Heavens

(Washington, DC • Sept. 30, 2009) – Completing an 18-month mission orbiting the Earth more than 6,000 times on-orbit the International Space Station (ISS), the Optical Reflector Material Experiment (ORMatE-1) returns to Washington, D.C., to NRL's Electronics Science and Technology Division to begin experiment testing and analysis.

Doctors could predict a patient's risk of receiving a domestic abuse diagnosis years in advance by using electronic medical records as an early warning system, according to research published on bmj.com today.

Lead author Dr Ben Reis from the Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School investigated whether the wealth of historical electronic data could be used to flag up high risk patients.

Planning a trip to Mars? Take plenty of shielding. According to sensors on NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft, galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high.

"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."

Close to 600 scientists from 21 countries met Sept. 23 – 25 2009 in Bremen, Germany, to outline major scientific targets for a new and ambitious ocean drilling research program. The scientific community envisions that this program will succeed the current Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), which ends in 2013. The outcome of the Bremen meeting will result in a new science plan, enabling scientific ocean drilling to take on a central role in environmental understanding and stewardship of our planet in the 21st century.

Montreal, September 29, 2009 – A team of Université de Montréal researchers, led by physics PhD student Olivier Daigle, has developed the world's most sensitive astronomical camera. Marketed by Photon etc., a young Quebec firm, the camera will be used by the Mont-Mégantic Observatory and NASA, which purchased the first unit.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — This summer, University of Florida astronomers inaugurated the world's largest optical telescope on a nearly 8,000-foot mountaintop 3,480 miles away.

But it was a far more modest observatory, located just above sea level in rural Levy County and just down the road from the UF campus, that proved key to a new discovery about what one astronomer termed "one of the weirdest" planets outside our solar system.

NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, which is toting an $8.7 million University of Colorado at Boulder instrument, will make its third and final flyby of Mercury on Sept. 29 -- a clever gravity-assist maneuver that will steer it into orbit around the rocky planet beginning in March 2011.

The newly released image extends across a field of view of more than one and a half square degree — an area eight times larger than that of the full Moon — and was obtained with the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. This 67-million-pixel camera has already created several of ESO's iconic pictures.

CHICAGO (September 24, 2009) – New research published in the September issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons offers important insights into the long-term impact of a major disaster on routine surgical services in a hospital. In the study, researchers at Ochsner Health System, New Orleans, LA, showed that although Hurricane Katrina resulted in a significant loss of surgical staff and an increase in the number of uninsured patients undergoing operations, greater cost efficiencies were achieved.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMER 24, 2009 – Results from a late breaking clinical trial called COGENT demonstrate that the combination of giving patients clopidogrel, a blood thinner commonly prescribed to patients with cardiovascular disease, and stomach medicines such as omeprazole, known as proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), did not lead to adverse events, as some prior studies had suggested. The results were presented at the 21st annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium, sponsored by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF).

Astronomers using the twin 10-meter telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have explored one of the most compact dust disks ever resolved around another star. If placed in our own solar system, the disk would span about four times Earth's distance from the sun, reaching nearly to Jupiter's orbit. The compact inner disk is accompanied by an outer disk that extends hundreds of times farther.

Scientists are seeing sub-surface water ice that may be 99 percent pure halfway between the north pole and the equator on Mars, thanks to quick-turnaround observations from orbit of fresh meteorite impact craters on the planet.

GREENBELT, Md. -- 28 times per second, engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center fire a laser that travels about 250,000 miles to hit the minivan-sized Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft moving at nearly 3,600 miles per hour as it orbits the moon.

The first laser ranging effort to track a spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit on a daily basis produces distance measurements accurate to about four inches (10 centimeters). For comparison, the microwave stations tracking LRO measure its range to a precision of about 65 feet (20 meters).

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – New data from the Deep Impact spacecraft and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument aboard India's recently ended Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, provide, for the first time, clear evidence that water exists on the surface of the Moon.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In a discovery that promises to reinvigorate studies of the moon and potentially upend thinking of how it originated, scientists at Brown University and other research institutions have found evidence of water molecules on the surface of the moon.