YCLOAK

India’s heaviest, newly-developed rocket hurtled into space Monday evening carrying a communication satellite of more than three tons from Sriharikota in eastern India. It marks another milestone in the country’s ambitious space program and brings India a step closer to sending astronauts into space.

“Today is a historic day.…we have been able to successfully put the satellite into the orbit,” a smiling A.S. Kiran Kumar, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization said after the launch.

Space scientists count many benefits of the 640 ton Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mk III rocket which can carry a four ton payload into higher orbit. It will reduce India’s dependency on foreign space agencies to put its heavier satellites in space leading to huge savings, it can over time make it possible to send manned missions and enhance deep space exploration capabilities.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that the “mission takes India closer to the next generation launch vehicle and satellite capability. The nation is proud!”

Although India has been dreaming big in space – mulling a manned mission to space and interplanetary missions to Venus and Jupiter, its lack of heavy lift technology remained a hurdle in giving concrete shape to those plans.

“To be very honest there was a major limitation of thinking slightly big in space,” says Ajay Lele at the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. “Without a heavy launcher you cannot have ambitious programs. Even though India had gone to Moon and Mars, India had carried a very small amount of a payload. Now future missions to all those planets can help India to do major scientific research.”

The technology has not come easy — India’s space agency has spent about 15 years to develop the heavy lift rocket.

The new rocket will also help the country enhance the commercial potential of its space program – putting satellites into space is a lucrative $ 300 billion business that India has begun exploiting. It was limited to putting smaller satellites in space so far, but can now consider heavier launches.

In the last three years India’s space program has come into international limelight with a series of landmark programs: In 2014, it sent the world’s cheapest mission to Mars, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi points out cost less than the Hollywood movie “Gravity”. Earlier this year it achieved a record by putting 104 small satellites in a single launch simultaneously into space.
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More than a billion people around the world rely on food from the ocean as their primary source of protein. But as the planet’s oceans become more polluted, they are changing and all kinds of marine life are being impacted. VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer reports that this week ((June 5-9)) more than 4,000 government, scientific, business and civil society leaders will meet in New York to mobilize for action to stop the decline of our oceans.
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If you’re being treated for cancer, speak up about any side effects. A study that had patients use home computers to report symptoms like nausea and fatigue surprisingly improved survival – by almost half a year, longer than many new cancer drugs do.

The online tool was intended as a quick and easy way for people to regularly report complications rather than trying to call their doctors or waiting until the next appointment. Researchers had hoped to improve quality of life but got a bonus in longer survival.      

“I was floored by the results,” said the study leader, Dr. Ethan Basch. “We are proactively catching things early” with online reporting.

Patients were able to stick with treatment longer because their side effects were quickly addressed, he said.

People shouldn’t assume that symptoms are an unavoidable part of cancer care, said Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

“You want to be able to reach your provider as early and easily as possible,” because a sign like shortness of breath may mean treatment isn’t working and needs to be changed, he said.

The study was featured at the cancer group’s annual meeting in Chicago on Sunday and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Earlier studies suggest that doctors miss about half of patients’ symptoms.

Catching problems sooner

Much of this happens between visits when patients are out of sight and out of mind,” said Basch, a researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Sometimes patients just put up with a problem until their next exam.

“The spouse will say, `My husband was laid up in bed, exhausted or in pain,’ and I’ll say `Why didn’t you call me?’” Basch said.

The study tested whether the online tool could catch problems sooner. It involved 766 people being treated for various types of advanced cancers at Sloan Kettering. Some were given usual care and the rest, the online symptom tool.

Patients were as old as 91, and 22 percent has less than a high school education, but using a computer proved easy. “The older patients really grabbed onto it very quickly,” Basch said.

The online group was asked to report symptoms at least once a week – sooner if they had a problem – and given a list of common ones such as appetite loss, constipation, cough, diarrhea, shortness of breath, fatigue, hot flashes, nausea or pain.

Doctors saw these reports at office visits, and nurses got email alerts when patients reported severe or worsening problems.

“Almost 80 percent of the time, the nurses responded immediately,” calling in medicines for nausea, pain or other problems, Basch said.

Six months later, health-related quality of life had improved for more of those in the online group and they made fewer trips to an emergency room. They also were able to stay on chemotherapy longer – eight months versus six, on average.

