Atom & Cosmos
NASA’s new old design for a shuttle replacement, plus Mars’ growth spurt, the most remote object and more in this week’s news
By Science News
An old design for shuttle’s replacement
NASA has designated a successor to the space shuttle based on a design that was originally created to carry astronauts back to the moon, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced May 24. The space agency said it didn’t know when the proposed 23-ton vehicle, which could carry a four-person crew beyond low-Earth orbit for missions up to 21 days, would be ready to fly. With the space shuttle set for retirement in July, the agency will lack its own means to transport humans into space for at least several years and will reach the International Space Station by purchasing seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. —Ron Cowen
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New way to find habitable planets
Astronomers have discovered a method for verifying the presence of Earthlike habitable planets that otherwise would be too tiny to confirm. Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and his colleagues used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to examine a candidate planet initially detected by Kepler spacecraft. The Spitzer observations show that the dimming of light from the sunlike star at infrared wavelengths is identical to that found by Kepler in visible light, confirming that a tiny planet, about 2.2 times Earth’s diameter, passed in front of the star. The newfound planet is too hot to contain liquid water, but the comparative technique can find cooler Earthlike planets, Fressin reported May 23 at a meeting in Boston of the American Astronomical Society. —Ron Cowen