NASA’s big launcher in the making - the ultra-powerful Ares V — may be the perfect lift ticket for astronomers, along with the rocket’s ability to help plant an outpost on the Moon.

A recently held astronomy workshop at NASA’s Ames Research Center has focused on utilizing the mega-blaster of a booster to hurl giant observatories into space…facilities that would make the now-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope look like a pip-squeak.

The Ares V can be topped by an 8 to 10 meter fairing and would have enough oomph to toss roughly 130 tons into low-Earth orbit. That being the case, the launcher is being eyed to deploy currently-infeasible telescopes and might provide a lower-cost means of deploying others.

For instance, one concept presented at the Ames gathering was a way to package an observatory that folds up nicely, but fans out once in space to become a 24-meter diameter telescope. For contrast, Hubble’s mirror is 2.4 meters, just 94-inches in diameter.

In material from Frank Cepollina, Deputy Associate Director for the Hubble Space Telescope Development at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, he explained that with completion of the next servicing mission of that orbiting eye, “Hubble will be at the apex of discovery potential.”

The “grand questions” of astronomy may require large, complex optics that cannot be operated on Earth’s surface, Cepollina noted. As was the case with Hubble, he asked will astronauts be the key enabling capability to realize these goals…and with robotic partners?

Also spotlighted by Cepollina was how best to make use of the piloted Orion spacecraft — the replacement for the space shuttle — in future telescope servicing missions.

“We are running out of time to achieve profound science goals through the effective use of humans and robots in free space,” Cepollina pointed out. “We did it with shuttle, why not with Orion?”

Cepollina’s briefing charts point out that budget realities will only allow for one or two large space telescopes over the next 30 years, if that. A servicing concept for those platforms, he added: allows the science community to maximize science return by periodic change out of instruments to focus on new scientific questions and changing scientific emphases; eliminates waiting 15 to 20 years for flight of new telescopes so as to perform new science; and eliminates flying old instrument detector technology in new telescopes because of telescope development cycles.

“Astronomers should be thinking outside the box,” was a key message in a presentation contributed by astronomer Dan Lester of the University of Texas. “The value of an Ares V to astronomy may be a lot more than the size of telescope it could lift.”

There are still bits and pieces of debris zipping through space from that USA 193 intercept back in February of this year, as well as China’s anti-satellite test back in January 2007.

According to space debris expert, T.S. Kelso and his CelesTrak satellite tracking software, some 15 pieces of the busted up USA 193 spysat are still flittering around up there. When the successful intercept was reported, estimates were that all pieces would reenter within 40 days.

A recent analysis shows the last piece of clutter will decay about 100 days post-intercept, Kelso told me.

To generate accurate whereabouts of Earth orbiting debris, experts use data in the form of what’s tagged as Two-Line Elements, or TLEs.

“We still don’t have any way to predict when the piece still identified as USA 193 will decay, since we have never received any TLEs for it. It’s almost as if that orbit was still classified, which seems a bit odd. You would think TLEs for all pieces would be released,” Kelso noted.

Kelso explained that, with fewer pieces of USA 193 speeding about the Earth, there are only a half dozen or so close approaches a week to other spacecraft. “So it would appear that this threat is diminishing.”

Meanwhile, to put that in a bit of perspective, the Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) test back in January 2007 created so much heavenly havoc that there are 3,144 close approaches of leftover debris with other satellites over the next week, according to a recent analysis, Kelso said.

In a debris update, NASA information puts the known leftover flotsam from the USA 193 intercept at 12, as of May 12. Furthermore, a government estimate of the maximum lifetime of orbital debris from the intercept — made prior to the intercept — pegged the last piece of clutter to fall back to Earth this summer, longer than 100 days post-event.

Lastly, the number of debris still being tracked from the Chinese ASAT is about 2,700. Only 33 cataloged debris have reentered as of May 2nd, according to my government source.

Among Americans under age 30, Jon Stewart is tied with Bill O’Reilly as the nation’s most admired journalist. Overall, he’s No. 4.

In a March 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center, Stewart was tied with Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Anderson Cooper. He was behind No. 1 Katie Couric, O’Reilly and Charles Gibson and ahead of Jim Lehrer, Walter Cronkite, Ted Koppel, Wolf Blitzer and a slew of others.

