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Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"

For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.

"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.

Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.

Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.

"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.

Nature News: The rise and fall this year of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM)—a satellite meant to pin down the repulsive force that is accelerating the universe's expansion—is partly due to strife between two US agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy, and a third potential partner, the European Space Agency.

In addition, scientists working on the JDEM designs have not presented a unified front, owing to disagreements over the best observational method to use at a time when an influential astrophysics panel is about to prioritize the next decade's best and most organized missions.

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Physics Today: A Russian Rokot launcher has successfully taken off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome with Europe's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite on board.

SMOS, a small 658-kg satellite, will provide the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans.

"Salinity is one of the drivers for the Thermohaline Circulation, the large network of currents that steers heat exchanges within the oceans on a global scale," says Volker Liebig, ESA's director of Earth observation programs. "Its survey has long been awaited by climatologists who try to predict the long-term effects of today's climate change."

The satellite was developed by ESA in cooperation with France's CNES and Spain's Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI).

Its only instrument is called the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS). The device works by connecting together 69 receivers mounted on three deployable arms to measure the temperature of the reflection of Earth's surface in the microwave frequency range. This temperature is linked to both the actual temperature of the surface and its conductive characteristics, which are in turn linked to soil moisture for land surface and to water salinity for sea surface.

"The data collected by SMOS will complement measurements already performed on the ground and at sea to monitor water exchanges on a global scale," says Liebig. "Since these exchanges—most of which occur in remote areas—directly affect the weather, they are of paramount importance to meteorologists."

SMOS is the second satellite launched under ESA's Earth Explorer program to gather new environmental data. It follows the Gravity and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), which was launched in March.

Next February, Cryosat-2 will be launched to measure the thickness of the ice sheets. This will be followed in 2011 by ADM-Aeolus—designed to study atmospheric dynamics—and the Swarm mission to monitor the weakening of Earth's magnetic field. Finally in 2013 the EarthCARE mission will study clouds and aerosols.

Physics Today: Images from the Herschel observatory, obtained during the performance verification phase, reveal previously unseen detail in a region of the Milky Way near the Galactic Plane. This composite image above has been constructed from a series of images taken by two instruments: SPIRE (SPIRE is a three band imaging photometer and an imaging fourier transform spectrometer) and PACS (an imaging photometer and integral field line spectrometer for wavelengths between 60 and 210 µm.) The image uses color coding the different observed wavelengths: the blue denotes 70 µm, green is 160 µm emission, while red is the combination of the emission from all three SPIRE bands at 250/350/500 µm. The color-coding differentiates material that is extremely cold (red) from that which is slightly warmer. The image contains an incredible network of filamentary structures with surprising features indicative of a chain of near-simultaneous star-formation events, glittering rather like beads of water on a string in the sunlight. The images are of a 2x2 degree field in an area near the Galactic Plane, 60 degrees from the Galactic Centre, in the constellation of the Southern Cross. This area of the night sky is considered to be a good test case for the telescope as the area is crowded with many molecular clouds along the line-of-sight, which should show whether the telescope can resolve fine detail easily. The images shown here were obtained on 3 September 2009 and are based on just over 6 hours of observations. Since stars form in cold, dense environments, the composite image easily locates the star-forming filaments that would be very difficult to isolate from a map made at a single far-infrared or submillimeter wavelength.

Various: New data and images from flybys of the Moon by the Cassini, the US Deep Impact spacecraft, and a NASA instrument on India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter provide compelling evidence of traces of water on the Moon. The results were published in Science magazine.

Tentative clues for the existence of water ice on the Moon have existed for sometime. Faith Vilas, director of the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona saw phyllosilicates—minerals formed through heat and water—back in 1999 when the Galileo spacecraft flew by the Moon, but until recently could not get her research accepted for publication.

Both the Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecrafts saw some hints of hydrogen molecules some years ago. But it was new data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, (LRO) which was discussed at a conference last week that gave hints that conditions would be ripe for water ice.

The LRO's Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which measured the temperature of the lunar surface, discovered that some of the polar craters contain some of the lowest temperatures in the solar system, even colder than the surface of Pluto. These measurement were proof that the Moon has permanently dark and extremely cold places said science team member Ashwin Vasavada from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California at the conference.

Data from the LRO's Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector didn't show many neutrons inside the craters but surprisingly showed evidence of ice outside of the craters says University of Arizona astronomer William Boynton. "It actually could be better (for exploration) because getting down inside those craters is very difficult," he adds.

According to the results published in Science, concentrations in sunlit soil might average about one liter per ton of lunar material. That water doesn’t remain on the Moon, but comes and goes each lunar day.

In contrast, water molecules bound to phosphate minerals within volcanic rocks—material that formed well beneath the lunar surface—date back several billion years, says Francis McCubbin of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC A fourth, unpublished study led by McCubbin finds a surprisingly high abundance of this interior water, which may shed new light on how the Moon formed.

"It’s so startling because it’s so pervasive," said Lawrence A. Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a co-author of one of the papers that analyzed data from a NASA instrument aboard India’s Chandrayyaan-1 satellite. "It’s like somebody painted the globe," he told the New York Times.

Carle Pieters, of Brown University, who led the Chandrayaan-1 observation team, said: "When we say ‘water on the moon’, we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface," she told the London Times.

The discovery of more evidence for water on the Moon is spurring excitement over its implications for future space exploration says space.com's Leonard David.

