In space, a room that can be folded like a shirt

By KENNETH CHANG, NYT News Service | Jan 18, 2013, 07.05 AM IST
READ MORE NASA|International Space Station|Bigelow Aerospace
NORTH LAS VEGAS: An inflatable space pod to be attached to the International Space Station in a couple of years will be like no other piece of the station. Instead of metal, its walls will be made of floppy cloth, making it easier to launch (and then inflate).

Nasa said on Wednesday that it had signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow Aerospace to build the module, which could reach the space station as soon as 2015. That is a bargain-basement price compared with most equipment the US and other countries send into space, and the Bigelow agreement could serve as a model for how Nasa puts together missions at lower costs by using a Kmart strategy: buying off-theshelf pieces instead of developing its own designs.

"This programme starts a relationship that we think, and we hope, is going to be meaningful between Nasa and ourselves," Robert T Bigelow, the chief executive of Bigelow Aerospace, said at a news conference here at the company's headquarters.

Low-Earth orbit, he said, is the "first target," but larger modules could be used for stations in deep space or for habitats on the Moon. "We have ambitions to get to the Moon someday, to have a base there," Bigelow said.

The fold-up , blow-up approach solves the conundrum of how to build something voluminous that can be packed into the narrow payload confines of a rocket. The soft sides of the module , called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or Beam, will allow it to be scrunched like a T-shirt in a suitcase.

At the space station, it will be attached to an air lock and then inflated like a balloon and expanded by a factor of 10 to its full size — about 13 feet long and 10 feet in diameter, with about 560 cubic feet of space inside.

At least initially, it will remain empty as Nasa gathers data about its characteristics, including temperature and protection against micrometeorites.

The balloonlike structure is carefully designed not to pop. The fabric walls will consist of several layers including Vectran , a bullet-resistant material. Even if punctured by a highspeed meteorite, the fabric does not tear. A hole in a metal structure in space, by comparison, can cause explosive decompression as air rushes out.

When the Beam module reaches the space station, astronauts might go to it to seek solitude: engineers expect it will be the quietest spot there. The fabric walls absorb sound vibrations instead of transmitting them.

Beam revives a concept that Nasa developed more than a decade ago for an inflatable four-story crew quarters on the space station. Congress halted the work as the station's construction costs grew sharply.

Bigelow licensed the technology from Nasa and set up his factory in North Las Vegas, investing over $250 million of his own money. The company has already launched two unmanned prototypes into orbit, showing that they can remain inflated for years.
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Diamond Planets.

Cover Image: January 2013 Scientific American Magazine See Inside

Carbon Planets Turn Earth’s Chemistry on Its Head

Scientists have discovered exoplanets where carbon, relatively rare on Earth, might be as common as dirt
By John Matson

rendering of 55 Cancrie, exoplanets, earth's chemistry Image: Ron Miller
The study of exoplanets—worlds orbiting distant stars—is still in its early days. Yet already researchers have found hundreds of worlds with no nearby analogue: giants that could steamroll Jupiter; tiny pebbles broiling under stellar furnaces; puffy oddballs with the density of peat moss. Still other exoplanets might look familiar in broad-brush, only to reveal a topsy-turvy realm where rare substances are ordinary, and vice versa.
Take carbon, for instance: the key constituent of organic matter accounts for some of humankind's most precious materials, from diamonds to oil. Despite its outsize importance, carbon is uncommon—it makes up less than 0.1 percent of Earth's bulk.
On other worlds, though, carbon might be as common as dirt. In fact, carbon and dirt might be one and the same. An exoplanet 40 light-years away was recently identified as a promising candidate for just such a place—where carbon dominates and where the pressures in the planet's interior crushes vast amounts of the element into diamond.
The planet, known as 55 Cancri e, might have a crust of graphite several hundred kilometers thick. “As you go beneath that, you see a thick layer of diamond,” says astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. The crystalline diamond could account for a third of the planet's thickness.
Carbon-based worlds would owe their distinct makeup to a planet-formation process very different from our own. If the composition of the sun is any indication, the cloud of dust and gas that coalesced into the planets of our solar system ought to have contained about twice as much oxygen as carbon. Indeed, Earth's rocks are mostly based on oxygen-rich minerals called silicates. Astronomers have determined that 55 Cancri e's host star, however, contains slightly more carbon than oxygen, which may reflect a very different planet-forming environment. And Madhusudhan and his colleagues calculated that the planet's bulk properties—denser than a water world but less dense than a world made of Earth-like minerals—match those predicted for a carbon planet. The researchers published their findings in the November 10, 2012, Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Life-forms on a carbon planet—if they exist—would little resemble the oxygen-dependent organisms of Earth. Precious oxygen would prove valuable as a fuel in much the same way that humans covet hydrocarbon fuels on Earth, says Marc Kuchner of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Even courtship customs would be worlds apart from ours. “You would not be impressed if someone gave you a diamond ring,” Kuchner muses. “If your suitor showed up with a glass of water, that would be really exciting.”
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  • 'Scientists discover potential cure for AIDS'
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STAFF WRITER 12:55 HRS IST
From Natasha Chaku

Melbourne, Jan 16 (PTI) In a breakthrough, Australian researchers claim to have discovered how to modify a protein in HIV which could lead to a potential cure for AIDS.

According to researcher David Harrich from Queensland Institute of Medical Research, the protein can be modified so that, instead of replicating, it protects against the deadly infection.

"I consider that this is fighting fire with fire.
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