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The Indian Space Research Organisation is ready to establish a world class facility for atmospheric studies near Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman G Madhavan Nair informed Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy that ISRO would establish the facility for advanced atmospheric studies.

Nair was replying to the message sent by the Chief Minister congratulating him and his team for the successful launch of Chandrayaan-I, said a statement from the Chief Minister’s office.

The moon mission was launched from Sriharikota launch station in Andhra Pradesh.

Rajasekhara Reddy, in his congratulatory message, sought the establishment of ISRO’s human space programme (astronaut training and biomedical engineering centre) and offered the necessary land in Anantapur district close to Bangalore.

Nair, however, informed him that as part of Human Spaceflight Programme (HSP), a centre for training India astronauts is planned to be set up around Bangalore, (in coordination with Indian Institute of Aviation, Medicine, Bangalore).

The ISRO chief pointed out that the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory (NARL) of ISRO was already functioning at Gadanki, near Tirupati since 1992. It is engaged in fundamental research related to atmospheric and space sciences and developing various types of radars and lidars for atmospheric studies.

“NARL has proposed to expand its activities towards advanced technology experiments and in this regard a laboratory for developing flight instruments is planned to be set up near Tirupati,” wrote the ISRO chairman.

Naidu urged the Chief Minister to allot 20 acres of land for establishing a world class facility for atmospheric studies which would attract the participations of many Indian and foreign researchers, who will contribute to advanced research in weather and climate.

Hidden alien moons that could harbor life can be revealed by the wobbles of their planets, according to calculations by a scientist.

Almost all the 30 known exoplanets that sit within the habitable zone of their stars are gas giants.

“But they might have rocky, possibly Earth-like moons,” said David Kipping of University College London.

Kipping’s calculations, which will appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, show that such moons would reveal their presence when the planet passes in front of its star as viewed from Earth.

A moon would induce a wobble in the planet’s orbit, so the planet’s position and velocity would differ slightly on each transit.

According to Kipping, existing telescopes could detect an Earth-mass moon around a Neptune-mass gas planet.

An approaching cold front could thwart NASA’s plans to launch space shuttle Endeavour on Friday on a flight to the international space station.

But the seven astronauts arrived Tuesday ahead of the countdown start and hopeful for an on-time liftoff.

“This mission is all about home improvement, home improvement both inside and outside,” shuttle commander Christopher Ferguson said after flying in Houston with his crew.

During the 15-day mission, the astronauts will deliver a new bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms and exercise machine, as well as a water recycling system — and a new resident for the space station. A new astronaut will replace one of the three space station residents.

The plan is to expand the living quarters of the space station so the crew can be doubled to six by next June.

“On the inside of the space station, the walls are largely up,” Ferguson said. “… Well, it’s moving day. It’s time to fill them up.”

Ferguson also noted the never-before-attempted repairs that are planned for outside the space station. Three of the crew will take turns going outside to clean and lubricate a clogged joint that is preventing one set of solar wings from turning automatically toward the sun, and they’ll replace its bearings.

Six hours after the astronauts’ arrival, the countdown clocks began ticking late Tuesday night.

This will be NASA’s first shuttle launch since the end of May.

“We haven’t had a launch for a while, so we’re really excited to be back in the saddle again,” said test director Jeff Spaulding.

The threatening cold front was moving across the central part of the nation Tuesday and was expected to bring rain and thick clouds to the launch site by week’s end.

Shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters said there was a 60 percent chance of acceptable conditions at the 7:55 p.m. Friday liftoff time and only a 40 percent chance on Saturday.

“The timing of the front will be critical,” she said.

NASA has a shuttle launch window until Nov. 25.

Wild animals are climbing back onto Chinese plates after the deadly SARS virus made some diners wary, and booming demand for traditional medicine is also threatening some plants, environmentalists said on Wednesday.

Nearly half of urbanites had consumed wildlife in the past 12 months, either as food or medicine, with rich and well educated Chinese most likely to tuck into a wild snake or turtle, a survey of urbanites in six cities found.

They enjoyed eating wildlife because they saw it as “unpolluted,” “special” and with extra nourishing and health powers, according to a study commissioned by Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

“This consumer demand is increasingly placing the natural environment — both in China and abroad — at risk through unsustainable and illegal wildlife trade,” the report said.

Around half of the southern Chinese markets checked by Traffic were also selling wildlife for the pot, mostly reptiles but some birds and mammals as well. Two species for sale are on an international list of 800 critically threatened animals.

