeseen events. The Kingdom currently produces about 8 million barrels a day, ostensibly leaving it plenty more to release on to world markets at short notice.

The belief that Saudi Arabia is the one country with significant reserves at the ready has given it immense clout in the global oil industry, and the status of a vital partner of the world's biggest consumer, the United States. Oil analysts hang on every word spoken by Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi. Last November, Naimi told journalists that he now considered the"fair price"for oil on world markets to be between $70 and $90 a barrel-an increase of $10 a barrel from his previous upper estimates; with hundreds of thousands of protesters storming the citadel of the Arab world's most populous country, Egypt, oil futures have shot above $100 a barrel this month.

But what if Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep the world's oil supplies flowing smoothly and prices stable? Reading the WikiLeaks cables, that possibility seems real enough. Geologist Husseini told U.S. officials in Riyadh that world oil supplies could hit a peak"within five to 10 years"- in other words, by 2012 -"and will last some 15 years, until world oil production begins to decline,"according to the 2007 Kincannon cable. If so, by next year the world could be producing as much oil as it will ever be able to do.

Not everyone is convinced by Husseini, however. Manouchehr Takin, a senior analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London and a former senior official in Opec, believes that the WikiLeaks cables are alarmist, and that geologists have made vast improvements in oil technology, that greatly change oil production calculations."What the previous generation of geologists could not dream of doing is now being done by the current generation,"Takin says."We are drilling to more than 30,000 feet now."Takin says he believes Husseini's estimate of Saudi Arabia's true reserves - the amount it can realistically produce - is based on a much less optimistic outlook about oil technology; Takin is sure Saudi Arabia's stated oil reserves are accurate.(See TIME's Top 10 Autocrats in Trouble)

But deciphering the Saudi oil reserves, and Husseini's estimates, is about as tricky as predicting when exactly the world will run out of oil - which, says Takin,"is a finite resources which will one day run out."Firstly, Husseini retired in 2004 after being passed over for Aramco's top job as chief executive, leading some experts to wonder whether he might hold a grudge against his former employers. Secondly, Saudi Arabia, like other Opec members, is thought to have long fudged its figures about how much oil they can practically bring to the surface. Indeed, oil experts say it is impossible to be certain how big any country's oil reserves are, since those statistics are based on what countries report, and in many countries, those figures are tightly held secrets."The fact of the matter is we simply do not know,"says Paul Stevens, senior research fellow for energy at the think tank Chatham House in London."That is true of the reserves of most of the Opec countries."

Stevens points out that in 1987, when Opec members were negotiating among themselves what production quota each country should have, about five countries with small populations - including Saudi Arabia - dramatically changed the figures of their oil reserves."The way you do that is you creep along to the chief geologist's office and say, 'change the recoverable factor,'"says Stevens."It led to a certain degree of skepticism."And this week, WikiLeaks deepened those doubts.

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Mexico pipeline thieves trigger big fuel spill

ROSARITO, Mexico (Reuters)– Thieves tapping into a Mexican fuel pipeline triggered a large diesel fuel spill south of the border city of Tijuana in Baja California state on Wednesday, authorities said.

A senior source at the state emergencies agency, which has dealt with a number of fuel spills in recent years due to criminal activity, described the incident as serious.

"There cannot be less than 50,000 liters (13,000 gallons) spilled," the official said, declining to be named since he was not authorized to comment on the size of the spill.

"We've never seen anything like this."

A Reuters witness saw a three-foot (1 meter) stream of fuel flowing on hilly ranch land a few miles (kilometers) from Rosarito.

Police prevented people from approaching the pipeline but bulldozers could be seen working furiously to build huge piles of earth to contain and absorb the flow of fuel. The odor of petroleum was extremely intense.

Gangs of fuel thieves regularly tap into Pemex pipelines to steal gasoline, diesel fuel and even crude oil.

The lucrative trade has attracted Mexico's brutal drug cartels, which earn money protecting fuel thieves and helping them smuggle oil out of the country.

Thirty people died in December when a suspected illegal connection on a crude oil pipeline east of Mexico City caused a massive spill that caught fire and exploded.

State oil monopoly Pemex said in a press release it was responding to the spill and that it posed no risk to bodies of waters or urban areas.

The 10-inch (25-centimeter) diameter pipeline carries fuel from a Pemex terminal in Rosarito to the city of Mexicali.

Pemex did not say how much fuel leaked from the pipeline.

The company claims it has cut the amount of oil that is stolen through better monitoring of its pipeline network even though the number of illegal connections has skyrocketed to more than 700 a year.

