August 2004 (Newstream) -- A Proton rocket launched by International Launch Services (ILS) successfully carried the Amazonas satellite into orbit today.

Kazakhstan, Thursday morning on a mission managed by International Launch Services (ILS) of MCLean, Va. The rocket carried the Amazonas satellite, built for Hispasat of Spain to provide communications on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the 30th Proton mission for ILS, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin of the U.S. and Khrunichev of Russia.

The launch vehicle was built by Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center of Moscow, a partner in the ILS joint venture along with Lockheed Martin Corp. [NYSE:LMT]. This was the third Proton launch of the year for ILS, and the seventh mission overall for the company in 2004.

(0) Comments posted about this in the forum

The United States will soon embark on a mission to the small planet Mercury, its first since 1973. A spacecraft named Messenger will lift off from Florida to begin a six-and-a-half year journey to a planet slightly larger than our moon and the one closest to the Sun. This proximity requires special protections for the spacecraft so it will not burn up in Mercury's extreme heat. But the planet can become extremely frigid, too.

On Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Boeing workers complete the installation of the fairing around the MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft. The fairing is a molded structure that fits flush with the outside surface of the upper stage booster and forms an aerodynamically smooth joint, protecting the spacecraft during launch. MESSENGER is scheduled to launch Aug. 2 aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket and is expected to enter Mercury orbit in March 2011. MESSENGER was built for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. Image credit:  KSC, NASA.

The only spacecraft to make the trip was the U.S. Mariner 10, which flew by three times in the mid-1970s. But it mapped only half of the surface, so Mercury still remains the least explored of the rocky, inner worlds that include Earth, Venus, and Mars.

Scientists have many questions

"How did Mercury end up mostly metal?" asks Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the mission scientists.

He notes that Mercury is mostly iron, making it the densest planet. He wonders why it has less rocky crust than Earth, Venus, and Mars, even though scientists believe they formed the same way from a giant cloud of gas and dust swirling around the Sun.

"We do not know whether that is because closer to the Sun there was more metal than other materials, or it is possible Mercury started out more Earthlike in composition and lost its rocky fraction because of extreme heat or because of mechanical disruption by a giant impact," adds Mr. Solomon.

(0) Comments posted about this in the forum

The Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes) lives in humid deciduous forest in Africa.  They mainly eat fruits and leaves, however they are omnivorous, and will eat seeds, birds, flowers, bark, insects and smaller mammals.

Anthrax has never been recorded before in a tropical rain forest environment. One of the scientists working on the study, Fabian Leendertz, says there are two theories on how the bacteria arrived.

"They are speculating in a very old French newspaper that it may have come from the north, with cattle transport and so on," he said. "Second possibility is that it has always been there, but nobody has seen it, because, in the forest, you don't see when there are dead animals."

"These animals are already highly endangered," said Heinz Ellerbrok. "There is much more contact between ecological niches that have been well separated over ages. And now, people are going into the forest, and there is an exchange, or there might be an exchange of pathogens between chimpanzees, or in general, great apes and humans, and this can go both ways."

(0) Comments posted about this in the forum