Median survival in the online group was 31 months versus 26 months for the others.

A larger study will now test the online reporting system nationwide.

A colon cancer patient, 53-year-old James Sylvester of New York, is using a version of the one tested in the study to report any problems to his doctors at Sloan Kettering. He hasn’t had many side effects, but a rash led to referral to a dermatologist to see if it was related to his cancer medicine.

“The main benefit is they go holistically all over your body” with the list, asking about things that folks may not realize could be due to cancer, such as a rash or trouble with balance, he said.

“Some of the things you might not tell your doctor, or you might forget,” Sylvester said. The tool ensures the doctor has that information ahead of time, “so when you have that face time, it’s more focused.”
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SpaceX launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station on Saturday, another milestone in its bid to drive down flight costs.

After a two-day delay caused by thunderstorms, the unmanned Falcon rocket blasted off carrying a Dragon capsule that made a station delivery nearly three years ago. When this refurbished Dragon reaches the orbiting lab on Monday, it will be the first returning craft since NASA’s now-retired shuttles.

The first-stage booster flown Saturday afternoon was brand-new, and as is now the custom, returned to Cape Canaveral following liftoff for a successful vertical touchdown. “The Falcon has landed,” SpaceX Mission Control declared from company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and a cheer went up.

Reusable booster

The plan is to launch the booster again, instead of junking it in the ocean as so many other rocket makers do. Just two months ago, SpaceX launched its first recycled booster on a satellite mission. Another flight featuring a reused booster is coming up later this month.

This Dragon capsule, meanwhile, came back for take two following a few modifications and much testing. Shortly before liftoff, a SpaceX vice president, Hans Koenigsmann, called the Dragon reflight “a pretty big deal.”

It’s all part of the company’s quest, Koenigsmann said, to lower the cost of access to space through reusability.

The Dragon soaring Saturday has the same hull and most of the same parts from its 2014 flight. SpaceX installed a new heat shield and parachutes, among a few other things, for the trip back to Earth at flight’s end. The Dragon is the only supply ship capable of surviving re-entry; all the others burn up in the atmosphere. NASA’s other supplier, Orbital ATK, will see its cargo carrier depart the 250-mile-high complex on Sunday, six weeks after arriving.

Besides the usual supplies, the 6,000-pound shipment includes mice and flies for research, a new kind of roll-up solar panel and a neutron star detector.

Similar risk

For now, SpaceX said savings are minimal because of all the inspections and tests performed on the already flown parts. NASA’s space station program manager, Kirk Shireman, told reporters earlier in the week that SpaceX did a thorough job recertifying the Dragon and that the risk is not substantially more than if this were a capsule straight off the factory floor. He said the entire industry is interested in “this whole notion of reuse,” first realized with the space shuttles.

It was the 100th launch from NASA’s hallowed Launch Complex 39A, the departure point for the Apollo moon shots as well as dozens of shuttle missions, including the last one in 2011. SpaceX now leases the pad from NASA; the company’s first launch from there was in February.

SpaceX has been hauling station supplies for NASA for five years, both up and down. This is the company’s 11th mission under a NASA contract. The company’s next step is to deliver astronauts using modified Dragons. That could occur as early as next year.

Until SpaceX and Boeing start transporting crews, astronauts will continue to ride Russian rockets. On Friday, a Russian and Frenchman returned from the space station in their Soyuz capsule, leaving two Americans and a Russian behind. The station was zooming over Oman in the Persian Gulf when the Falcon took flight.
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U.S. President Donald Trump “believes the climate is changing,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley says.

“President Trump believes the climate is changing and he believes pollutants are part of the equation,” Haley said during an excerpt of a CNN interview released Saturday. The interview will be broadcast Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

On Thursday, Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate change pact, tapping into his “America First” campaign theme. He said participating in the pact would undermine the U.S. economy, wipe out jobs, weaken national sovereignty and put his country at a permanent disadvantage.

On Friday, nobody at the White House was able to say whether Trump believed in climate change. In recent years, he has expressed skepticism about whether climate change is real, sometimes calling it a hoax. But since becoming president, he has not offered an opinion.
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A Polish musician has created an unusual interactive instrument – a larger-than life music box bristling with xylophones and drums – that he says can help educate children and aid their development through musical play.

