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Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites — one American, the other Russian — smashed into each other hundreds of miles above the Earth.

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.

The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said.

“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the international space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course.

A spokesman for the Russian civilian space agency Roscosmos, Alexander Vorobyev, said on state-controlled Channel I television that “for the international space station, at this time and in the near future, there’s no threat.”

There also should be no danger to the space shuttle set to launch with seven astronauts on Feb. 22, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days.

Nicholas Johnson, an orbital debris expert at the Houston space center, said 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.

The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, Matney said.

The Iridium craft weighed 1,235 pounds, and the Russian craft nearly a ton. No one has any idea yet how many pieces were generated or how big they might be.

“Right now, they’re definitely counting dozens,” Matney said. “I would suspect that they’ll be counting hundreds when the counting is done.”

There have been four other cases in which space objects have collided accidentally in orbit, NASA said. But those were considered minor and involved parts of spent rockets or small satellites.

At the beginning of this year there were roughly 17,000 pieces of manmade debris orbiting Earth, Johnson said. The items, at least 4 inches in size, are being tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, which is operated by the military. The network detected the two debris clouds created Tuesday.

Litter in orbit has increased in recent years, in part because of the deliberate breakups of old satellites. It’s gotten so bad that orbital debris is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight, surpassing the dangers of liftoff and return to Earth. NASA is in regular touch with the Space Surveillance Network, to keep the space station a safe distance from any encroaching objects, and shuttles, too, when they’re flying.

“The collisions are going to be becoming more and more important in the coming decades,” Matney said.

Iridium Holdings LLC has a system of 65 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 U.S. Department of Defense is one of its largest customers.

The company said the loss of the satellite was causing brief, occasional outages in its service and that it expected to have the problem fixed by Friday.

Iridium also said it expected to replace the lost satellite with one of its eight in-orbit spares within 30 days.

“The Iridium constellation is healthy, and this event is not the result of a failure on the part of Iridium or its technology,” the company said in a statement.

Initially launched by Motorola Inc. in the 1990s, Iridium plunged into bankruptcy in 1999. Private investors relaunched service in 2001.

Iridium satellites are unusual because their orbit is so low and they move so fast. Most communications satellites are in much higher orbits and don’t move relative to each other, which means collisions are rare.

Iridium Holdings LLC, is owned by New York-based investment firm Greenhill & Co. through a subsidiary, GHL Acquisition Corp., which is listed on the American Stock Exchange.

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Tuesday announced it was extending successful unmanned missions to Mars and Venus as well as a satellite exploration of Earth’s magnetic field.

The decision would extend the Mars Express, Venus Express and Cluster missions until December 31, ESA said in a press release.

Mars Express, launched in 2003, “has produced a treasure of discoveries,” ESA said, pointing to radar measurements that discovered massive underground deposits of water ice and a 3-D camera that has produced stunning images of the planet’s surface.

Venus Express, launched in 2005, has been mapping Venus’ roiling, scorching, toxic atmosphere, in a project that could help explain the mechanisms of runaway global warming.

The Cluster mission, launched in 2000, comprises four satellites that are carrying out a coordinated mapping of the magnetosphere, the magnetic field that surrounds Earth and protects it from charged particles blasted out by the Sun.

Mars Express and Cluster had previously been extended twice, and Venus Express once.

A prototype of NASA’s Lunar Electric Rover will make the journey along Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue Tuesday in honor of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, the space agency said Friday.

The pickup truck-sized vehicle, which is equipped with beds and a toilet, can accommodate two astronauts for a fortnight for extended lunar explorations.

To be able to cover the moon’s rugged terrain, the electric-motored vehicle can also move in any direction — even sideways, like a crab.

Its versatility may not be as useful on January 20, but it will have a good view of the elite guests, dignitaries and Washington insiders that will line the inaugural parade route, as Obama moves from the swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol to his new residence at the White House.

Unless the Obama administration makes changes to current plans, US astronauts are set to return to the moon before 2020 under the Constellation program, with the aim of establishing permanent lunar bases.

The visit is widely considered to be the first step towards further exploring the solar system, including an eventual colonization of Mars.

