The EDRS will provide bi-directional data transmission between Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites and the ground almost in real-time and with broadband quality. EDRS is developed and implemented within a Public Private Partnership (PPP) between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Astrium Services.

As prime contractor, Astrium will build and operate the system infrastructure and provide the data transmission services. The company holds the exclusive rights to sell EDRS services to customers worldwide.

The European Union (EU), with its Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme and its Sentinel satellites, is intended to be the anchor tenant for the service, with additional capacity on the system marketed by Astrium Services to third-party users.

Leading a consortium consisting of Spacebel (Belgium), Edisoft (Portugal), Deimos (Portugal) and SES TechCom (Luxembourg), RSS will install the prime MOC system at Astrium's facilities in Ottobrunn, Germany.

This will be operated by Astrium Services, whereas a backup system at the ESA station in Redu, Belgium will be installed and operated by RSS. RSS will also be in charge of the lifetime maintenance and backup operations of the MOC system.

The contractual agreement also includes the hosting and maintenance of a backup TT and C (telemetry, tracking and command) and EDRS data reception antenna system in Redu, as well as the upgrading and expansion of the capabilities of this antenna system to facilitate the In-Orbit Testing of the EDRS payloads.

The commitment of Belgium to the EDRS programme offers attractive opportunities to Belgium-based companies working in the space sector.

"The heritage of RSS at the ESA station in Redu, the support of the shareholders QinetiQ Space and SES, and our intense cooperation in the proposal and negotiation phase are certainly some of the reasons why Astrium is putting its trust in us and awarded us this contract. We are delighted to start this cooperation, which will be a key milestone for RSS," said Jos Giannandrea, General Manager of RSS.

"Astrium Services is in a unique position to implement and operate the innovative EDRS service, as the company can capitalise on its extensive expertise as operator of Earth observation and telecom satellites as well as provider of Geo-information and Telecom satellite services. We are happy that we can count on RSS', QinetiQ's and SES' support to make EDRS a success for our service customers in Europe and world-wide," said Eric Beranger, CEO of Astrium Services.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST Brussels (UPI) Feb 6, 2012 - A Belgium woman is able to chew, speak and breathe normally after the implantation of a new jawbone created on a 3D printer, doctors say.

The replacement jaw, created out of a fine titanium powder sculpted layer by layer by a precision laser beam, has proved a successful substitute for her own jaw all but destroyed by a potent infection called osteomyelitis, NewScientist.com reported Monday.

"This is a world premiere, the first time a patient?specific implant has replaced the entire lower jaw," Jules Poukens of the University of Hasselt in Belgium said. "It's a cautious, but firm step."

Poukens and fellow researchers collaborated with a 3D printing firm called Layerwise in Leuven, Belgium, which specializes in printing with ultrastrong titanium to make dental implants and facial and spinal bone implants.

An MRI scan of the patient's jawbone was fed into a laser sintering 3D printer which fused tiny titanium particles layer by layer until the shape of her jawbone was recreated, then it was coated in a biocompatible ceramic layer.

The four-hour jaw implant operation was a success, researchers said.

"Shortly after waking up from the anesthetic the patient spoke a few words, and the day after was able to speak and swallow normally again," Poukens said.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST Moscow, Russia (RIA Novosti) Feb 07, 2012 - Tests carried out by Russian space agency Roscosmos have ruled out the possibility a U.S. radar could be linked to the failure of the Phobos-Grunt Mars probe, Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin said on Thursday.

In an interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Popovkin said an experiment to test the radar's impact showed no link between the failure of the Mars mission and the alleged electromagnetic emission from a U.S. radar in the Pacific Ocean.

The U.S radar theory first appeared in mid-January when unidentified space officials told the Kommersant daily that U.S. radar could have been behind the mishap.

NASA dismissed the idea and refused to take part in the tests.

Among the possible causes of the crash, Popovkin on Tuesday named cosmic radiation that triggered a glitch in the on-board computer system and defective microchips imported from abroad.

Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades, was launched on November 9 but a propulsion failure left it stuck in Earth orbit. It fell back to Earth on January 15.

Popovkin previously suggested that certain forces in the Western Hemisphere, which is a shadow zone for Russia, might be shooting down Russian spacecraft.

According to NASA, Russia has failed in all 17 of its attempts to study the Red Planet close-up since 1960. The most recent failure before November 2011 occurred in 1996, when Russia lost its Mars-96 orbiter during launch.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST New Haven CT (SPX) Feb 09, 2012 - Yale researchers have developed a methodology for governments and corporations to determine the availability of critical metals, according to a paper in Environmental Science and Technology.

In "Methodology of Metal Criticality Determination," the researchers evaluate the importance of scarce metals using a methodology that determines their supply risk, environmental implications, and vulnerability to supply restriction.

