Jan
14
2009
President-elect Barack Obama’s made his pick for NASA head — a decorated military man, according to several reports.
New NASA Head
Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Jonathan Scott Gration, who uses his middle name, is a career Air Force man who’s logged nearly 1,000 hours of combat flight time and been awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star and the Distinguished Service Medal, among many other awards.
The son of missionaries, he was raised in Africa and speaks Swahili.
Reports said an official announcement would be forthcoming Wednesday. The Obama transition team refused FoxNews.com’s requests to comment on the reports.
Gration is especially close to Obama, having met the young senator in 2005. He and Obama traveled to Africa together in 2006, and Gration has since been one of Obama’s unofficial national-security advisors.
However, unlike current NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, a rocket scientists, Gration has little space experience other than working as a White House fellow in 1982 for then-NASA Deputy Administrator Hans Mark.
Read the rest at-http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479889,00.html
Dec
20
2008
NASA researchers this week said Mars appears to have been more hospitable to life in the past than previously believed. Using the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM, on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have found carbonate minerals on the planet. Because carbonates dissolve rapidly in acid, their presence has forced researchers to revise conclusions based on previous evidence that the Martian environment was primarily acidic. NASA says that its findings, published in the Dec. 19 issue of Science magazine, indicate that different types of watery environments existed, raising the chance that at least one may have supported life.
“Although we have not found the types of carbonate deposits which might have trapped an ancient atmosphere,” said Bethany Ehlmann, lead author of the article and a spectrometer team member from Brown University, in a statement, “we have found evidence that not all of Mars experienced an intense, acidic weathering environment 3.5 billion years ago, as has been proposed. We’ve found at least one region that was potentially more hospitable to life.” Read the rest at- http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212501435&subSection=All+Stories
more articles at-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/20/nasa_mars_findings/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/12/081219-mars-carbonate.html
