NASA Curiosity Rover: Water helped shape Mars

This evenly layered rock photographed by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover shows a pattern typical of a lake-floor sedimentary deposit not far from where flowing water entered a lake.

The scene combines multiple frames taken with Mastcam's right-eye camera on Aug. 7, 2014, during the 712th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars.

It shows an outcrop at the edge of "Hidden Valley," seen from the valley floor.

This view spans about 5 feet (1.5 meters) across in the foreground.

An annotated image of MastCam on Curiosity rover.

Credit: NASA JPL

The colour has been approximately white-balanced to resemble how the scene would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth.

The image at the top of the page has a superimposed scale bar of 50 centimeters (about 20 inches).

This is an example of a thick-laminated, evenly-stratified rock type that forms stratigraphically beneath cross-bedded sandstones regarded as ancient river deposits.

These rocks are interpreted to record sedimentation in a lake, as part of or in front of a delta, where plumes of river sediment settled out of the water column and onto the lake floor.

NASA Spitzer Image: Dramatic new portrait helps define Milky Way's shape - Video

More than 200 million images like this one have been stitched together by Wisconsin astronomers to make a 360-degree portrait of the plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way. 

In this image, the billowing pink clouds are massive stellar nurseries. 

The stringy green filaments are the blown out remnants of a star that exploded in a supernova. 

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /University of Wisconsin-Madison

Using more than 2 million images collected by NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of Wisconsin University scientists has stitched together a dramatic 360 degree portrait of the Milky Way, providing new details of our galaxy's structure and contents.


The new composite picture, using infrared images gathered over the last decade, was unveiled today (March 20, 2014) at a TED conference in Vancouver.

The galactic portrait provides an unprecedented look at the plane of our galaxy, using the infrared imagers aboard Spitzer to cut through the interstellar dust that obscures the view in visible light.

Edward Churchwell

"For the first time, we can actually measure the large-scale structure of the galaxy using stars rather than gas," explains Edward Churchwell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of astronomy whose group compiled the new picture, which looks at a thin slice of the galactic plane.

"We've established beyond the shadow of a doubt that our galaxy has a large bar structure that extends halfway out to the sun's orbit. We know more about where the Milky Way's spiral arms are."

Lofted into space in 2003, the Spitzer Space Telescope has far exceeded its planned two-and-a-half-year lifespan.

Although limited by the depletion of the liquid helium used to cool its cameras, the telescope remains in heliocentric orbit, gathering a trove of astrophysical data that promises to occupy a new generation of astronomers.

In addition to providing new revelations about galactic structure, the telescope and the images processed by the Wisconsin team have made possible the addition of more than 200 million new objects to the catalog of the Milky Way.

"This gives us some idea about the general distribution of stars in our galaxy, and stars, of course, make up a major component of the baryonic mass of the Milky Way," notes Churchwell, whose group has been collecting and analyzing Spitzer data for more than a decade in a project known as GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Survey Extraordinaire). "That's where the ballgame is."

Barb Whitney

The new infrared picture, known as GLIMPSE360, was compiled by a team led by UW-Madison astronomer Barb Whitney.

It is interactive and zoomable, giving users the ability to look through the plane of the galaxy and zero in on a variety of objects, including nebulae, bubbles, jets, bow shocks, the center of the galaxy and other exotic phenomena.

The image is being shown for the first time this morning on a large visualization wall installed by Microsoft at the TED conference.

The new GLIMPSE composite image will be made widely available to astronomers and planetaria.

The data is also the basis for a “citizen science” project, known as the Milky Way Project, where anyone can help scour GLIMPSE images to help identify and map the objects that populate our galaxy.

Serotonin Receptors Can Shape Drug Effects from LSD to Migraine Medication

A team has determined and analyzed the high-resolution atomic structures of two kinds of human serotonin receptor, findings that shed light on several drugs' complex and sometimes harmful effects. 

Credit: Photo courtesy of The Scripps Research Institute.

A team including scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has determined and analyzed the high-resolution atomic structures of two kinds of human serotonin receptor.

The new findings help explain why some drugs that interact with these receptors have had unexpectedly complex and sometimes harmful effects.

"Understanding the structure-function of these receptors allows us to discover new biology of serotonin signaling and also gives us better ideas about what biological questions to probe in a more intelligent manner," said TSRI Professor Raymond Stevens, who was a senior investigator for the new research.

The studies were published in two papers on March 21, 2013 in Science Express, the advance online version of the journal Science.

Pioneering Important Molecular Structures
Stevens's laboratory at TSRI has pioneered the development of techniques for determining the 3D atomic structures of cellular receptors -- particularly the large receptor class known as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs).

GPCRs sit in the cell membrane and sense various molecules outside cells. When certain molecules bind to them, the receptor's respond in a way to transmit a signal inside the cell.

"Because G protein-coupled receptors are the targets of nearly 50 percent of medicines, they are the focus of several major National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiatives," said Jean Chin of the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which partly funded the work through the Protein Structure Initiative.

"These detailed molecular structures of two serotonin receptor subfamilies bound to antimigraines, antipsychotics, antidepressants or appetite suppressants will help us understand how normal cellular signaling is affected by these drugs and will offer a valuable framework for designing safer and more effective medicines."