Of course Stewart is a comedian. His “Daily Show” airs weeknights on Comedy Central.

But in an era when “real” TV newspeople often toss softball questions at political candidates (or in the case of George Stephanopoulos to Hillary Clinton in one of the televised debates, didn’t ask one he said he knew she wouldn’t want to answer!) and press sensational issues rather than policy questions, Stewart gets down to brass tacks, which is not news to anyone who watches him regularly.

On his show last night, he asked John McCain whether he’d rather run against Clinton or Barack Obama. McCain didn’t want to answer, and Stewart pressed him. It was a compelling question. No answer came, but Stewart was more dogged than any “real” anchor of late. He also pressed McCain, quite humorously, on the serious issue of how he can shake the shadow of President Bush and why that’s any different from Obama having to shake Pastor Jeremiah Wright. The point was clear: You politicians all have baggage, but you like to gloss over yours while pointing out the other guy’s. McCain was frank in distancing himself from Bush’s policies. It was a darn good news interview, and yet funny as hell at times.

Stewart also drew out the softer and more jovial side of John McCain that you rarely see on the network or cable news programs. Maybe we got a glimpse of the real John McCain last night, and since he’s running for president, that’s no laughing matter.

Anyway, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism actually studied the content of “The Daily Show” for all of 2007 in an effort to figure out why Stewart is so admired as a journalist, even though Stewart himself says he is not one.

The upshot: Stewart uses a lot of news footage from the day’s events to show contrast and contradiction (just like the other news programs) and he picks selectively among major events (just like the other news programs) and ignores a lot of what happened during the day (just like …).

The Pew analysis, out yesterday, concludes: In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, “The Daily Show” performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature — getting people to think critically about the public square.

• See also: Scientist Finds Truthiness in the ‘Colbert Bump’

In Texas, three pot smokers have taken grave digging to a new low.

Two men and a juvenile were said to dig up a corpse, decapitate it and make a bong of the head, reports the Houston Chronicle. One can only assume they were well into the brownies before grabbing their shovels.

We humans really do have an obsession with death. Offbeat post-life practices range from letting the vultures eat us to “plastination” for display. Add this new one we learned of today: dissolving a corpse with lye.

The rising cost of gas is fueling a slew of lifestyle changes and is even expected to have an environmental impact. It’s too early to quantify clearly, but life in these United States is changing faster than you can say “fill ‘er up.”

People are driving less, skipping events and changing summer plans. Some are driving more slowly (even airlines are employing this fuel-saving trick).

The types of vehicles you’ll see on the road of the future will be much different. U.S. sales of SUVs are plummeting, off 32 percent in April compared to the same month last year, and people stuck owning them are struggling to sell on a flooded market. Likewise, demand for small cars and hybrids is soaring. New small car sales were up 18 percent in April.

The knock-on effects are even more interesting:

Deaths down. Fewer miles driven means safer roads. One study predicts nearly 2,000 fewer people will die because of the recent price hikes.

Less gas consumption (fewer SUVs, less driving, etc.). One economist estimates that each $1 rise in gas leads to 14 percent less fuel consumption over the long haul. Of course, as consumption falls, some analysts say prices at the pump could dip, stimulating demand.

Less pollution. If we use less gas, logic dictates that smog will decrease (you’ll breath cleaner air) and we’ll pump lower amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Little if any research has quantified this potential outcome, but the traffic-death study also predicts 600 fewer pollution-related deaths.

Lifestyle changes. An online CNN poll, though not scientific, has 46 percent saying they plan to get used to “staycations” and 26 percent figuring to cut back on summer travel. Separately, a Florida State University management professor surveyed 800 employees in the southeast who each commuted at least 15 miles a day. Among the findings (which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal):

• 52 percent have reconsidered taking vacations or other recreational activities.
• 45 percent said escalating gas prices have caused them to fall behind financially.
• 33 percent would quit their job for a comparable one nearer to home.