NASA also said it is also developing new technologies for the rover that can be applied to electric vehicles on Earth.

Tiny diamonds sprinkled across North America suggest a “swarm” of comets hit the Earth around 13,000 years ago, kicking up enough disruption to send the planet into a cold spell and drive mammoths and other creatures into extinction, scientists reported on Friday.

They suggest an event that would transcend anything Biblical — a series of blinding explosions in the atmosphere equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs, the researchers said.

The so-called nanodiamonds are made under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions created by cosmic impacts, similar to an explosion over Tunguska in Siberia that flattened trees for miles in 1908.

Doug Kennett of the University of Oregon and colleagues found the little diamonds at sites from Arizona to South Carolina and into Alberta and Manitoba in Canada.

They are buried at a level that corresponds to the beginning 12,900 years ago of the Younger Dryas, a 1,300-year-long cold spell during which North American mammoths, saber-toothed cats, camels and giant sloths became extinct.

The Clovis culture of American Indians also appears to have fallen apart during this time.

Bones of these animals, and Clovis artifacts, are abundant before this time. Excavations show a dark “mat” of carbon-rich material separates the bones and artifacts from emptier and younger layers.

Writing in the journal Science, Kennett and colleagues report they have evidence of the nanodiamonds from six sites across North America, fitting in with the hypothesis that a giant explosion, or multiple explosions, above the Earth’s surface cause widespread fire and pressure.

There is evidence these minerals can be found in other sediments, too, they said, and help explain the “black mat”.

“These data support the hypothesis that a swarm of comets or carbonaceous chondrites (a type of meteorite) produced multiple air shocks and possible surface impacts at 12,900 (years ago)” they wrote.

The heat and pressure could have melted part of the Greenland ice sheet, causing currents to change and affecting climate. Any impacts would have kicked up dust that would have shrouded the sun and lowered temperatures, endangering plants and animals.

“The nanodiamonds that we found at all six locations exist only in sediments associated with the Younger Dryas Boundary layers, not above it or below it,” Kennett, an archeologist, said in a statement.

“These discoveries provide strong evidence for a cosmic impact event at approximately 12,900 years ago that would have had enormous environmental consequences for plants, animals and humans across North America.”

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Russian Space Agency have joined hands to share critical equipment for the Indian Man Mission to the Moon.

India and Russia signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote joint activities in the field of human space flight programme during the visit of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last week.

“Under the MoU, both countries will jointly build spacecraft for the Indian manned mission,” said S Satish, spokesperson of ISRO.

As per the MoU, an Indian astronaut will embark on a mission to space in a Russian spacecraft within the next five years, ahead of ISRO’s maiden human space flight scheduled for 2014 or 2015.

“We have well laid our plans and of course manned mission are in our plan and programme. May be manned mission for the government approval, comes immediately, around 2014 or 2015, will be the targeted launch date,” added Satish.

Recently, ISRO achieved benchmark success when the Chandrayaan-1 (India’s moon mission) was successfully launched on October 22, by PSLV-C11.

This success allowed India to join the elite lunar club of which Russia, the USA, Japan, China and European Space Agency are already members.

India is also planning to launch the satellite ”Aditya” to study the sun by 2012 and it also hopes to send an astronaut into space by 2012.

Apple or pear shape don’t cause problematic heart, but liver fat, identified as the real villain, actually does.

The new findings from nutrition researchers at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM), St. Louis suggested body-shape comparisons don’t completely explain risk.

In two studies, they identified excess liver fat appears as the real key to insulin resistance, cholesterol abnormalities and other problems that contribute to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Having too much fat stored in the liver is known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

‘Since obesity is so much more common now, both in adults and in children, we are seeing a corresponding increase in the incidence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,’ said senior investigator Samuel Klein, professor of medicine and nutritional science.

‘That can lead to serious liver disorders such as cirrhosis in extreme cases, but more often it tends to have metabolic consequences.’

Klein studied two groups of obese adolescents, namely obese with excessive liver fat and those with no evidence of fatty liver disease. The groups were matched by age, sex, body mass index, body fat percentage and degree of obesity, said a WUSM release written by Jim Dryden.

