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A privately owned US communication satellite collided with a defunct Russian satellite in orbit posing a risk to the international space station, which a NASA official said was the first such incident in space.

It was the first such collision in space, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries said Wednesday, adding that the magnitude of the accident was still unknown.

NASA will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred Tuesday nearly 790 km over Siberia, at an altitude used by satellites that monitor weather and carry telephone communications among other things.

According to an e-mail alert issued by NASA Wednesday, Russia’s Cosmos 2251 satellite slammed into the Iridium 33 satellite at 11.55 a.m. (0455 GMT). The incident was observed by the US Defence Department’s Space Surveillance Network, which later tracked two large clouds of debris.

“This is the first time we have ever had two intact spacecraft accidentally run into each other,” said Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “It was a bad day for both of them.”

He said outdated spacecraft, rocket stages and other components break apart in space every year, but there have only been three relatively minor collisions between such objects in the last 20 years. Never before have two intact satellites crashed into one another by accident, he added.

The debris created in Tuesday’s collision is being tracked to assess its risk of damaging other satellites and the International Space Station, which is currently home to two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut.

The space station orbits at an altitude of about 354 km, well below the impact point between the Russian and US satellites.

NASA believed that any risk to the space station and its three astronauts is low. There also should be no danger to a space shuttle set to launch Feb 22 with seven astronauts, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days.

The risk of damage from Tuesday’s collision is greater for the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, which are in higher orbit and nearer the debris field.

At the beginning of this year, there were roughly 17,000 pieces of man made debris orbiting Earth, Johnson said.

Litter in orbit has increased in recent years, in part because of the break-up of old satellites. Orbital debris is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight, surpassing the dangers of lift-off and return to Earth.

Iridium, which operates a constellation of 66 low earth orbiting satellites providing mobile voice and data communications globally, said Wednesday that the incident could result in limited disruptions of service.

In a statement, Iridium characterised the incident as a “very low probability event” and said it was taking immediate action to minimise any loss of service.

The company has a system of active satellites that relay calls from portable phones that are about twice the size of a regular mobile phone. It has more than 300,000 subscribers. The US Defence Department is one of its largest customers.

Iridium said its system remains healthy and that it would implement a “network solution” by Friday.

“Within the next 30 days, Iridium expects to move one of its in-orbit spare satellites into the network constellation to permanently replace the lost satellite,” the statement said.

The 560-kg Iridium 33 satellite involved in the collision was launched in 1997 while the 900-kg Russian satellite was launched in 1993 and presumed non-operational.

Standing in a field of debris where mobile homes once stood, Sue Rose wondered how a half-mile wide tornado could ravage nearly everything in sight and take so many lives but spare hers.

“I don’t know how I made it,” said Rose, who rode out Tuesday’s storm in a trailer at the Bar K Mobile Home Park with family members.

“I tried to keep the kids calm. We just prayed,” she said, fighting back tears Wednesday.

Rose’s home was heavily damaged and dozens more were destroyed after a tornado with winds estimated at 170 mph ripped through Lone Grove just after dark Tuesday night.

Search and rescue crews were expected on Thursday to resume the task of sifting through scattered bricks and beams to find any remaining victims.

The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management reported eight deaths early Wednesday and Carter County Sheriff Ken Grace said a man who was injured in the storm and transferred to a Dallas hospital died later in the day.

“The majority of the deaths appeared to be blunt force trauma to the head,” said Cherokee Ballard, a spokeswoman for the state medical examiner’s office.

President Barack Obama spoke to Gov. Brad Henry and Oklahoma Sens. Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn and “passed along his condolences and best wishes to the victims,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also offered Henry “any and all support” to help rebuild infrastructure destroyed by the storm, as well as support to those who lost their homes.

Most of the deaths occurred in the mobile home park, where no tornado shelter was available for residents to take refuge. In one case, a victim was found underneath a pickup truck the tornado had lifted and dropped on him.

There also were miraculous tales of survival. People who were huddling in a closet grabbed a woman after the tornado blew part of the roof off and threatened to carry her away. Rescuers found another woman injured but alive under an overturned mobile home.

Firefighters methodically searched each damaged or destroyed structure in Lone Grove on Wednesday, spray-painting a large X on homes after inspection and allowing residents to go in and check for belongings.