(Writing by Robert Campbell and Robin Emmott; Editing by David Gregorio)

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Private Moon Race Team Signs Rocket Deal with SpaceX

A privately funded team hoping to win a multimillion-dollar race to the moon has figured out how it's going to get most of the way there— aboard a commercial rocket that could launch in 2013.

The team Astrobotic Technology Inc., which aims to take home theGoogle Lunar X Prize, has signed a contract with private spaceflight firm Space Exploration Technologies— SpaceX for short— to launch its robotic payload to the moon aboard a Falcon 9, Astrobotic officials announced Sunday (Feb. 6).

The mission could launch as soon as December 2013, team officials said. Astrobotic's expedition will search for water and deliver payloads, with the robot narrating its adventure while sending 3-D video.

Taking home the prize

The Google Lunar X Prize is an internationalmoon explorationchallenge to land a robot on the lunar surface, have it travel at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) and send data and images back to Earth. The first privately funded team to do this will receive the $20 million grand prize.

An additional $10 million has been set aside for second place and various special accomplishments, such asdetecting water, bringing the prize’s total purse to $30 million.

The Google Lunar X Prize expires whenever all prizes are claimed (or, failing that, at the end of 2015). Twenty-one teams are currently in the race.

Astrobotic, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., is counting on SpaceX to get its payload off the ground.

Launching to the moon

Astrobotic is the first Google Lunar X Prize team to announce a launch contract with SpaceX, prize officials said.

SpaceX— which in December became the first private company to successfully return aspacecraft from Earth orbit— usually charges between $49.9 million and $56 million for a launch to low-Earth orbit. But it's lowering its prices for the prize.

"SpaceX is a Preferred Launch Partner, having offered substantial discount to all Google Lunar X Prize teams as a way of further fostering exploration and innovation," officials wrote on the X Prize website.

The Falcon 9 upper stage will sling Astrobotic on a four-day cruise to the moon. Astrobotic will then orbit the moon to align for landing. The spacecraft will land softly and precisely using technologies pioneered by Carnegie Mellon for guiding autonomous cars, team officials said.

The rover will explore for three months, operating continuously during lunar days and hibernating through lunar nights. The lander will sustain payload operations, helping to provide power and communications, officials said.

Astrobotic wants to win the $20 million, but its ambitions don't stop with the Google Lunar X Prize.

"The mission is the first of a serial campaign," Red Whittaker, chairman of Astrobotic Technology and founder of Carnegie Mellon's Field Robotics Center, said in a statement."Astrobotic’s missions will pursue new resources, deliver rich experiences, serve new customers and open new markets. Spurred further by incentives, contracts, and the Google Lunar X Prize, this is a perfect storm for new exploration."

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Private Spaceflight Innovators Attract NASA's Attention

BOULDER, Colo.– NASA's focus on the value of innovative commercial space firms took center stage in back-to-back meetings with a private space station module builder and a company developing a new space plane to fly passengers to and from Earth orbit.

The meetings were led by NASA's deputy chief Lori Garver, who traveled last week toinflatable space modulebuilder Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas and then visited the company Sierra Nevada, based here, to check on the progress of its Dream Chaser spacecraft.

In a briefing Friday (Feb. 4) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Garver spotlighted NASA’s partnering with the commercial sector to develop innovative technologies of value to space agency aspirations.

Real space hardware is being built in"a rapid and unprecedented way," Garver said, with NASA recognizing that the government can’t and shouldn’t do everything.

“We’re looking to loosen our grip and allow companies to do those things in low Earth orbit that we’ve been doing for over 50 years," Garver said.

Bigelow’s business

Garver’s visits with space entrepreneurs groups included Feb. 4 discussion with Bigelow Aerospace president and founder Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based general contractor, real estate tycoon, hotel businessman and developer.

In 2006 and 2007, the space company launched orbiting space station prototypes, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

Garver and Bigelow discussed several issues, including the prospect for a Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM)– an inflatable room for the International Space Station. BEAM would be a larger version of the already flown Genesis-type unit.

But Bigelow has his sights on a grander adventure: Building the first of multiple, fully-functioning stations by 2015. The initial"Alpha" complex would consist of Bigelow's large Sundancer and BA 330 modules.

"How exciting to see that government isn’t the only one interested in doing things on-orbit," Garver told SPACE.com regarding Bigelow's plans."And guess what they need? They need transportation services."

Currently, NASA has deals in place with two other private companies to provide unmanned cargo delivery services that will keep the International Space Station stocked with supplies once the agency retires its shuttle fleet for good later this year.