The researchers determined that children with fatty liver disease also had abnormalities in glucose and fat metabolism, including lower levels of HDL cholesterol, the so-called good cholesterol.

‘Abdominal fat is not the best marker for risk,’ says Klein, who also directs the Nutrition Support Service at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. ‘It appears liver fat is the real marker.’

‘Fatty liver disease is completely reversible,’ he said. ‘If you lose weight, you quickly eliminate fat in your liver. As little as two days of calorie restriction can improve the situation dramatically, and as fat in the liver is reduced, insulin sensitivity and metabolic problems improve.’

Doctors may soon be able to diagnose inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis, thalassaemia and sickle cell anemia in fetuses by simply testing a blood sample taken from the mother.

Until now, prenatal diagnoses of such disorders have been possible only through invasive procedures like amniocentesis, which carry a risk of fetal miscarriage.

Amniocentesis is the extraction of a small amount of fluid from the sac surrounding a developing fetus.

But scientists in Hong Kong and Thailand may have found a way to diagnose in fetuses such “monogenic” diseases, which are caused by a single error in a single gene in the human DNA.

“Such diseases can be diagnosed by a simple blood test (taken from the mother) … and by counting the relative ratio of the mutant genes against the normal genes,” said lead researcher Dennis Lo at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

This is only possible because fetal DNA circulates in maternal blood, a discovery Lo and his colleagues made several years ago.

Many scientists have since been trying to find the best way to differentiate fetal DNA from maternal DNA, before they can even get down to looking for any anomalies in the fetal DNA. But these efforts have not met with much success.

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lo and his colleagues said they had devised a counting system that could “bring non-invasive prenatal diagnosis of monogenic diseases closer to reality.”

Using highly precise digital blood testing technology, both mutant and normal DNA sequences are counted in maternal plasma and that is then used to calculate the number of mutant genes inherited by the fetus and to determine the probability of the fetus developing any monogenic disease.

Lo, however, noted that the accuracy of this method would depend on the concentration of fetal DNA in maternal blood.

Thalassaemia is a blood related genetic disease that can result in reduced fertility or even infertility. Early treatment can improve the quality of life of patients.

Cystic fibrosis affects the respiratory, digestive and reproductive systems and can lead to fatal lung infections.

Scientists have used the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Mars Express to produce the first crude map of aurorae on Mars, which are a powerful tool with which scientists can investigate the composition and structure of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

The aurorae on Mars were discovered in 2004 using the SPICAM ultraviolet and infrared atmospheric spectrometer on board Mars Express.

These displays of ultraviolet light appear to be located close to the residual magnetic fields generated by crustal rocks on Mars.

They highlight a number of mysteries about the way Mars interacts with electrically charged particles originating from the Sun.

Now, Francois Leblanc, from the Service d’Aeronomie, IPSL/CNRS, France and colleagues have announced the results of coordinated observation campaigns using SPICAM, the MARSIS sub-surface sounding radar altimeter’s radar, and the energetic neutral atoms analyser, ASPERA’s electron spectrometer on Mars Express.

They have observed nine new auroral emission events, which have allowed them to make the first crude map of auroral activity on Mars.

According to the researchers, the aurorae seem to be located near regions where the martian magnetic field is the strongest.

This suggests, although it does not prove, that the magnetic fields help to create the aurorae.

On Earth, aurorae are more commonly known as the northern and southern lights. They are confined to the polar regions and shine brightly at visible as well as ultraviolet wavelengths.

The existence of similar aurorae is well known on the giant planets of the Solar System. They occur wherever a planet’s magnetic field channels electrically charged particles into the atmosphere.

The aurorae are caused by charged particles, in this case most probably electrons, colliding with molecules in the atmosphere.

The electrons almost certainly come from the Sun, which constantly blows out electrically charged particles into space.

Known as the solar wind, this constant stream of particles provides the source of electrons to generate the aurorae, as suggested by MARSIS and ASPERA.