Ginger Byrne got to look for cherished possessions in a pile of rubble that used to be her mobile home. The tornado picked it up and dropped it about 100 feet north of where it had stood.

“I found my Bible, my mother’s ring,” Byrne said. “It’s just stuff. I have memories in my heart.”

It may take months, even years, before the community of about 4,600 fully recovers, but Henry said state residents have “become very good at responding to disaster.”

“Oklahomans have gone through this kind of disaster before,” he said. “We know what we are doing. We will rebuild.”

Sheriff’s Deputy David Gilley said between 100 and 150 homes were destroyed in the town, located about 100 miles south of Oklahoma City.

Residents apparently had good warning of the approaching twister. The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning, meaning a tornado is imminent and residents should take shelter, at 6:50 p.m. for Carter County. Another was issued at 7:15 p.m. when the actual tornado was spotted. The tornado hit Lone Grove at 7:25 p.m.

The Lone Grove tornado was the third to cause multiple fatalities in the state since March 2007, when a Panhandle couple became the state’s first tornado deaths in almost six years.

The storm took many by surprise because even in tornado-prone Oklahoma, February twisters are rare. According to the weather service, 44 have touched down in the state during the month of February since 1950.

Two other tornadoes hit the Oklahoma City metro area and in north-central Oklahoma late Tuesday. No serious injuries were reported in the Oklahoma City storm, but at least six homes were destroyed and businesses were damaged there, officials said.

Oklahoma’s severe weather season generally begins in March and runs through mid-June, a fact not lost on Henry, who wondered whether this was a fluke or a sign of things to come in the spring.

“It’s a big concern. I kind of thought we were still in winter.”

An unmanned Russian cargo ship launched into space early Tuesday carrying a fresh load of coffee, chocolate and other vital supplies for astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The automated space freighter Progress 32 lifted off atop a Russian-built Soyuz rocket at 12:49 a.m. EST (0549 GMT) from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Packed aboard the disposable spaceship are nearly 2 1/2 tons of traditional supplies like clothes, fresh fruit and equipment, as well as some special requests for the space station’s crew.

“Of course chocolate,” space station flight engineer Sandra Magnus, an admitted chocolate fan, told SPACE.com in an interview last week via a space-to-ground link. “Coffee. The boys like to drink coffee, so we asked for some of that as well.”

Magnus and station commander Michael Fincke, both of NASA, said they and fellow crewmate Yury Lonchakov of Russia were eagerly looking forward to Progress 32’s arrival on Friday.

Progress 32 is due to arrive at the space station at 2:19 a.m. EST (0719 GMT) on Friday morning, when it docks at an Earth-facing berth on the outpost’s Russian-built Pirs docking compartment. Packed aboard the spacecraft are more than 1,910 pounds (866 kg) of propellant for the space station’s engines, 110 pounds (50 kg) of oxygen and air for its astronaut crew, as well as 2,860 pounds (1,297 kg) of dry cargo, such as food, clothing, experiment hardware and other supplies. The spacecraft is also reportedly carrying a new Russian-built spacesuit, according to Russian wire reports.

Progress 32 replaces the older Progress 31 cargo ship, which launched to the space station last November and undocked last week to ultimately burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in a fiery disposal on Sunday.

The Russian Federal Space Agency’s Progress cargo ships are similar in appearance to the agency’s crew-carrying Soyuz TMA spacecraft. Both have three modules, one of which is a propulsion and instrumentation section. But instead of a crew capsule and orbital module, which take the top two spots on Soyuz vehicles, Progress ships have a propellant tank to refuel the space station in the center and a cargo-packed orbital module on top.

Also known as Progress M-66, the Progress 32 cargo ship is Russia’s second to last space freighter in the 300 series that uses an older analog control system, according to Russian wire reports. The spacecraft is due to be replaced with the updated 400 series, which features a new onboard computer and telemetry systems, they added.

NASA will broadcast the docking of Progress 32 at the International Space Station live on NASA TV on Friday beginning at 1:30 a.m. EST (0630 GMT). Click here for a link to SPACE.com’s live NASA TV feed and space station mission updates.

once wrote of the Great Hunter or Celestial Warrior, Orion, that he shines “like a gigantic piece of celestial jewelry through the frosty winter air.”