The FSU researcher, Wayne Hochwarter, contends all this affects employee productivity: “People concerned with the effects of gas prices were significantly less attentive on the job, less excited about going to work, less passionate and conscientious and more tense,” he said.

Even NASCAR feels the pinch. Their fancy fuel is now $6.25 a gallon. (In the 1970s, NASCAR shortened races to save fuel during the OPEC crisis; no such plans yet this time around.)

Meanwhile, oil continues to reach new highs with one prediction of $200/barrel inside two years. And gas prices, well, you know.

Newsday has posted a slew of reader comments that hint at the lifestyle changes underway and in the wings. One high school athlete says Mom can’t attend some of the away games. Another woman worries she’ll have to walk to work soon.

The ultimate effects, either on summer tourism or lifestyles in general, awaits scientific study and actual data. But the largely anecdotal evidence now available suggests we’ll soon be looking back at a different America.

A just released report has taken a first look at using NASA’s monster booster — the Ares V — to support visionary space science missions. Ares 1 and Ares 5 are booster elements of the space agency’s Constellation system of Moon, Mars and beyond hardware.

The interim report, Science Opportunities Enabled by NASA’s Constellation System, is a product of the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board, written by a blue ribbon panel of experts.

The report notes that the first flight of Ares V is not expected until 2018 at the earliest. Lunar missions would begin in 2019 or 2020, and for at least the first several years of flights, the mega-booster would be tied up tossing hardware to the Moon to build a lunar outpost. Therefore, Ares V could not be available to support science missions until the early or mid-2020s at the earliest.

At this point, the report explains, NASA doesn’t have reliable price tag info on the Ares V.

But given its development, the report spotlights a number of vision missions that might benefit from the opportunities enabled by the Constellation system, and are therefore deserving of future study, such as the Modern Universe Space Telescope, a Stellar Imager, an Interstellar Probe mission, Solar Polar Imager, Neptune Orbiter with Probes, and a Titan Explorer.

The committee believes that Ares V offers the greatest potential for an impact on science. The big launcher would be capable of hurling large-diameter, large-volume, heavy spacecraft into orbit, seemingly removing the physical — although not the financial — constraints on missions that would benefit from being able to fly large, heavy payloads to their destinations.

But the report stresses that using the Ares V could have a potentially dramatic effect on the price tags of these missions. That is, incorporating the use of an expensive launch vehicle could increase costs. But it could also possibly balance increased costs by simplifying mission design - for instance, by cutting out the requirement for on-orbit assembly or eliminating complicated deployment mechanisms.

The committee found that the greatly increased payload lift capacity promised by Ares V could lead to more costly science payloads.

Also, it was determined that the Ares 1 capabilities are not sufficiently distinct from those of Atlas V and Delta IV to enable different types or a higher quality of space science missions.

Noted in the report is that by adding a heavy-lift launch vehicle option could lead to larger science missions and even higher costs. There is a direct relationship, the report adds, between the size of a spacecraft and its cost. Expensive space science programs will place “a great strain” on the space science budget, which has been essentially flat for several years and is already under strain from an ambitious slate of flight missions, the report states.

By the way, one little financial footnote in the report caught my eye: The James Webb Space Telescope, now planned as a 2013 liftoff on an Ariane booster, is pegged as a $4.5 billion mission.

That’s something to reflect on too.

A Wi-Fi setup in your body, using Bluetooth connected to base station in your home, could alert a hospital of a heart attack or other health emergency, predicts the UK’s Ofcom, the independent regulator for communications industries.

From The Times in London: If the “in-body network” recorded that the person had suddenly collapsed, it would send an alert, via a nearby base station at their home, to a surgery or hospital.

Other than possible privacy concerns, such a device seems pretty simple, composed of off-the-shelf ideas: Think external heart rate monitor’s worn by runners mixed with the common cell phone ear bud and the already implantable RFID chips.

Road & Track got a surreptitious sneak peak of the 2009 Prius, which as part of the hybrid class of gas/electric cars is bound to be in high demand.

Here’s the cool part: The new model will be faster and get better mileage. Detroit has some work to do.

See it here.

I see a formerly well-off family with driving-aged teens, now squeezed by fuel and food prices into eating Top Ramen and trading in three severely devalued SUVs for one of these beauts. The old gas guzzlers will be lying around like all cell phones larger than deck of cards.

