Spark Spot

The current hot news is that NASA has postponed the launch of  Endeavour space shuttle after engineers failed to fix a hydrogen leak during fueling.  Endeavour is to make a 16-day visit to the International Space Station to complete the assembly of the $1 billion Japanese Kibo research facility.

Today’s takeoff from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, was canceled at 1:55 a.m. local time because of the leak in a system that vents excess hydrogen as the shuttle’s external fuel tank is being filled with more than 500,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

Engineers still don’t know the cause of the leak, which is no larger than a pinhole. “It’s very small, but it’s something we have to be concerned about,” Scolese said via video conference from Kennedy.  The spacecraft’s June 13 launch was postponed because of a leak in the same system, which carries the excess hydrogen gas away from the launch pad to an area where it can be safely burned off.

The shuttle can’t take off between June 22 and July 10, when the orbit of the space station would expose the spacecraft to too much sunlight and overheat the vessel’s systems. In March, the launch of the shuttle Discovery was postponed after technicians found a leaky valve in the same system. That mission, which went ahead March 15 to March 28, had already been delayed several times so engineers could test valves that help deliver hydrogen to the engines at the correct pressure.

NASA is scheduled to launch the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite from Cape Canaveral at 5:12 p.m. local time tomorrow. That mission, which will survey the lunar surface and seek traces of water as part of a longer-term plan to return American astronauts to the moon, had already been delayed a day because of the postponement of the Endeavour launch.

Astronemers have found that many new galaxies are luminous and they must relatively new. Some 15 galaxies in the sample exhibit luminosities that indicate that they are massive systems like the Milky Way and other so-called “giant” galaxies.

The chemical abundances of the galaxies, combined with some simple assumptions about how stellar evolution and chemical enrichment progress in galaxies in general, suggest that they may only be 3 or 4 billion years old, and therefore formed 9 to 10 billion years after the Big Bang. Most theories of galaxy formation predict that massive, luminous systems like these should have formed much earlier.

If this overall interpretation proves correct, the galaxies may allow astronomers to investigate phases of the galaxy formation and evolution process that have been difficult to study because they normally occur at such early times in the Universe, and therefore at very large distances from us.

The discoveries are the result of a multi-year survey of more than 2,400 star-forming galaxies. The survey was designed to collect basic observational data for a large number of extragalactic emission-line sources. Additional rounds of follow-up spectroscopy for the sources discovered in the initial survey led to the discovery of the 15 luminous, low-abundance systems.

While the hypothesis that these galaxies are cosmologically young is provocative, it is not the only possible explanation for these enigmatic systems.

NASA launched a new telescope to scout the earth sized planets. The telescope, named Kepler, rode into a starry night sky aboard an unmanned Delta rocket that blasted off at 10:49 p.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.So far, although we’ve discovered more than 300 planets , we haven’t discovered any new earth.

Kepler, named for the 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler, is designed to do just that.Once in position trailing Earth around the sun, Kepler will turn its gaze onto a patch of sky between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra that is filled with more than 4 million stars. Scientists plan to scrutinize Kepler’s observations of more than 100,000 targets in hopes of catching tiny blinks of light caused by passing planets.Finding Earth-sized planets is like trying to detect a very tiny flea.

The measurements will not only be difficult to make, they will be time-consuming.A planet the size of Earth that is about as far from its parent star as Earth is, will pass by Kepler’s view just once a year. Scientists say they’ll need to catch three transits to verify existence of an Earth-sized world.

NASA hopes to follow up the $591-million Kepler mission with a new generation of powerful telescopes capable of directly imaging Earth-sized planets and analyzing their atmospheres for gases indicative of life. So soon we will come to know about large number of planet in the size of the earth.