Indeed, Orion is by far the most brilliant of the constellations and is visible from every inhabited part of the Earth.  As darkness descends, he clearly dominates the southeast sky. Three bright stars in line in the middle of a bright rectangle decorate Orion’s belt, which point northward to the clusters of the Hyades and Pleiades of Taurus, and southward to the Dog Star Sirius.

Within Orion we find two immense stars, Rigel and Betelgeuse, apparently at two entirely different periods in a star’s existence.

A tale of two stars

Rigel (the “Left Leg of the Giant”), is a blue-white supergiant star, one of the rarest breeds in our galaxy; it’s one of the most intrinsically luminous of all stars and one of the hottest, apparently just reaching the prime of its life in the time span of a star and literally “burning the candle at both ends.”  It has been computed that Rigel’s luminosity is something like 36,000 times that of the sun.  Our best estimates currently place it at 773 light-years away.

In contrast, red supergiants like Betelgeuse (”The Armpit of the Giant”) are gigantic bloated globes of cooler gas.  If such a star were to replace the sun in the solar system, it might extend beyond Mars’ orbit.

Betelegeuse is near the end of its career, some 522 light-years away, but not shining with a steady light.  It is a “pulsating” star, expanding and contracting spasmodically with a diameter that varies from 550 to 920 times that of the sun, but so irregular are these pulsations that no one can predict exactly when it will expand or contract.

In trying to describe Betelegeuse many years ago, a lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium noted that it is “like an old man with his strength almost entirely spent, panting in the asthmatic decrepitude of old age.”

Stellar genealogy

Stars produce their energy by fusing hydrogen into helium deep within their cores.  When a star accumulates sufficient helium in its core, its energy output increases significantly, and it swells into a red giant or supergiant, like Betelgeuse.

This is what Rigel will become in a few million years.  In such stars, the core produces successively heavier elements to balance the incessant crush of gravity.  But once the core begins creating iron, a star’s days are numbered; the formation of elements heavier than iron consumes rather than produces energy.  Eventually, since the core can no longer support the star’s vast weight it collapses, triggering a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

Betelgeuse is in its final stage and could explode in only a few million years.

Infecting mosquitoes with a common bacteria can cut their lives short and reduce the likelihood they will transmit dengue and other diseases, Australian researchers reported on Friday.

They genetically engineered bacteria known as Wolbachia so they would infect the Aedes aegypti mosquito species that carry the dengue virus, and found infected mosquitoes lived half as long as uninfected mosquitoes.

This could reduce the chances they will transmit the virus to people, as the virus takes about two weeks to mature and become infectious inside a mosquito’s body, they report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

“Dengue virus and the disease it causes is only transmitted to humans by the older female Aedes aegypti mosquito,” said Scott O’Neill, head of University of Queensland’s School of Biological Science.

“If we can introduced this into populations it should move the management of dengue fever from an outbreak management paradigm to a prevention paradigm,” O’Neill said in a telephone interview.

Wolbachia bacteria, which occur naturally in fruit flies, allowed the mosquito to live long enough to reproduce and spread to its young, but not to mature to the stage when it is capable of transmitting dengue.

There is no vaccine or cure for dengue fever, which is a painful and debilitating disease also known as breakbone fever. When it takes on a hemorrhagic form it can kill, and dengue kills 22,000 people a year.

“Dengue around the world is getting worse now. We are seeing more and more activity around the world including Australia,” said O’Neill.

His team hopes to infect a caged population of mosquitoes in Australia’s tropical Queensland state. More than 50 cases of dengue have been confirmed in northern Queensland since November.

“If that proves successful we hope to deploy this new dengue control measure in other parts of Australia, as well as Thailand and Vietnam,” O’Neill said.

“Ultimately we would like to see if it could be applied to other diseases transmission systems like malaria, which we are currently working on as well,” he said.

The researchers now need to show that Wolbachia will spread naturally among mosquitoes the way they do among fruit flies, Andrew Read and Matthew Thomas of Pennsylvania State University said in a commentary.

And then it is possible that dengue viruses would evolve the ability to multiply more quickly inside a mosquito’s body, they noted.

A new chromium-free coating can help protect cars against rust, reveals new study.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Silicate Research ISC in Würzburg and for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Chemnitz, developed an alternative anti-corrosion method based on nanocomposites as against the long-standing chromium plating prohibited since 2007.

