NASA Questions Commander Lovell’s Right to Auction Apollo 13 Checklist

NASA is questioning whether James Lovell, an Apollo 13 commander, has the right to sell a 70-page checklist that contains his handwritten calculations that were vital in guiding the damaged spacecraft back to Earth.

The rare document was sold by Lovell for more than $388,000 at an auction in Dallas in November 2011. The amount raised was around 15 times more than the estimated price value.

However, NASA now has laid its claims to the document that assisted the return of the Apollo 13 team to the Earth after an oxygen tank in the craft exploded.

The recent event comes a year after NASA filed a federal lawsuit against Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut, obliging him to return a camera used on his Moon mission in 1971. The camera has since been placed in a museum.

Apart from the checklist, the agency has also raised questions about the hand glove worn by NASA astronaut Alan Shepard which fetched over $19,000, a lunar module identification plate valued at $13,000 and a hand controller sold by Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart which was auctioned for $22,700 at the Heritage auctions.

NASA has, however, interpreted the inquiry in a different manner. "We haven't filed a claim against (the checklist) but what we have done is notify the auction house that we are seeking proof of ownership of the artefact," NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs claimed.

The checklist sold by Lovell has gained great popularity particularly after the release of the 1995 film "Apollo 13" where actor Tom Hanks portrayed the role of Lovell.

Emission control: Turning carbon trash into treasure

Emission control: Turning carbon trash into treasure - New Scientist

IT'S LIKE standing at the edge of a giant patchwork quilt. Stretching into the distance are broad bands of bright yellow alternated with patches of delicate white, all beneath a vast glass roof. This greenhouse full of flowers is just one of hundreds that dot the Dutch coast, where row after row of chrysanthemums, orchids and roses are fed carbon dioxide-enriched air, helping them to grow up to 30 per cent faster than normal.

While plenty of commercial greenhouses top up their air with extra CO2, what is unusual about this one is where its CO2 comes from. Until a few years ago, the greenhouse's operators used to burn natural gas for the sole purpose of generating CO2. Today it is piped from a nearby oil refinery. Each year, 400,000 tonnes of CO2 are captured and then piped to around 500 greenhouses between Rotterdam and The Hague, where it is absorbed by the growing plants before they are shipped for sale around the world (see "Cash for carbon").

As governments ramp up their efforts to cut carbon emissions, carbon capture is moving closer to the top of the agenda. The current plan to deal with all of our excess CO2 is to just pump the stuff underground - a kind of landfill for gases. Looking at this carpet of flowers, it is hard not to think that we are going about this in the wrong way. Shouldn't we look to pioneering schemes like the Dutch greenhouses to find ways to recycle the captured CO2 instead?

It turns out that a growing number of researchers, start-ups and even industry giants are also beginning to think like this. And not just for growing flowers; they believe whole cities could one day be built and powered with the help of exhaust fumes.

"It's time we stopped thinking of CO2 solely as a pollutant and viewed it as a valuable resource," says Gabriele Centi, a chemist at the University of Messina, Italy. "With carbon capture and sequestration, we'll essentially have a zero-cost feedstock."

Cosmic Treasure Trove of Heavy Metals Found

Cosmic Treasure Trove of Heavy Metals Found

An orbiting X-ray observatory has found the largest known reservoir of rare heavy metals in the universe.

The lightweights of the periodic table, hydrogen and helium, are the most abundant elements in the cosmos — they're the key fuels of stellar engines.

But more familiar to us Earthlings are the heavier elements that make up the rest of the table, though these heftier elements are rare in the universe at large.

Recently, astronomers used the Suzaku orbiting X-ray observatory, operated jointly by NASA and the Japanese space agency, to discover the largest known cache of rare metals in the universe to date.

Suzaku detected the elements chromium and manganese while observing the central region of the Perseus galaxy cluster, which lies 225 million light-years from Earth. The metallic atoms are part of the hot gas, or intergalactic medium, that lies between 190 galaxies within the cluster.

"This is the first detection of chromium and manganese from a cluster," says Takayuki Tamura, an astrophysicist at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who led the Perseus study. "Previously, these metals were detected only from stars in the Milky Way or from other galaxies. This is the first detection in intergalactic space."