But how the electrons are accelerated to sufficiently high energies to spark aurorae on Mars remains a mystery.

“It may be that magnetic fields on Mars connect with the solar wind, providing a road for the electrons to travel along,” said Leblanc.

“There’s now a large domain of physics that we have to explore in order to understand the aurorae on Mars. Thanks to Mars Express we have a lot of very good measurements to work with,” he added.

More snow was forecast for the Great Lakes region on Wednesday, while chilly temperatures were expected in the central and southern Plains and the Southeast.

Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan were forecast to get 6 to 10 inches of snow. Two to 5 inches were expected in northern New York. Forecasters warned that whiteout conditions were likely.

Temperatures in the central and southern Plains were expected to fall below seasonable norms, though the regions were not predicted to see any precipitation.

Windy, cool conditions were forecast for the mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coast states. Daytime highs were expected to reach only into the 50s before temperatures dip below freezing overnight.

Partly cloudy skies and cooler temperatures were forecast across the West, which was predicted to stay dry. Strong winds and dry surface conditions continued to pose a fire danger in Southern California.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Tuesday ranged from a low of 2 degrees at Upson, Wis., to a high of 93 degrees at Riverside, Calif.

A spacewalking astronaut accidentally let go of her tool bag Tuesday after a grease gun inside it exploded, and helplessly watched as the tote and everything inside floated away.

It was one of the largest items ever to be lost by a spacewalker, and occurred during an unprecedented attempt to clean and lube a gummed-up joint on a solar panel.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was just starting to work on the joint when the mishap occurred.

She said her grease gun exploded, getting the dark gray stuff all over a camera and her gloves. While wiping off herself, the white, backpack-size bag slipped out of her grip, and she lost all her other tools.

“Oh, great,” she mumbled.

Stefanyshyn-Piper was carrying out the spacewalk with Stephen Bowen. He had his own tool bag with another grease gun, putty knife and oven-like terry cloth mitts to wipe away metal grit from a clogged joint at the space station.

Mission Control agreed the spacewalk would continue as planned, and that the two astronauts would share tools. Flight controllers were assessing the impact the lost bag would have on the next three planned spacewalks.

Earlier, the spacewalkers spotted a screw floating by, but were too far away to catch it. “I have no idea where it came from,” Stefanyshyn-Piper told Mission Control.

Mission Control said the screw was not considered a serious hazard, but did not immediately elaborate on the missing tool bag. Flight controllers were tracking its location in orbit.

The lost bag marred what had been a near-flawless mission by Endeavour and its seven-member crew.

Putting her disappointment aside, Stefanyshyn-Piper — the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight — carried out her work on the joint with Bowen.

For more than a year, the jammed joint has been unable to automatically point the right-side solar wings toward the sun for maximum energy production. The repair work — expected from the outset to be greasy and hand-intensive — is supposed to take up much of all four spacewalks.

The joint is located near the extreme reaches of the 220-mile-high outpost. The spacewalkers had 85-foot safety tethers to keep them connected to the mother ship at all times.

NASA suspects a lack of lubrication caused the massive joint to break down; grinding parts left metal shavings everywhere and prompted flight controllers to use the joint sparingly. Besides scraping and wiping away the grit and applying grease, the spacewalkers will replace the bearings.

As a precaution, extra grease will be applied on a later spacewalk to the joint on the opposite side of the space station that has allowed those solar wings to produce ample electricity.

As the action unfolded outside, the astronauts inside the shuttle-station complex started unloading the gear inside a huge trunk that was brought up by Endeavour.

The big-ticket item — and one of the first things to be hooked up — is a recycling system that will convert astronauts’ urine and sweat into drinking water. It is essential if NASA is to double the size of the space station crew to six next June.

Endeavour also delivered an extra bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms, an exercise machine and refrigerator that will allow space station residents to enjoy cold drinks for the first time.

The additions — coming exactly 10 years after the first space station piece was launched — will transform the place into a two-bath, two-kitchen, five-bedroom home.

Endeavour arrived at the space station Sunday. The shuttle will remain docked through until at least Thanksgiving. The next spacewalk is set for Thursday.