The boffins along with colleagues at the Institute for Corrosion Protection Dresden GmbH had submerged steel sheets into a coating sol, applied a power coating and exposed them to various tests to produce the new nanomaterials.

While the steel sheets were kept in a chamber filled with atomized brine for 360 hours, or 15 days, at a temperature of 35 degrees, the metal sheets had also been placed in an environment chamber with a relative humidity of 100 percent for 240 hours, or 10 days.

ISC project manager Dr. Johanna Kron said: “These coatings protect most galvanized materials almost as well as commercial yellow chrome plating. Indeed, the new coatings are often even more effective than the chromium-free system and chromium(III) passivation currently on the market.”

The study also found that the chromium-free coated metal sheets, which were less than a thousandth of a millimeter thick, could be formed in exactly the same way as yellow chrome plated sheets.

Kron revealed that the corrosion-proofing system could be expected to hit the market in around five years.

Researchers who tracked breast cancer rates in Norwegian women proposed the controversial notion on Monday that some tumors found with mammograms might otherwise naturally disappear on their own if left undetected.

But leading cancer experts expressed doubt about the findings and urged women to continue to get regular mammograms, saying this screening technique unquestionably saves lives by finding breast cancer early on when it is most treatable.

Dr. Per-Henrik Zahl of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo and Norwegian and U.S. colleagues examined invasive breast cancer rates among nearly 120,000 women age 50 to 64 who had a mammogram — an X-ray of the breast used to find evidence of cancer — every two years over a six-year period.

They compared the number of breast cancers detected with another group of about 110,000 Norwegian women of the same age and similar backgrounds who were screened just once at the end of the six-year period.

The researchers said they expected to find no differences in breast cancer rates but instead found 22 percent more invasive breast tumors in the group who had mammograms every two years.

This raises the possibility that some cancers somehow disappear naturally, although there is no biological reason to explain how this might be, according to Zahl, whose findings were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“We are the first ones to publish such a theory,” Zahl said in a telephone interview. “What we say is many cancers must spontaneously disappear or regress because we cannot find them at later screenings. I have no biological explanation for this.”

Mammography and breast self-examination for tumors are standard methods used for early detection of breast cancer, the leading cause of cancer deaths among women worldwide.

The American Cancer Society estimated that about 465,000 women die of breast cancer globally each year, and 1.3 million new cases are diagnosed.

“I think generally when we look at studies like this it is important to keep in mind there are some studies that change practice and others that make us think a little bit more, said Dr. Eric Winer, director of the Breast Oncology Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“The idea that somehow these cancers go away entirely is, I would say, an intriguing hypothesis, but one we don’t have a lot of evidence to support,” said Winer, who was speaking on behalf of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

In much of Europe women undergo mammograms every two years after age 50 except for in Britain where it is every three years, Zahl said. The American Cancer Society recommends that women get an annual mammogram beginning at age 40.

Bob Smith, director of cancer screening for the American Cancer Society, said Zahl’s team misinterpreted the data, and expressed doubt about the idea that a significant number of breast tumors “spontaneously regress.”

“I imagine there are still some people who believe the Earth is flat, but there are not very many of them,” Smith said in a telephone interview. “It’s not usual — it happens every day that research is published that gets it wrong.”

The researchers acknowledged many doctors might be skeptical of the idea but they cited 32 reported cases of a breast cancer regressing, a small number for such a common disease.The researchers said their findings provide new insight on what is “arguably the major harm associated with mammographic screening, namely, the detection and treatment of cancers that would otherwise regress.”

The mere presence of graffiti and trash encourages people to trash the neighborhood by littering, trespassing or even stealing, a new study has found.

They do so because they feel rules have broken down, the Dutch research has found.

Litter, abandoned shopping carts and impromptu fireworks can all prompt petty crime and feed further social disarray.

“[It's better to have] no rule than one that no-one complies with,” New Scientist quoted Kees Keizer, head of the team at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands which conducted the latest experiments, as saying.

The finding confirms experimentally that disorder and disobedience grow in neighbourhoods where rules are openly flouted, a phenomenon dubbed “broken window” theory.

“Broken window theory says that if there are broken windows in houses, it will lead to more disorder and a degrading neighbourhood,” says Keizer.