The Musicon comprises a rotating wooden drum fitted with removable smaller instruments. Children play notes by placing pegs in holes on the rotating drum’s surface – much like a music box – but one that allows children to play any melody they like.

“Musicon is not only music, it is only a tool for learning, for development,” said Kamil Laszuk, who invented the instrument and has developed it with the help of a team of close friends. “There is also programming here, learning physics, cooperation in a team and also the development of manual skills. Music is the reward.”

Laszuk developed the instrument for a project during his industrial design studies at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Following a positive reaction to his creation, his parents sold their house to help fund its development.

Warsaw’s Synapsis Foundation, which helps children with autism and Asperger syndrome, suggested the instrument could be enjoyable for children suffering from those conditions.

“It is very important that there is no possibility of failure, that they can freely experiment in their own way,” psychologist Joanna Burgiell said.

The instrument is due to go into production by the end of 2017.
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Better treatment strategies for pediatric cancers are helping survivors live longer, with fewer serious health problems related to their treatment, U.S. researchers said Friday.

The finding, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, is based on analysis of data from 23,600 participants in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Overall, severe health conditions arising within 15 years of childhood cancer diagnosis fell to 8.8 percent of survivors in the 1990s, from 12.7 percent in the 1970s, the study found.

The findings show that childhood cancer survivors who were given more modern treatment approaches, such as reduced exposure to radiation and lower doses of chemotherapy, were faring better, said Todd Gibson of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, who led the study.

“Not only are more children being cured, but they also have lower risk for developing serious health problems due to cancer treatments later in life,” he said in a statement.

The researchers focused on severe, disabling, life-threatening or fatal health problems that occurred within 15 years of being diagnosed with a pediatric cancer between 1970 and 1999.

The biggest declines in health problems related to treatment occurred in survivors of Wilms’ tumor, a rare kidney cancer. In this group, serious complications fell to 5 percent of survivors in the 1990s, from a high of 13 percent in the 1970s.

Improvements

In survivors of childhood Hodgkin lymphoma, latent complication rates fell to 11 percent, from 18 percent in the 1970s. Improvements were also seen for astrocytoma, the second most common childhood cancer, and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer.

There were no reductions in long-term side effects among survivors of neuroblastoma, acute myeloid leukemia, soft-tissue sarcoma and osteoscarcoma.

The biggest improvements were seen with regard to endocrine conditions such as diabetes, thyroid disease or growth hormone deficiency. The researchers saw endocrine problems fall to 1.6 percent for childhood cancer survivors surveyed in the 1990s, compared with 4 percent in the 1970s.

The emergence of secondary cancers fell to 1.6 percent in the 1990s, compared with 2.4 percent in the 1970s.

Gastrointestinal and neurological conditions also improved.

But there was no improvement in rates of heart or lung conditions, which the researchers said served as a reminder of the need for close follow-up in childhood cancer survivors.
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It will be a few more days before Space X’s Dragon cargo capsule reaches the International Space Station (ISS). Bad weather postponed the launch scheduled for Thursday until Saturday. Among other supplies for the ISS crew, it carries an unusual telescope designed to look at not-well-known objects called neutron stars. These relatively small celestial bodies have some mind-boggling features, for example, a teaspoon of their matter weighs about 10 million tons.

Looking at a life-size model of the Neutron Star Composition Explorer, or NICER for short, displayed at the Goddard Space Center, one can immediately see that it is not an optical telescope.

The most visible part of Nicer is a one-meter-wide cube, made of solid aluminum with 56 holes drilled through its face. The instrument houses its own array of special lenses that deflect x-rays and focus them towards sensors fixed on the inner wall behind them.

Outside, it looks a little like the WWII Katyusha rocket launcher.

On top, it has a few appendages housing auxiliary equipment, as well as a socket for the ISS’s robotic arm that will eventually install it outside the orbital station.

Neutron stars

Standing next to the cube, deputy principal investigator for the NICER Mission, astrophysicist Zaven Arzoumanian, says that not much is known about neutron stars, the densest objects in the universe.

“They are only about 16 to 20 kilometers across but can contain the mass of up to two of our suns compressed into that tiny volume so we think they are made mostly of neutrons.”

But how is that possible when everything we know is made of atoms?