In an encouraging sign, only 3 percent of diners order the most endangered animals, but Traffic said a new approach was needed to persuade Chinese customers not to eat other wildlife.

Species endangered by their culinary and medicinal popularity in China include the pangolin, tiger and Chinese sturgeon, the report said.

“A PROBLEM FOR YOU”

An outbreak of the deadly SARS virus six years ago resulted in a local gourmet favorite — the civet — being banished to the black market. The raccoon-like animal was blamed for spreading SARS, which infected 8,000 people globally and killed 800.

And more than half the people surveyed still worried about the threat of diseases, hinting at one possible tactic in the battle to cut sales of wildlife for the dining table.

“A ‘causing a problem to you’ approach (e.g. legal liability, deteriorated living environment, hazardous to one’s health) instead of a ‘be compassionate’ approach could have a more immediate effect,” the report said.

The demand for medicine could also be as destructive to natural vegetation and habitats as the quest for food, in a country where traditional medicine is widely used and has also yielded valuable compounds for use in Western treatments.

The country’s total exports of traditional medicine were also worth $1.1 billion last year. Catering to this market and the demand from an expanding and increasingly wealthy domestic population is straining areas where wild plants are gathered.

Up to a fifth of medicinal plants and animals are now considered endangered, Traffic said.

But only about one third of China’s traditional medicine output is from wild plants, the rest are farmed — most with good practice.

NASA’s Phoenix Mars spacecraft regained contact with Earth more than a day after falling silent, but its days operating on the red planet are still numbered, mission managers said.

Waning sunlight and a dust storm this week drained the lander’s power, forcing it to go into safe mode. It failed to respond to two wake-up calls from Earth but sent a signal late yesterday when the orbiting Odyssey spacecraft passed overhead.

Phoenix is programmed with a “Lazarus mode” that automatically causes it to reboot itself after losing power. Though Phoenix answered the latest call, it went back to sleep for another 19 hours to recharge its battery. Engineers expect the lander to survive several more weeks.

“We knew this was coming. It’s bittersweet,” said project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic in May. During its three-month prime mission, the sun stayed above the horizon, allowing the long-armed lander to dig trenches in the soil and collect ice bits for its various instruments to analyze.

Phoenix landed in a patch of ice in Mars’ high northern latitudes to study whether the environment could be friendly to microbial life. It has found evidence that the ice may have melted at some point, although the soil is dry. It has yet to find the presence of organic, or carbon-based, compounds that are considered essential for life.

Russia’s spacecraft producer Energiya will not provide any more Soyuz vessels for trips to the International Space Station unless funds could urgently be found, Energiya’s president and general constructor warned on Friday.

“We have vessels and funding for them for the next two trips, but I do not know what will happen with expeditions after that,” Vitaly Lopota told reporters as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency.

“We have no funds to produce new Soyuz craft. Unless we are granted loans or advance payment in the next two or three weeks, we cannot be responsible for future Soyuz production,” Lopota explained.

The Soyuz is Russia’s workhorse spacecraft that has carried out more than 1,600 flights, despite glitches that have bedevilled recent landings of the Soyuz capsule.

An April 19 landing, where the capsule entered the atmosphere at an unusually steep angle, subjecting astronauts to uncomfortably strong G forces and landing 420 kilometres (260 miles) from its target, as well as a similar October 2007 incident, raised doubts about the Soyuz’s safety.

However, Friday’s landing of the Soyuz carrying US space tourist Richard Garriott and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, went smoothly as scheduled.

NASA will be totally reliant on the Soyuz for transporting astronauts and cargo to the ISS after its space shuttle fleet retires in 2010 and until the shuttle’s successor vehicle is ready, expected in 2015 at the earliest.

Although little is known about how the universe is structured, latest observations support the theory that large galaxies are clustered together in structures similar to giant soap bubbles, with tinier galaxies sprinkled on the surface of this “soapy” layer.

A team led by Noah Brosch, director Tel Aviv University (TAU) owned Wise Observatory, is the first in the world to uncover what they believe are visible traces of a “filament” of dark matter - an entity on which galaxies meet, cluster and form. A filament can originate at the junction of two “soap bubbles”, where the thin membrane is thicker.

Brosch, with his student Adi Zitrin and researchers from Cornell University, studied an area of the sky opposite the constellation Virgo, where 14 galaxies were forming in a line, according to a TAU release.

Pundits have called the line a “Bridge to Nowhere” because it seems to start and end in unknown locations. Strangely, 13 of these galaxies were simultaneously giving birth to new stars.