See also the 100 mpg car.

Ask any reputable meteorologists or climate researcher and they’ll tell you no single storm can be attributed to global warming. Somebody should tell Al Gore.

According to the right-leaning Business & Media Institute, Gore said today on NPR’s Fresh Air (with host Terry Gross):

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

Global warming is indeed predicted to fuel more powerful storms, but many, many other localized and short-term factors are at work with any given cyclone. In fact it’s quite possible that a short-term cooling trend will have an entirely different effect over the next few years before the long-term warming trend resumes. This is not simple A to B then on to C stuff. Rather, it’s complex science … best left to scientists.

Blaming this storm on climate change, which the above quote pretty much does (and which will be interpreted that way regardless), has Gore doing the same thing as those who don’t think global warming is real: It distorts facts, stretches them to fit a view.

There are two primary types of information useful in evaluating climate change:

• Predictions of future climate conditions using historical data, facts about changes underway, and models to fast-forward various what-ifs.
• Continued scientific study to see if events and conditions change as models predicted and to hindcast observed changes to create better models of what’s going on.

Proclaiming the cause of an event underway, one that nobody has studied, is counterproductive to Gore’s cause and, like pumping hot air into hurricane, fuel for his detractors’ arguments.

We might not be professional astronauts, but NASA has opened to the gates for us to sign on – literally - for missions to the moon and to hunt for alien planets.

NASA is taking names from the public to send to the moon aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), an unmanned probe slated to launch this fall to map the lunar surface and hunt for future landing sites. The project is part of a cooperative effort between NASA’s LRO office, the Applied Physics Lab at the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and the Planetary Society.

An illustration of NASA’s LRO spacecraft at the moon. Credit: NASA.

The LRO spacecraft will be on the vanguard of NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2020. It is slated to launch on Oct. 28 with a second probe, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) that will crash two vehicles into the moon on purpose.

You can send your name to the moon by entering it at this Johns Hopkins University Web site:

http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/index.php

Not only does your name go to the moon, but you’ll also get a lovely numbered certificate (I’m #618,963 if you’re wondering. So yeah, the nosebleed section of the moon trip). You can even go the eco route and just download it in a PDF form, file it away, then never look at it again until later when you’re sifting through old files wondering what delete and save.

The deadline is June 27, so you’ve got some time.

“Everyone who sends their name to the moon, like I’m doing, becomes part of the next wave of lunar explorers,” said Cathy Peddie, LRO deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in a statement. “The LRO mission is the first step in NASA’s plans to return humans to the moon by 2020, and your name can reach there first. How cool is that?”

An illustration of NASA’s Kepler telescope in space. Credit: NASA/GSFC.

And if Earth’s nearest neighbor isn’t enough for you, there’s always Kepler: a new space telescope that will hunt for alien planets similar to our terrestrial home.

Slated to launch in February 2009, Kepler will orbit the Sun – not Earth – and peer into the depths of space to scan for Earth-like planets circling their parent stars. The mission’s Name in Space project is part of a NASA cooperation with the International Year of Astronomy in 2009 and the 400th anniversary of Johannes Kepler’s publication of his first two laws of planetary motion.

True to its namesake’s research, the Kepler space telescope will be placed in an orbit that slowly drifts further and further from Earth.

Kepler engineers will be attaching a DVD to the new telescope carrying the names and thoughts of the public, which can be entered at the following Web site:

http://www.seti.org/kepler/names/

The deadline to enter your name is Nov. 1. Like the LRO program, you can enter your name and receive a digital certificate. But you can also add your two cents on where the Kepler mission’s importance lies in the current space exploration regime.

NASA plans to donate a copy of the DVD to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and post a video of the original’s installation on the Kepler telescope later this year.

“It’s a way for the public to participate in our space program,” explained David Koch, deputy principal investigator for Kepler’s mission, in a statement. “We’re looking for several million names…The only limitation is people’s interest.”

• Mooncrash! The Greatest Lunar Impacts Ever
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• The Top 10 Most Intriguing Extrasolar Planets