Under those deals, California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) will provide deliveries using its Dragon capsules and Falcon 9 rockets. Orbital Sciences Corporation in Virginia is NASA's other commercial partner in the venture, and is developing Cygnus freighters and Taurus 2 rockets to provide the service.

Bigelow Aerospace's new deals

Meanwhile, Bigelow Aerospace has been busy hammering out new agreements to spur customer use of the firm’s expandable, orbital space complexes.

The company is currently on the road marketing a variety of individual spaceflight programs, tied to an array of duration and pricing options, including an option of $28,750,000 for a 30-day astronaut visit.

A Memorandum of Understanding between the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) and Bigelow Aerospace was announced on Jan. 31. That deal is geared to explore joint efforts to establish a next-generation commercial human spaceflight program for Dubai and the United Arab Emirates.

The agreement was signed by His Excellency Ahmed Al Mansoori, director general of EIAST, and Robert Bigelow, president of Bigelow Aerospace. In a joint statement, they said they will work to create a world-class microgravity research and development program“with a potential focus on advanced biotechnology applications, and a variety of other commercial space-related activities.”

Earlier this month, another memorandum was inked between Bigelow Aerospace and Space Florida, a group created to strengthen Florida’s position in aerospace research, investment, exploration and commerce. That deal is focused on pursuing and identifying foreign and domestic companies

According to Bigelow, if the company attracts enough customers to lease all of the orbiting, inflatable modules on the company’s Complex Alpha, it could mean up to 25 launches a year -- possibly from Cape Canaveral -- to ferry cargo and crew into Earth orbit. Module launches could be accommodated by current United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets or other vendors, such as the SpaceX Falcon 9 booster.

Space plane drop testing

One day after visiting with Bigelow's team, Garver visited the brains behind the Sierra Nevada Corporation's (SNC) Dream Chaser spacecraft. Her Feb. 5 visit with the Colorado-based company stemmed from the partnership being carried out under an award of the space agency’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.

SNC’s Space Systems Colorado in neighboring Louisville has also partnered with the university to draw upon hands-on student talent in design, test, and human-rating aspects of Dream Chaser.

The seven-person Dream Chaser vehicle is based on NASA HL-20 lifting body work, a legacy design completed in the 1980s and 1990s at the space agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Dream Chaser would fly to the International Space Station and back. The vehicle is slated to launch vertically on an Atlas 5 rocket and land horizontally on conventional runways.

According to former NASA astronaut, Jim Voss, vice president of SNC Space Exploration Systems, Dream Chaser is taking shape with modern methods and materials.

The core structure of the craft will become an atmospheric flight test vehicle, to be taken to high-altitude and released by the White Knight Two mothership, built by as part of a space launch system by Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., to support Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceliner business.

"We’ll do approach and landing tests much like what was done for the space shuttle before it flew into space," Voss told SPACE.com."We plan to be ready for drop testing by May 2012 if we are aggressive and work more quickly like we did during CCDev 1…then we expect to be doing our drop testing at that time."

Voss said that drop testing via helicopter of a Dream Chaser scale model in December was carried out at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

The 88-pound (40-kilogram) model was designed, built, and operated in collaboration between SNC and the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Space: Not a solo sport

Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada Space Systems and a corporate vice president, spotlighted the harmony needed between government, industry, and academia to work on Dream Chaser.

"Space is not a solo sport. You don’t do it on your own. You need a team. You need a village to make that happen," Sirangelo said.

Sirangelo pointed out that"It’s a very interesting time. Everyone sees that it’s a difficult time in the space industry… certainly a difficult time in the budget world."

But in calling attention to those issues, he added:“Today, we’re here to talk about the positive. This is a good time. There’s a lot of change going on.”

Under the NASA CCDev award, Sirangelo said that the company has met all of its milestones, announcing that"we’re on time, actually under budget." He added that Dream Chaser will become a fully capable suborbital vehicle on the way to reaching orbital capability.

Concerning the work of Bigelow, as well as his enterprise, Sirangelo said it’s all about building infrastructure together.

"NASA didn’t invest in this program to take people to the space station. NASA invested, in my view, in this program to help build and spur industry," Sirangelo said."There are many markets that we are looking at that really justify the nation’s investment in this… as well as our investment."

Garver said that NASA's partnerships with commercial space efforts"truly are our collective future” to help the U.S. win that future by out-innovating, out-educating and out-building our competition around the world.

"The entrance of the entrepreneur into the field that has been dominated by government investment is now poised for rapid commercial growth," she added.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

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