That’s true, Arzoumanian explains, “but the distance between nuclei of individual atoms is very large and is occupied by electrons that have very little mass, so it’s mostly empty space. If you could imagine having a lump of gold and crushing it to the point where you bring the nuclei closer and closer together until they’re touching, when there’s no more empty space the electrons are absorbed by the protons, they cancel each other out, they turn into neutrons and you’re left with a ball of neutrons.”

The only force that is capable of crushing atoms together to that point is gravity, and for gravity to be strong enough to do that you need one or two times the mass of the Sun collapsing and compressing, crushing itself under its own weight and you’re left with what we think is a neutron star,” he said.

At this point, the physics of a neutron star becomes murky. Perhaps under those conditions, neutrons and protons aren’t able to maintain their identities any more, Arzoumanian suggests. They may dissolve into a soup of even smaller particles – quarks and gluons. What we know, he adds, is that neutron stars rotate at very fast and constant speed and that they are very powerful sources of x-rays.

Pulsating beacons

If the Earth is in the path of the rotating beams, we see them as pulsating sources of light, as well as x-rays, which is why such neutron stars are also called pulsars.

“Imagine that you have a beach ball with a hot spot in the front and a hot spot in the back and the beach ball is spinning,” says Arzoumanian. “You see the hotspot come around towards you, you see the brightness increase, but there’s a hot spot in the back as well and eventually that swings around. So imagine the brightness as a function of time, it goes up and down deeply as the spots swing in and out of view.”

In a simplified way, he says, how deep that light variation is, how deeply it is modulated or how it varies, is a measure of how big the star is, how compact it is and it will tell us about its interior contents.

Spider’s eye

Building the NICER’s 56 eyes, sensitive to x-rays, required some marvelous ingenuity, as those rays don’t behave like visible light. Its lenses are in fact 24 concentric aluminum cylinders, coated with a thin layer of gold, and bent very slightly lengthwise.

“X-rays prefer to pass through things rather than to be focused,” explains Arzoumanian, “so there’s a unique geometry to these mirrors, which is very similar to skimming a stone on a pond. If you drop a pebble into water vertically it passes through. X-rays work the same way. But if you throw the pebble onto the water at a very sharp angle, you can skim it off the surface and these mirrors work the same way, the x-rays come in at a grazing angle and are redirected very slightly to focus at some distance downstream.”

But neutron stars emit all kinds of radiation, from low frequency radio waves to extremely high frequency gamma rays. Why concentrate on x-rays?

There are two reasons, says Arzoumanian, one scientific and one technological.

“The surface of the neutron star is glowing in x-ray light and for us to understand the size of the star, which is a direct way of understanding the interior makeup of the star, we need to be looking at the surface and the surface is glowing and x-rays so we look where we have to look to understand.”

The other technological reason, he says, has to do with the SEXTANT Mission that will use the same telescope.

Celestial GPS

A sextant is the optical instrument that mariners, and later airmen, have used since the 18th century to navigate when far from dry land. It was essential on ships until the U.S. military satellite-based navigation system, now known as GPS, was made available for civilian use.

GPS, which stands for Global Positioning System, relies on a number of satellites in geostationary orbit. When a GPS receiver, now embedded in most smartphones, establishes contact with at least three satellites that are over the horizon, the computer in it automatically calculates its exact position.

SEXTANT stands for Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology. Jason Mitchell, the mission’s project manager, says pulsars are so stable in the rotation that often you’ll hear the analogy of a celestial lighthouse or a celestial clock.

“Their spins are so accurate,” says Mitchell, “they rival atomic clocks here on Earth. So in analogy to GPS global positioning system, you can think about pulsars as objects in very precise orbits that transmit very precise timing signals.”

Mitchell says the worst possible scenario we can think of happening to future manned space explorations would be the inability to communicate with Earth. So we want to make sure that in such an event, the astronauts can perform their function and return home safely. An autonomous navigation system like this could certainly help, he says, as strong x-ray emissions from pulsars could serve as guiding beacons.

Mitchell adds that the SEXTANT team plans to conduct two experiments with the NICER telescope – one relatively early in the mission and another toward the end of its use by NASA researchers, about 18 months after its launch.

After that time, the telescope will become available to scientists and researchers worldwide.
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