The odds of this occurrence are very rare, leading the researchers to believe that the galaxies might somehow be forming on this elusive filament, made entirely from dark matter, which attracts regular matter that then turns into new stars.

“There has long been a theoretical belief that this was the case,” said Brosch, “but this new finding represents experimental results that such a filament really exists, and that possibly it is an entity made from dark matter which is aligning these galaxies.”

Brosch compared the work of an astronomer to “looking for hairs of the beard of the Creator”. This line of galaxies may be one such hair. Generally speaking, matter as we know it on earth makes up only a small percentage of our universe.

The composition of most of the universe is unknown - it’s either dark matter (about a quarter of the universe) or dark energy (the other three-quarters). “Our studies show that you don’t need to go to the edge of the universe to find dark matter. It may be only 15 million light years away, more or less in our backyard,” said Brosch.

The research has massive implications for astronomy and the understanding of galaxy-formation. Due to the surprising closeness of this new grouping of galaxies to ours, it would only be a matter of technological advances - maybe a couple of hundred years - and a longer human lifespan before explorers could visit this unusual dark matter in person.

“Our technology is abysmally limited right now, but it could definitely happen,” said Brosch.

Geologists say they have discovered prehistoric animal tracks so densely packed on a 3/4-acre site that they’re calling it a “dinosaur dance floor.”

The site along the Arizona-Utah state line offers a rich new set of clues about the lives of dinosaurs 190 million years ago.

Back then, large stretches of the West were a Sahara-like desert. More than 1,000 tracks were found in what would have been a watery oasis nestled among towering, wind-whipped sand dunes.

The footprints could provide fodder for researchers trying to understand dinosaurs that survived in what many considered a “vast, dry, uninhabitable desert,” said Marjorie Chan, professor of geology at the University of Utah and one of the authors of a new study of the site.

“Maybe it really wasn’t as lifeless as we think,” Chan said Monday.

The discovery adds yet another site to the region’s long list of dinosaur hot spots. The difference, though, is sheer numbers. Scientists estimate there are more than 1,000 tracks at the site, which is in a protected area of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

In some places, there are a dozen footprints in a square yard.

“It was a place that attracted a crowd, kind of like a dance floor,” Chan said.

Researchers identified four different kinds of tracks in the rock but haven’t determined the specific species that left them behind.

Some of the footprints — once thought to be potholes formed by erosion — measure 16 inches across and have three toes and a heel. Others are smaller and more circular.

The area also includes what researchers think are rare tail drag marks.

Winston Seiler, who studied the site for a master’s thesis, said the area might have been a popular gathering spot for adults and youngsters alike. It could have been one of many where Early Jurassic dinosaurs stopped for refreshment before moving along.

Seiler imagines dinosaurs were “happy to be at this place, having wandered up and down many a sand dune, exhausted from the heat and the blowing sand, relieved and happy to come to a place where there was water.”

The study’s findings were published in the October issue of the journal Palaios.

“It’s an exciting site and deserving of a lot more work,” said Jim Kirkland, Utah’s state paleontologist, who was not involved with the study.

He hopes paleontologists begin a large-scale survey of the site to better understand what’s there and what stories the tracks might tell.

Dinosaur tracks can provide important insight about dinosaur behavior and movements across the landscape, said Andrew Milner, paleontologist at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in southwestern Utah.

The newly discovered site, about three miles from the nearest road, is part of a protected wilderness area that also includes a geologic formation called “The Wave” — a gallery of striped, twisted sandstone.

Twenty permits are issued each day to enter the area. Linda Price, the monument’s manager, expects interest in the area will jump with word of the dinosaur track site.

The 13 commercial satellite-fleet operators active in the Middle East and North Africa showed a 73 percent fill rate on their 41 Ku-band satellites in mid-2008 when measured in booked megahertz compared to total megahertz of capacity, according to a mid-2008 survey of capacity taken from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, by the London Satellite Exchange (LSE) and Euroconsult. The satellites were spread over 31 orbital slots.

The Ku-band fill rate jumps to 97 percent if the measure is made in the less-precise count of transponders used versus transponders unused, because some transponders are booked only partially, the survey found.

The survey is the latest confirmation that the region is among the world’s most dynamic, and it explains why operators without satellites in the region want to get in there, and those already there are planning new capacity.

Transponder demand has risen at a rate of 12 percent per year during the last five years, with most of the new capacity in Ku-band. Commercial satellite-lease revenues have grown by 17 percent per year on average since 2003, reaching $752 million in 2007, according to Euroconsult estimates.

Not all operators are sharing the benefits, in part because fill rates are a function of the uses to which satellites are put.