"In the past few years, a number of organizations have attempted to evaluate metal criticality, but the methods used have varied widely and so have the results," said Thomas Graedel, Clifton R. Musser Professor of Industrial Ecology at Yale. "This is the first time that this topic has been addressed in the peer-reviewed literature."

The criticality methodology, based on a U.S. National Research Council template, is designed to help corporations and national governments evaluate the risk of not having access to critical metals and to inform strategic decision-making around resource use.

"If you're a corporation, you don't want to design and manufacture something only to find out that you don't have important materials," he said.

The criticality methodology evaluates supply risk for entities that use metals on the basis of three components: geological, technological and economic; social and regulatory; and geological.

The first of these components measures the potential availability of a metal's supplies, and the latter two address the degree to which the availability of the supply might be constrained.

According to the paper, the most obvious questions related to a metal's availability in the ground are how much there is, whether it is technologically feasible to obtain, and whether it is economically practical to do so.

Regulations and social attitudes can either impede or expedite the development of mineral resources. For example, communities are aware of the potential for environmental damage from tailings ponds and may resist the development of a new mine.

Governmental policies, actions and stability can significantly affect the ability to obtain mineral resources. Graedel said that, in general, the more concentrated the mineral deposits in one area, the higher the risk of supply restriction.

"This work was stimulated by China's attempt to horde rare earth metals, which are being almost entirely mined and processed in China," said Graedel.

"We asked ourselves: How do you know what's scarce? If you know a metal is scarce, how do you know if you should worry about it? We think this methodology has substantial legitimacy."

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST Munich, Germany (SPX) Feb 09, 2012 - A doll in a doll, and then one more, enveloping them from the outside - this is how Thomas Faessler explains his molecule. He packs one atom in a cage within an atom framework. With their large surfaces these structures can serve as highly efficient catalysts. Just like in the Russian wooden toy, a hull of twelve copper atoms encases a single tin atom.

This hull is, in turn, enveloped by 20 further tin atoms. Professor Faessler's work group at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) was the first to generate these spatial structures built up in three layers as isolated metal clusters in bronze alloys.

Particularly fascinating are the images the researchers use to explain these chemical compounds and their properties. In the laboratory the substance is an unimpressive, fine, grayish-black powder, yet the structure models are in color and in various nested shapes.

These powders, with their large surfaces, are interesting as an interim step for catalysts that transfer hydrogen, for instance. Similar structures made of silicon could be used in solar cells to capture light from the sun more effectively.

Most people view metals as uniform materials with a rather unspectacular structure. The metal compounds from Faessler's institute are quite the opposite. His desk is piled high with various multicolored cage models with yellow spheres representing copper atoms and blue ones for tin.

The analogy to the carbon spheres that caused a sensation as Buckyballs can not be overlooked. Here, too, there are geometric structures made up of triangles, pentagons and hexagons. However, they are not made of carbon: heavier metals such as tin and lead can also form such isolated cage structures.

"We are basically interested in alloy structures that are out of the ordinary," says Faessler. Bronze, for example: this mixture of copper and tin, which was discovered early on and lent its name to an entire age of humanity, has a crystalline structure; the atoms of the two components are distributed evenly throughout the entire crystal and are densely packed together.

The new bronzes from the Faessler laboratory are different. The PhD candidate Saskia Stegmaier melted a particularly pure form of copper wire and tin granulate under special conditions - protected from air and moisture in an argon atmosphere.

The bronze produced in this manner was then sealed into an alkali metal such as potassium in an ampoule made of tantalum. The melting point of tantalum is 3,000 degrees Celsius, making it particularly well suited as a vessel for binging other metals into contact with each other.

This is how the new metal clusters, nested inside each other just like the Russian doll, came into existence. When bronze is heated, together with potassium or sodium, to 600 to 800 degrees Celsius, the alkali metals act like scissors that cut up the alloy grid and then edge their way between the pieces, thereby stabilizing the isolated atomic clusters.

On their own, these clusters cannot organize themselves into dense, uniformly structured layers to form crystals. They are made up of pentagons with 20 tin atoms in all - a constellation in which repetitive patterns are not possible under normal conditions. But "cheating" a little and using potassium atoms as glue can produce a seemingly normal crystal. Last year the Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman received the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the discovery of a similar phenomenon - the so-called quasi-crystals with five-fold symmetry.

"Our clusters are small units. They are, so to speak, piles of atoms that are not connected to their neighbors." That makes them ideal for catalytic applications: "Because they are consistent in size," explains Faessler, "they are much better at steering chemical reactions than classical catalysts."

Hydration reactions in which hydrogen atoms dock to organic molecule chains with oxygen atoms, e.g. in the synthesis of artificial flavors, are examples of such processes. Typically, expensive precious metals like rhodium are used for this. However, novel polar alloys with magnesium, cobalt and tin can serve the same purpose. "What we need for an efficient reaction is a catalyst with very large surface area."

