LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – NASA on Tuesday named its new living quarters on the International Space Station “Tranquillity,” denying television comedian Stephen Colbert his attempt to get the new Node 3 named after himself.

Astronaut Sunita L. Williams, appearing on “The Colbert Report” on cable TV network Comedy Central, said NASA will name the new module Tranquility, instead of Colbert as he and his fans demanded after winning an online poll conducted by NASA.

But the U.S. space agency did make one concession. It said it will make a new Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT) — a fancy way of saying “exercise treadmill” — a key fixture in the space station.

“Your name will be in space in a very important place,” Williams assured Colbert on his TV show. “Everyday somebody will have to jump on the COLBERT,” she said.

Initially, the comedian seemed upset, but then he hit on an idea. “By running on the treadmill, that is what powers the Space Station?” asked a hopeful Colbert.

“Well, not really,” said Williams, who in the past served as a flight engineer aboard the space station.

The comedic situation stemmed from NASA’s recent public outreach to drum up interest in the $100 billion International Space Station by holding an online contest to name the new Node 3, which will house life support equipment.

Colbert, who parodies a conservative political commentator on his TV show, waged a campaign encouraging fans to vote for him and he eventually won, earning 230,539 write-in votes to 40,000 for NASA’s top suggestion, “Serenity.”

Contest rules stipulated that NASA retained the right to name Node 3, but in March U.S. Representative Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat, called on NASA to do the democratic thing and use the name that drew the most votes — Colbert.

In the end, Colbert took Tuesday’s news with a friendly handshake, and he thanked Williams and NASA for playing along with him and his fans.

It wasn’t Colbert’s first attempt to brand a piece of public property with his name. In 2006, he topped another public vote to name a bridge in Budapest, Hungary. But again he lost because Hungarian law required that the bridge’s namesake be fluent in Hungarian and deceased.

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Originally posted 2009-04-16 08:20:13.

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A newly found primordial blob may represent the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, researchers announced today.

The gas cloud, spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, could signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation back when the universe was just 800 million years old.

“I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance,” said Masami Ouchi, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s kind of record-breaking.”

A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). An object 12.9 billion light-years away is seen as it existed 12.9 billion years ago, and the light is just now arriving.

The cloud predates similar blobs, known as Lyman-Alpha blobs, which existed when the universe was 2 billion to 3 billion years old. Researchers named their new find Himiko, after an ancient Japanese queen with an equally murky past.

Himiko holds more than 10 times as much mass as the next largest object found in the early universe, or roughly the equivalent mass of 40 billion suns. At 55,000 light years across, it spans about half the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Lyman-Alpha blobs remain a mystery because existing telescopes have a hard time peering so far back to nearly the dawn of the universe.

Himiko sits right on the doorstep of an era called the reionization epoch, which lasted between 200 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang. That’s when the universe had just emerged from its cosmic dark ages and had begun brightening through the formation of stars and galaxies. Hot, energized hydrogen gas from that time period has allowed astronomers to begin seeing some objects — as much good as it does to squint at such fuzzy blobs.

“Even for astronomers, we don’t understand,” Ouchi told SPACE.com. “We are keen to try to understand what those systems are in the reionization epoch.”

Himiko may represent an ionized gas halo surrounding a super-massive black hole, or a cooling gas cloud that indicates a primordial galaxy, Ouchi noted. But it might also be the result of a collision between two young galaxies, or the outgoing wind of a highly active star nursery, or a single giant galaxy.

Pinning down this riddle will require further telescope time. The W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii can help accurately estimate star formation in the blob, while NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could test the super-massive black hole scenario, Ouchi noted. And even Hubble could get in on the action.

“We’re planning deep infrared imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope to tell whether [Himiko] has merger-like qualities or not,” Ouchi said.

However, that particular research hinges upon the future success of a risky repair mission to the aging Hubble. Astronauts are slated to blast off with the space shuttle Atlantis in the attempt next month.

For now, researchers may celebrate the fact that they found Himiko at all. They almost overlooked the blob among 207 galaxy candidates, while sweeping a portion of the sky designated the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey Field.

After making the initial sighting with the Subaru telescope in Hawaii in 2007, Ouchi and his colleagues followed up using instruments from the Keck/DEIMOS and Magellan/IMACS arrays. Those spectrographic observations allowed them to pinpoint the signature of the ionized hydrogen gas and determine the distance and age of the mysterious Himiko.

“We never believed that this bright and large source was a real distant object,” Ouchi said. “We thought it was a foreground interloper contaminating our galaxy sample. But we tried anyway.”

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Originally posted 2009-04-27 08:06:30.

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HOUSTON (Reuters) – Teen-age boys, are you tired of embarrassing questions about when you last changed underwear? Japan’s space scientists may have just the answer — a line of odour-free underwear and casual clothing.

Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese astronaut to live on the International Space Station, is testing the clothes, called J-ware and created by textile experts at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo.

“He can wear his trunks (underwear) more than a week,” said Koji Yanagawa, an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Wakata’s clothes, developed by researcher Yoshiko Taya, are designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body and dry quickly. They also are flame-resistant and anti-static, not to mention comfortable and stylish.

Japanese astronaut Takao Doi gave the clothes a trial run during a shuttle mission last year. Even after a vigorous workout, Doi’s clothes stayed dry.

“The other astronauts become very sweaty, but he doesn’t have any sweat. He didn’t need to hang his clothes to dry,” Yanagawa said.

J-ware should reduce the amount of clothing that needs to be sent to the space station, which has no laundry facilities. Toting cargo into orbit is expensive, so having clothes that stay fresh for weeks at a time should result in significant savings.

The Japanese space agency plans to make the clothes available to NASA and its other space station partners once development is complete. A commercial line also is in the offing.

Taya also is working with clothing manufacturers Toray Industries and Goldwin. on clothes that have a microscopically thin chemical layer in the materials.

Wakata, who arrived at the station last week for a three-month stay, said on Sunday that the clothes appear to be working.

“Nobody has complained, so I think it’s so far, so good,” Wakata said.

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Originally posted 2009-03-25 08:30:46.

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