"If ice is found we have to further explore it with landers, rovers, coring drills to assess its distribution and composition," explained Bernard Foing, the European Space Agency (ESA) project scientist for the now defunct ESA SMART-1 lunar orbiter. He is also the director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG).

Following that appraisal, Foing said that the next task is to organize how ice could be partly exploited on the spot in some areas to ease the next steps of human exploration towards an international lunar base.

NASA help hold a press conference to announce the findings at 2:00pm EST earlier today.

Related Links
Water on the Moon? Nature
Possible surface ice on moon surprises Arizona Star
Water sheathes, permeates Moon ScienceNews
Prospect of Water Ice Spurs Excitement for Moon Exploration Space.com
It's Official: Water Found on the Moon Space.com
India's first space mission finds water on Moon The Guardian
Evidence suggests water exists on the Moon LA Times

Building magazine: After dominating the architecture scene for 40 years, Norman Foster seems to have decided that the world is not enough: his practice has joined a European consortium to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon as part of the European Space Agency's Aurora programme.

The Daily Telegraph: US scientists are trying to map the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons in order to reduce the amount of fuel used by spacecraft. The Genesis spacecraft used this technique in 2004 to cut its fuel load by a factor of ten.

Depicted by computer graphics, the optimal journey pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Virginia Tech's Shane Ross said: "I like to think of [these tubes] as being similar to ocean currents, but they are gravitational currents."

"If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free."

"It's not the same as a [gravitational] slingshot," said Ross. "Slingshots don't put you in orbit round a moon, whereas this does."

Space.com: Project managers for the British Beagle lander program are seeking redemption—on the moon—nearly six years after their spacecraft disappeared on Mars. Collin Pillinger who headed the unsuccessful Beagle Mars project is in discussion with the commercial "Odyssey Moon" program to fly a backup version of Beagle's most powerful instrument on board the Odyssey lunar lander

New Scientist: The US government is launching a competition, which will run until the end of 2010, to find the best way of tracking pieces of junk down to the size of a pool ball. Three aerospace companies—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon—have each been awarded $30 million by US Air Force Space Command to design a "space fence" that will constantly report the motion of all objects 5 centimetres wide and larger in medium and low-Earth orbits.

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Science News: Saturn’s moon Titan has an environment that resembles Earth’s at the time that life first got a foothold, suggest new findings from the Cassini spacecraft.

Two close flybys have gathered fresh evidence that ammonia, most likely mixed with water ice, has recently erupted onto the surface of the moon. The likely presence of ammonia on Titan’s icy surface, combined with the abundance of methane and nitrogen in the moon’s thick atmosphere, together suggest that Titan may host a prebiotic brew, says Cassini scientist Robert Nelson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The findings were reported by Nelson 5 August in Rio de Janeiro at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union

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BBC NEWS: Europe's flagship robotic rover mission to Mars now looks certain to leave Earth in 2018, two years later than recently proposed, the BBC understands.

The ExoMars vehicle is intended to search the Red Planet for signs of past or present life.

The delay is the third for the mission originally planned to launch in 2011.

NPR: NASA scientists Paul Goldsmith and Charles Lawrence discuss the space telescopes Herschel and Planck, which the European Space Agency launched last month. Herschel will investigate star and galaxy formation, and Planck will observe the residual glow of the newborn universe.

SPACE.com: "For the first time, astronomers have observed the phases of an extrasolar planet in visible light, as the world orbits around its star.

The planet, CoRoT-1b, was the first planet discovered by the French CoRoT (Convection Rotation and Planetary Transit) satellite about 2.5 years ago. It is about 1,600 light years away in the constellation Monoceros."

Various: Europe's Herschel and Planck telescopes have blasted into space on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana, reports the BBC. The far-infrared and submillimeter Herschel observatory is the largest telescope put into space. The Planck telescope will survey the cosmic microwave background.

Meanwhile the space shuttle Atlantis has captured the Hubble Space Telescope and started the first spacewalks to install the new Wide Field Camera 3 into the 19-year-old observatory. "It looks beautiful and in good shape," said astronaut John Grunsfeld to NASA ground control in Houston, Texas. However, a stubborn bolt attached to a grounding strap is causing the astronauts some difficulty, reports space.com.

Science: Tight budgets are pushing the U.S. and European space agencies to consider a truly collaborative series of missions to Mars. What would it mean for science?
Did Mars ever harbor life? The multibillion-dollar quest to find out faces an uncertain future on both sides of the Atlantic. The European Space Agency (ESA) lacks the money to carry out its ambitious blueprint for putting a sophisticated lander and rover on Mars's surface in 2016. And NASA is grappling with major cost increases and delays in its Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) that are eating up funding for future missions.

To avoid hanging separately, say scientists and managers in the United States and Europe, the two agencies must agree to hang together in an unprecedented partnership. This summer they intend to unveil a sweeping plan for a decade of collaboration that could kick off with a joint 2016 mission and culminate a decade later in the return of a martian sample to Earth. "This is a big change," says David Southwood, ESA science chief. "But we have to think about Mars differently." Adds his counterpart at NASA, Edward Weiler: "We've got to do this together."

BBC: NASA and the European Space Agency have decided to forge ahead with an ambitious plan to send a probe to the Jupiter system and its icy moon Europa.

Nature News: European ministers commit €10 billion to space missions, Earth monitoring, and new facilities.

 

The Guardian: The rover – the most sophisticated ever built – is due to explore Mars in 2015 as part of the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission, but there are fears funding cuts will kill off Britain's contribution