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Gizmorama - May 14, 2014
Good Morning, Before you travel on a space mission to an asteroid it's probably in your best interest to test all of the tools that will be used once the destination is reached, right? Where would you go to do such a thing? The pool, perhaps?
Learn about this interesting story and more from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
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GopherArchives**** NASA Astronauts go underwater to test tools for a mission to an asteroid *HOUSTON (UPI) - Most people sport plain, boring old bathing suits when they go swimming. Not NASA astronauts Stan Love and Steve Bowen; they don brand new orange space suits when headed to the pool. But their underwater attires is more than just a fashion statement. It's science. As a sort of dress rehearsal for a future NASA asteroid mission -- planned for sometime after 2020 -- the astronauts got zipped up in their newest traffic-cone-colored suits and took a dive into a 40-feet-deep swimming pool at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, part of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The underwater environment mimics the zero gravity of deep space, and a mockup of the future asteroid-bound Orion spacecraft made an ideal setting for a simulated spacewalk. "We're working on the techniques and tools we might use someday to explore a small asteroid that was captured from an orbit around the sun and brought back by a robotic spacecraft to orbit around the moon," explained Love. "When it's there, we can send people there to take samples and take a look at it up close. That's our main task; we're looking at tools we'd use for that, how we'd take those samples." Practicing their spacewalk underwater is way for the astronauts to locate potential problems and fix them before their several million miles from home. "We need some significant modifications to make it easy to translate," Bowen said. "I can't stretch my arms out quite as far as in the [space station space suit]. The work envelop is very small. So as we get through, we look at these tasks. These tasks are outstanding to help us develop what needs to be modified in the suit, as well." As part of its planned asteroid mission, NASA will first attempt to land a robotic spacecraft on an asteroid -- with the hopes that the craft can manipulate the space rock into an orbit around Earth's moon. Once circling the moon, astronauts would be sent up to occupy and explore the asteroid.
* Study: scientific output doubles every nine years *WASHINGTON (UPI) - Does the phrase "too much of a good thing" apply to science? There's no obvious answer, but when it comes to scientific output -- research, papers, studies, surveys, etc. -- some scientists have suggested the answer is "yes." So much output at such a high pace, some have argued, means there's a growing emphasis (to the detriment of science) on quantity over quality. But supporting such an argument with quantitative evidence has proven difficult. But now, new data analysis by Lutz Bornmann, researcher at the Max Planck Society in Munich, Germany, and Ruediger Mutz, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, offers a more accurate picture of exactly how much "science" is being produced. The results: global scientific output is doubling every nine years. Bornmann and Mutz arrived at the figure by analyzing more than 755 million references in some 38 million publications, including papers, books, datasets and websites, from 1980 to 2012. In this sense, anything worth citing is deemed "output," and measured accordingly. But the question remains: is all this output a fair representation of the growth of scientific knowledge? Or do scientists just like seeing their names in print? In 1965, Derek de Solla Price, the so-called father of bibliometrics, said: "I am tempted to conclude that a very large fraction of the alleged 35,000 journals now current must be reckoned as merely a distant background noise, and as very far from central or strategic in any of the knitted strips from which the cloth of science is woven." Anthony van Raan, another bibliometrics researcher, told Nature that the pressures of career advancement encourage scientists to publish as much as possible, sometimes splitting their papers up into smaller, separate pieces of research in order to maximize output -- "salami slicing." "The behavior of scientists to publish more, to split up papers, to publish first a short paper followed by a more detailed one, and so on," said van Raan, "would imply an 'extra' growth which is not necessarily 'real' growth of science." Although van Raan wishes it were otherwise, he acknowledges that for now, there's no systematic way to separate the scientific fat from the meat. The analysis Bornmann and Mutz will be published later this year in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
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