Obama visits Bethesda for stimulus announcement

Obama visits Bethesda for stimulus announcement

Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman Seven months after signing into law $10.4 billion in economic stimulus funding for the National Institutes of Health, President Barack Obama visited the Bethesda-based biomedical agency today to announce that…$5 billion of the money has been spent. Coming as it did on the last day of the government’s 2009 fiscal year, this “major Recovery Act announcement,” as billed by the White House, was in fact considerable testimony to the speed with which the huge agency can shovel money out the door when the pressure is on. After all, only nine days ago, according to  … Read more

California wildfires creep closer to observatory

California wildfires creep closer to observatory

So are two of Southern California’s premier scientific institutions doomed by the wildfires currently ravaging the Los Angeles basin? In the case of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the answer appears to be no. The massive Station Fire, which so far has torched more than 105,000 acres in the mountains north of Los Angeles, has been dancing with the fringes of the municipality of La Cañada Flintridge. That’s where JPL – despite its official mailing address of Pasadena – is actually physically located. But according to city officials, the fire has moved out of the area and is no longer a  … Read more

Indian moon mission loses contact

Posted on behalf of K.S. Jayaraman India’s planned 2-year moon mission, launched last year, ended 14 months prematurely today. Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) have abruptly lost radio contact with the lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1. ISRO spokesman S. Satish said that attempts to re-establish contact had failed and that the spacecraft may crash any time on the lunar surface. The end of India’s first lunar mission comes four months after the onboard device for determining the orientation of the spacecraft started malfunctioning on 26 April. An ISRO release said that the spacecraft had made more than 3,400 orbits  … Read more