The classical method of achieving this is to mix solutions of two metal salts to precipitate extremely small nanoparticles. "This results in an entire spectrum of particle sizes," explains Faessler. With metal clusters we can tailor the catalyst to our needs, as it were."

However, Stegmaier's and Faessler's reaction vessel contained more surprises. Aside from the clusters, the scientists noticed a fiber-like material - like thin needles - whose ends could be bent a little.

"We suspected," says Stegmaier, "this could turn out to be exiting." In the meantime the yield of the fibers has been improved by using sodium as scissors to cut up the bronze.

This time the result was not spheres, but multilayered rods. In the middle is a string of tin atoms, surrounded by a layer of copper atoms, and around that yet another tube of tin atoms. Just as the hollow Matryoshka molecules are reminiscent of Buckyballs, the new fibers with their tubes are akin to carbon nanotubes. Analogously, such fibers could one day be used as molecular wires with various electrical properties.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST Torrance, Calif. (UPI) Feb 7, 2012 - A U.S. maker of security cameras has acknowledged a flaw that allowed live feeds from its home security cameras to be accessed online without a password.

TRENDnet confirmed the security flaw in its SecurView Cameras bought after April 2010 and began to release firmware updates Monday to fix the problem, tech site The Register reported.

TRENDnet's home security cameras are often used by parents to monitor children's bedrooms and other sensitive locations, raising concerns they could be observed by anyone needing only the camera user's IP address and a sequence of 15 characters used by all the affected cameras.

The problem came to light after a montage of feeds from insecure Trendnet cameras was posted on an online forum in early January.

TRENDnet said it became aware of the problem on Jan. 12, and has been developing and testing firmware fixes to resolve the coding error, apparently introduced into the cameras two years ago, The Register reported.

Registered users have been informed by e-mail of the problem and remedy, TRENDnet said.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST Washington (AFP) Feb 8, 2012 - Amazon announced a deal with entertainment giant Viacom on Wednesday, building up its arsenal of television shows as it takes on video streaming market leader Netflix.

The licensing agreement with Viacom will give Amazon Prime members access to TV shows from MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, TV Land, Spike, VH1, BET, CMT and Logo, Amazon said in a statement.

The Seattle, Washington-based online retail giant said the Viacom deal takes the total number of videos available to Amazon Prime members to 15,000.

For $79 a year, Amazon Prime members receive free two-day shipping and unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows. Amazon has been giving away a free month of Amazon Prime to buyers of its new tablet computer, the Kindle Fire.

Amazon said the Viacom offering will include MTV's The Hills and Jersey Shore, Comedy Central's Chappelle's Show and The Sarah Silverman Program and Nickelodeon's iCarly, Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants.

The agreement does not include Hollywood movies from Viacom's Paramount Pictures, which has a deal with Netflix, or popular Comedy Central shows such as The Colbert Report or The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

"We are constantly working to improve the service by adding the shows that our customers enjoy the most," said Brad Beale, director of video content acquisition for Amazon.

"This deal with Viacom brings Prime customers and Kindle Fire users thousands of comedies, kids' shows, reality TV and much more from some of the best cable networks available," Beale said.

Other Amazon content partners include CBS, Fox, PBS, NBCUniversal, Sony, Warner Bros and Disney-ABC Television.

The Amazon-Viacom announcement comes two days after US telecom giant Verizon said it is teaming up with Coinstar, which operates Redbox movie rental kiosks, to launch a subscription video service later this year.

Verizon and Coinstar said Monday they had formed a joint venture that will add an online streaming option to the 35,400 Redbox vending machines located in grocery stores, McDonald's restaurants and other sites.

The Los Gatos, California-based Netflix, which offers online streaming and DVD delivery by mail, had 24.4 million US subscribers at the end of December, up from 23.8 million at the end of the previous quarter.

Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings, in a letter to shareholders last month, said he expects Amazon to eventually launch "their video subscription offering as a standalone service at a price less than ours."

But Hastings said Amazon and another online video rival, Hulu -- a joint venture between News Corp., Disney and NBC Universal -- offer only a "fraction of our content" and their total viewing hours are "less than 10 percent of ours."

Amazon shares rose 0.70 percent to $185.48 on Wednesday. Netflix shares lost 3.03 percent to $124.00 and Viacom shares gained 2.30 percent to $55.53.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST San Francisco (AFP) Feb 6, 2012 - An outbreak of iPhone fever made Apple the third hottest mobile phone maker worldwide at the end of 2011, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).

Apple jumped into the third spot globally from fifth place in the final quarter of the year due to a record-breaking quarter for iPhone shipments, IDC said in figures available online Monday.