Keizer and colleagues Siegwart Lindenberg and Linda Steg set up six practical experiments to put the theory dating from 1982 to test.

Setting up real-life situations in Groningen in each of the experiments, the researchers tempted random citizens to do something unruly, illegal, or antisocial. Then, they discreetly watched what happened, without the passers-by realising they were under observation.

In the most striking experiment, Keizer left a 5-euro note protruding from a fully addressed envelope that itself was poking out of a mailbox. The team discovered that people were less likely to steal the money if there was no graffiti or litter on or around the mailbox.

With no litter or graffiti, 13percent of the passers-by stole the money. Thefts doubled to 27 percent when the mailbox was daubed with graffiti, or to 25 percent when it was surrounded by litter.

“It’s quite shocking that the mere presence of litter doubled the number of people stealing,” says Keizer.

The researchers conclude that one type of antisocial behaviour leads to others, because people’s sense of social obligation to others is eroded.

“When people think they can get away with it because other people already have, they do,” says Keizer.

The study has been published in the journal Science.

NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet, using it to transmit images to and from a spacecraft 20 million miles from Earth, it was announced on Tuesday.

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” said Adrian Hooke, leader of the team that performed the feat and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google, in Mountain View, Calif., who is often called the father of the Internet, partnered 10 years ago to develop the software protocol used for space transmissions, called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN. The DTN sends information using a method that differs from the terrestrial Internet’s Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communication suite, which Cerf co-designed.

The Interplanetary Internet must be robust enough to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. Glitches can happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms and long communication delays occur. For instance, the delay in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes, even at the speed of light.

If a disruption occurs in the pathway along which the information travels, each node in the network will hang on to its information until it’s safe to communicate, unlike our Internet on Earth, which just discards the data packets.

The new network could ease communication with distant spacecraft and enable new kinds of space missions.

“In space today, an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it,” said Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN Experiment Operations Center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically.”

The DTN was tested during a month-long experiment in October, using NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft (currently on a mission to encounter Comet Hartley 2 in two years) and nine other “nodes,” all on the ground at JPL.

A pair of orb weaver spiders flying aboard the International Space Station have fought a battle with weightlessness and lost.

When astronauts took a peek at the spiders’ webs on Monday, they found a tangled concoction that was a far cry from the elegant symmetrical, creations of their eight-legged brethren on Earth.

“The web was more or less three-dimensional and it looked like it was all over the inside of the spider hab,” said NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, the space station’s science officer. “We took some pictures of it, so hopefully they will turn out.”

“So it was more of a tangled, disorganized-looking web rather than the standard, like ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ kind of web?” asked Mission Control. After all, the fictional spider Charlotte from the children’s book “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White was an orb weaver spider, too.

“There was no symmetry that was noticeable in it,” Magnus replied.

Despite weaving a tangled web, the spiders appeared to be doing well. The spiders launched to the space station a supply of tasty fruit flies for food aboard NASA’s shuttle Endeavour last Friday as part of a science experiment to promote interest in science and technology among students between grades K-12 on Earth. Painted lady butterfly larvae were also included as a separate part of the experiment.

Students will compare the space butterflies’ lifecycle and how the spiders weave webs and feed in weightlessness with similar spiders and butterflies on Earth.

Meanwhile, Endeavour astronauts are began the first of four spacewalks outside the space station today to maintain the orbiting lab clean metal grit out from a damaged solar wing gear. Endeavour ferried Magnus to the station as part of  a planned 15-day mission to deliver a new bathroom, kitchen, gym, two extra bedrooms and a recycling system that turns urine into drinking water so the research facility can double the number of astronauts that can live aboard.

So far, there’s been only one problem. Astronauts could only find one of the space spiders inside their habitat.

“We’re not missing a spider,” space station flight director Holly Ridings assured reporters Monday, adding that - since it’s NASA - there is a backup spider with his own designated area. “The way it was explained to me, he came out of his bedroom and may be into the living room of the house.”

The wayward spider is definitely not running amuck inside the space station, NASA said.

“We don’t believe that it’s escaped the overall payload enclosure,” said Kirk Shireman, NASA’s deputy station program manager. “I’m sure we’ll find him spinning a web sometime here in the next few days.”

NASA is providing live coverage of Endeavour’s STS-126 mission on NASA TV. Click here for SPACE.com’s mission coverage and NASA TV feed.