A company focused on satellite television, such as Nilesat of Egypt, is booked solid on its two satellites, both in terms of available megahertz and available transponders. Television broadcasters typically lease entire transponders in multiyear contracts. Nilesat recently ordered a new satellite, to be launched at the company’s 7 degrees west orbital slot in early 2010.

But television and radio broadcasts represented just 42 percent of the uses to which the observed satellites were put when LSE measured demand from Dubai in mid-2008.

A majority of the satellite capacity in the region was devoted to voice and data traffic, whose customers tend to sign shorter-term contracts, often for partial transponders. This gives their fill rates a higher volatility. LSE and Euroconsult said in their survey, “Ku-Band Loading Report: Middle East and North Africa,” that for these applications any snapshot of demand may be less reliable.

Also distorting the figures is the fact that some operators purposely take transponders out of service as they await the arrival of a large customer that has reserved the capacity but not yet taken up residence. Such a transponder would appear as “unused” in the LSE and Euroconsult survey.

Russian Satellite Communications Co. of Moscow, for example, showed a 100 percent fill rate for the transponders on the three satellites it has over the region, but just a 52 percent fill rate when measured in booked versus available megahertz.

“The Russian operator used 81 percent of its capacity for voice and data traffic, which is generally more volatile than broadcasting applications,” LSE and Euroconsult said in the report. “Thus the fill rate measured for the study as of mid-2008 might be underestimated as compared to the average yearly value.”

With 14 satellites carrying more than 475 transponders over the region, Eutelsat of Paris is the region’s biggest player, providing half the bandwidth available in the region. But Eutelsat shows an average fill rate of 72 percent for the 14 satellites it operates in the region.

Among Eutelsat’s satellites, its Atlantic Bird and “W” series satellites, which include voice and data traffic, are less full than the company’s Hot Bird series of direct-broadcast television spacecraft at 13 degrees east longitude, which are full and are Eutelsat’s prime source of revenue.

Eutelsat, which is in the midst of an unprecedented fleet-expansion program, plans to launch five more satellites with footprints over the Middle East in the next 24 months: Hot Bird 9 and Hot Bird 10, both to operate from 13 degrees east; W2A, to be located at 10 degrees east; W2M, for 16 degrees east; and W3B, for 7 degrees east.

The company with the biggest near-term development plans in the region, after Eutelsat, is the Arabsat consortium of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which has announced plans to launch one satellite per year, on average, for the next four years. Arabsat was reported to have a fill rate of 64 percent in terms of megahertz occupancy, and 89 percent when measured in transponders that are at least partially occupied.

In terms of satellites now in service, the second-largest operator in the Middle East and North Africa is Intelsat of Bermuda and Washington, which has 11 satellites and 144 transponders capable of transmitting to the Middle East.

The Dubai-based measure of occupancy showed Intelsat’s satellites 73 percent full on average when measured in megahertz, and 98 percent full when measured in transponders.

Norbert dissipated into a tropical depression over the northern mountains of mainland Mexico on Sunday, after ripping off roofs, flooding streets, and forcing thousands to seek shelter in Baja California.

The storm’s remnants dumped moderate rain in areas across West Texas on Sunday afternoon, but there were no immediate problems, according to officials with the National Weather Service in Texas.

Presidio County Attorney Rod Ponton said Texas officials were waiting for rain reports from Mexico to know if they should expect floodwaters later this week in Presidio, where an earthen levee is struggling to hold back the swollen Rio Grande.

Civil Protection officials in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua warned of possible freezing rain because of Norbert’s remnants and a cold front.

Norbert hit mainland Mexico’s Sonora coast early Sunday as a Category 1 hurricane with winds near 85 mph (140 kph) after crossing the Baja California peninsula on Saturday, said the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Sonora Civil Protection Director Willebado Alatriste said authorities were still evaluating the damages, but they did not appear to be widespread.

The storm weakened rapidly as it moved inland. But the hurricane center warned it could dump up to 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain over northwestern Mexico — possibly producing flash floods or mudslides — and up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) over the portions of the U.S. southern high plains.

Norbert barreled through Baja California as a Category 2 hurricane Saturday, uprooting trees, tearing roofs off of homes, and causing widespread flooding. Thousands of residents fled to shelters in school buses and army trucks as floodwaters rose in their homes.

Off the southwest coast of Mexico, Tropical Storm Odile also weakened into a depression. The storm had flooded about 200 homes in the Acapulco area.

The hurricane center said it would not issue additional advisories on Norbert and Odile.