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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The space shuttle Discovery dodged clouds to make a textbook touchdown here Monday, capping a 13-day mission that set the stage for resuming construction of the international space station.

Two bone-rattling sonic booms heralded the shuttle’s arrival over Florida, and only a couple of minutes later, Discovery plunged to its landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 9:14 a.m. ET.

"Welcome back, Discovery, and congratulations on a great mission," spacecraft communicator Steve Frick told the crew.

"It was a great mission, a really great mission," Discovery commander Steve Lindsey replied. "Enjoyed the entry and the landing."

The flight ranked as one of NASA’s safest ever, with almost none of the worrisome foam insulation loss that marked last year’s flight of Discovery. In fact, NASA said Discovery’s 5.3 million-mile (8.5 million-kilometer) flight was nearly flawless.

After repeatedly checking the shuttle’s heat shield and assessing a small leak in one of the onboard power units, NASA declared Discovery perfectly safe for landing on Sunday. The verdict on Monday’s weather went almost to the last possible minute, however.

Forecasters were watching a band of rain clouds north of the shuttle’s landing strip here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, but ultimately concluded that the rain would stay far enough away. The path for Discovery’s final approach was fine-tuned to change from one runway to another at the landing strip, to avoid any troublesome clouds.

Once the decision was made to descend, there was no turning back.

"When an astronaut has to take the controls of a space shuttle that’s worth $5 billion, and land it with one shot — no engines, no chance to go around — you’ve got to do it right the very, very first time you do it for real," astronaut Brent Jett, who is due to command the next shuttle mission in August, told NBC News.

On its way home, Discovery slowed down from a velocity 25 times the speed of sound — in the process, heating the shuttle’s protective skin to temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,700 degrees Celsius). The flight path took the shuttle over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, west of Cuba and then across Florida itself.

The only problem on the way down was a harmless glitch involving one of the shuttle’s air data probes.

Discovery’s touchdown represented the first shuttle landing in Florida since December 2002. The space shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas on its way to a Florida landing in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard and forcing a suspension of flights. Last August, Discovery’s first post-Columbia flight ended in California because of unacceptable weather in Florida.

via MSNBC.

Space Shuttle Discovery has undocked from the International Space Station and is moving away in preparation for a return to Earth on Monday.

Six astronauts are on board, after German astronaut Thomas Reiter was left behind for a six-month ISS stay.

Before re-entry Discovery’s team will conduct a final scan of the craft’s heat shield to check for impact damage.

It will stay just 46 miles (74km) from the ISS until the scan is done so it can return if serious damage is found.

The shuttle is scheduled to land at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday.

The mission is just the second to be carried out since the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere in January 2003, killing all seven crew on board.

Accident investigators said the disaster had been caused by insulating foam falling from Columbia’s external fuel tank during launch and striking the shuttle’s wing, compromising the heat shield needed to protect it during re-entry.

The heat shield scan will done with the same laser and camera system which was used to check for possible damage from flying debris during launch earlier in the flight.

In this instance it will check for micrometeoroid impacts which could have occurred during the stint in space.

The post-launch inspection found no damage and the astronauts are confident that this will be the case again.

"We’ve been flying space shuttles for a long time and we’ve never had any kind of critical damage from a micrometeoroid so it’s pretty remote," pilot Mark Kelly said

"Based on what we’ve seen over the last 10 days, the inspections we’ve done… we’ve got a great ship. It’s ready to come home," he added.

The nine-day mission has included three spacewalks and repairs vital to resuming building work on the ISS.

via BBC.

A microchip which can store information like a hard drive has been unveiled by US company Freescale.

The chip, called magnetoresistive random-access memory (Mram), maintains data by relying on magnetic properties rather than an electrical charge.

One analyst told the Associated Press news agency that the chip was the most significant development in computer memory for a decade.

Mram chips could find their way into many different electronic devices.

The benefit of Mram chips is that they will hold information after power has been switched off.

Freescale has been producing the four-megabit Mram chips at an Arizona factory for two months to build up levels of stock.

A number of chip makers have been pursuing the technology for a decade or more, including IBM, but Freescale is the first company to offer a chip with practical usage for many of today’s electronic devices.

"This is the most significant memory introduction in this decade," said Will Strauss, an analyst with research firm Forward Concepts.

"This is radically new technology. People have been dabbling in this for years, but nobody has been able to make it in volume."

Unlike flash memory, which also can keep data without power, Mram has faster read and write speeds and does not degrade over time.

Ram chips in most electronic devices, such as PCs, lose data when their power is switched off.

Currently flash memory is used in portable devices such as MP3 players and for portable storage in the form of small cards that are used in cameras.

Mram chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.

Bob Merritt, an analyst with Semico Research, said memory chip manufacturers were seeking technology that will be faster, smaller, cheaper and retain data when the power is off.

"The older memory technologies are awkward to work with in a mobile computing environment," Mr Merritt said.

"This is a significant step forward and absolutely critical for moving into the smaller forms that consumers and industry want."

Freescale has been working on the technology for nearly a decade, said Saied Tehrani, who runs the Austin-based company’s Mram programme.

He said Freescale already had customers, but he declined to name any.

via BBC.

Acclaimed British physicist Stephen Hawking has told a Hong Kong lecture humanity is finally getting close to understanding the origin of the universe.

Professor Hawking said that despite some theoretical advances in the past years, there are still mysteries as to how the universe began.

"Despite having had some great successes, not everything is solved," he told an audience of 2,500 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"We do not yet have good theoretical understanding of the observation of the expansion of the universe.

"Without such understanding, we cannot be sure of the future of the universe.

"New observational results and theoretical advances are coming in rapidly; cosmology is a very exciting subject.

"We are getting close to answering these old questions: why are we here, where did we come from?"

The 64-year-old says his unfulfilled ambitions, among many, are to find out what happens inside black holes, how the universe began and how the human race can survive in the next 100 years.

But above all, he says, he wants to understand women.

On Tuesday, Professor Hawking said the human race should reach for the stars to survive as the Earth is at risk of being wiped out by a disaster.

He believes humans should settle in space, predicting a lunar settlement within 20 years and a martian colony in 40 years.

- AFP

 The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

"We won’t find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong to a rock star’s welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist — author of the global best seller "A Brief History of Time" — is wheelchair-bound and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Hawking said he’s teaming up with his daughter to write a children’s book about the universe, aimed at the same age group as the      Harry Potter books.

"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," said his daughter, Lucy, a journalist and novelist. They didn’t provide other details.

The Associated Press.