Serotonin receptors are no less important. "Nearly all psychiatric drugs affect serotonin receptors to some extent, and these receptors also mediate a host of effects outside the brain, for example on blood coagulation, smooth muscle contraction and heart valve growth," said Bryan Roth, a collaborator on both studies who is professor of pharmacology at the University of North Carolina (UNC).

Untangling Two Serotonin Receptors
Roth's laboratory teamed up with Stevens's as part of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Protein Structure Initiative.

For this project the two labs also worked with the laboratories of Professors Eric Xu and Hualiang Jiang at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"By collaborating with the Chinese teams we were able to complete a much more thorough study and get the most out of our fundamental structural results," said Stevens.

In the first of the new studies, co-lead author Chong Wang, a graduate student in the Stevens laboratory, and his colleagues determined the structure of the serotonin receptor subtype 5-HT1B, the principal target of several drug classes. (5-HT, or 5-hydroxytryptamine, is a technical term for serotonin.)

The team produced the 5-HT1B receptor while it was bound by either ergotamine or dihydroergotamine -- two old-line anti-migraine drugs that work in part by activating 5-HT1B receptors.

With the help of the special fusion protein, nicknamed BRIL (apocytochrome b562RIL), Wang and colleagues were able to stabilize these structures and coax them to line up in a regular ordering known as a crystal.

X-ray crystallography revealed, at high resolution, an atomic structure of 5-HT1B with a main binding pocket and a separate, extended binding pocket.

Read the full article here

NASA: Shuttle Replacement takes shape, the X-37

It's been a long wait—in some ways, more than 50 years—but in April 2010, the U.S. Air Force is scheduled to launch an Atlas V booster from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the newest U.S. spacecraft, the unmanned X-37, to orbit.


The X-37 embodies the Air Force's desire for an operational spaceplane, a wish that dates to the 1950s, the era of the rocket-powered X-15 and X-20.


In other ways, though, the X-37 will be picking up where another U.S. spaceplane, NASA's space shuttle, leaves off.

With a wingspan of 15 feet and a length of 27.5 feet, the X-37 looks like a tiny space shuttle. It has a blunt (though windowless) nose, and one rocket engine bell instead of the shuttle's three.

Two cargo doors open just as the shuttle's do, revealing a four- by seven-foot bay. Like the shuttle, the X-37 was designed for low Earth orbits—in the latter's case, altitudes of 125 to 575 miles. And the craft will fly like a shuttle, reentering the atmosphere with the orbiter's 40-degree nose-high attitude.

After reentry, it will change to a 20-degree nose-down glide and, flying at up to 220 mph, land at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with Edwards Air Force Base as an alternate.

But as for the period between launch and landing, no one, save for a select few in the Department of Defense, knows exactly what the little Boeing-built spaceplane will do, or for how long.

The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, which is running the program, says only that the orbital test version, the X-37B, will take a suite of next-generation technologies to orbit and will break new ground in the realm of launch, recovery, and reuse, all with an unmanned twist that the shuttle never offered.

At a 2008 Space Foundation breakfast in Washington, D.C., Gary Payton, deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, recalled the X-37's origins. Payton started the program while at NASA.

"Then, the X-37 was intended to be a testbed for new technologies that could retrofit into the shuttle: predominantly guidance, navigation, and control, and [thermal protection system] technologies," he said. In that era, planners imagined the shuttle carrying the X-37 to space in its cargo bay and releasing it.

Now, with the shuttle's retirement looming, it appears the X-37 will have an independent, post-shuttle life. Payton envisioned such a role for the X-37, saying: "It would be really advantageous in my mind if we had a system you could launch, recover, change out the payload bay quickly, and put into a different orbit, and do all that measured in weeks instead of decades."

David Hamilton, director of the Rapid Capabilities Office, says in an e-mail: "Eventually, I see the unique possibility to operate X-37B more like an aircraft and explore the needs of responsive, reusable spacecraft."

Unlike a satellite, he points out, the spaceplane returns, enabling "detailed inspection and significantly better learning than can be achieved with [a satellite's] remote telemetry alone. Experiments can be modified and reflown, with the objective of shortening the technology maturation timeline."

"The space shuttle was designed to be a very heavy payload lifter, and it has performed that job extremely well," says Mark Lewis, a University of Maryland hypersonics expert who recently completed a four-year appointment as chief scientist for the Air Force. "But you don't need to send a Mack truck into space when a Toyota Celica will do."

The question is: Will do what? Lewis, whose enthusiastic speech barely keeps pace with his mind, is happy to talk about the skin-deep similarities between the shuttle and the X-37. ("A lot of the basic reentry physics is treated the same way," he says. "Blunt configurations. The shuttle has very blunt leading edges.") But when he's asked about anything more than the X-37's aerodynamics, he clams up.

So does everyone else. "While some aspects of the…program have been designated as unclassified and been released to the public; information regarding specific technical and performance capabilities will not be released at this time," writes David Hamilton.

"Hide it in plain view," says one observer of the Air Force's practice of letting out just a little about the X-37, enough to make it seem like it will never be more than a research tool. Read More....