Apple vaulted over South Korea's LG and China based ZTE in the mobile phone market rankings, IDC said.

Nokia remained king, shipping 113.5 million mobile phones in the final quarter of the year to claim nearly 27 percent of the market.

Samsung was second with 22.8 percent of the market, or 97.6 million handsets shipped.

Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter which ended on December 31, giving it a market share of 8.7 percent.

A total of 427.4 million mobile phones were shipped in the final months of 2011 in a 6.1 percent increase from the same quarter a year earlier, IDC said.

IDC warned that the growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 was weaker than the 9.3 percent seen in the prior three-month period of the year.

"The mobile phone market exhibited unusually low growth last quarter, which shows it is not immune to weaker macroeconomic conditions worldwide," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.

"The introduction of high-growth products such as the iPhone 4S, which shipped in the fourth quarter, bolstered smartphone growth," he said.

"Yet overall market growth fell to its lowest point since the third quarter of 2009 when the global economic recession was in full bloom."

Verizon, Redbox team up to take on Netflix
Washington (AFP) Feb 6, 2012 - US telecom giant Verizon is teaming up with Coinstar, which operates Redbox movie rental kiosks, to launch a video service to take on market leader Netflix.

Verizon and Coinstar said Monday they had formed a joint venture that will add an online streaming option to the 34,500 Redbox self-service vending machines located in grocery stores, McDonald's restaurants and other sites.

Verizon and Coinstar subsidiary Redbox said the subscription service will launch in the second half of this year.

"Our joint venture with Verizon will enable us to bring (consumers) even more value by offering expanded content offerings and greater flexibility for how and when they enjoy entertainment," Coinstar chief executive Paul Davis said.

Bob Mudge, president of Verizon consumer and mass business markets, said the venture is aimed at "freeing people to spontaneously enjoy the entertainment they want, whenever they choose, using the devices and media they prefer, at home or away."

Verizon will hold a 65 percent stake in the venture with Redbox holding the remaining 35 percent.

The Los Gatos, California-based Netflix, which offers online streaming and DVD delivery by mail, had 24.4 million US subscribers at the end of December, up from 23.8 million at the end of the previous quarter.

Netfix has expanded to Britain, Canada and Latin America over the past two years.

Netflix shares were up 2.34 percent to $129.39 in late afternoon trading on Wall Street.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST San Francisco (AFP) Feb 6, 2012 - An outbreak of iPhone fever made Apple the hottest smartphone maker worldwide at the end of 2011 but handsets powered by Google's Android software were shaping up as true winners in the market.

Worldwide shipments of smartphones soared 54.7 percent in the final three months of 2011 from the same period a year earlier, with California-based Apple making the most popular models, according to an IDC report released Monday.

Smartphone makers shipped 157.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 102 million in the same period the prior year, IDC reported.

A total of 491.4 million smartphones were shipped during the year, up a "strong 61.3 percent" from the 304.7 million units in 2010, according to IDC.

Apple had a 23.5 percent share of the global smartphone market, followed by Samsung and Nokia with 22.8 percent and 12.4 percent respectively.

"So-called 'hero' devices, such as Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and Apple's iPhone 4S, garner the bulk of the attention heaped on the device type," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.

"But a growing number of sub-$250 device offerings, based on the Android operating system, have allowed Google's hardware partners to grow smartphone volumes and expand the market concurrently."

While Apple tightly controls iPhone hardware and software, Google makes the Android mobile device operating system available free to smartphone manufacturers who have been building it into ranks of handsets.

Android and iPhone smartphones accounted for slightly more than 90 percent of US smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2011, industry-tracker NPD Group reported on Monday.

Android commanded 48 percent of the market compared to Apple's 43 percent, according to NPD.

NPD figures indicated that Android handsets were more popular with first-time smartphone buyers in the United States, with its share of that market at 57 percent compared to Apple's 34 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

"Android has been criticized for offering a more complex user experience than its competitors, but the company's wide carrier support and large app selection is appealing to new smartphone customers," said NPD analyst Ross Rubin.

Apple jumped into the third spot in the overall global mobile phone market from fifth place in the final quarter of the year due to a record-breaking quarter for iPhones, according to IDC.

Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter which ended on December 31, giving it a market share of 8.7 percent.

Nokia remained king, shipping 113.5 million mobile phones in the final quarter of the year to claim nearly 27 percent of the market.

Samsung was second with 22.8 percent of the market, or 97.6 million handsets shipped.

South Korea's Samsung, a star producer of Android smartphones, hit a new milestone in the final quarter of the year, more than tripling handset shipments to top the 35 million mark for the first time.

Nokia and Canadian BlackBerry maker Research In Motion saw shipments drop by 30.6 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

Nokia hopes to reverse the losing trend with a new line of smartphones based on mobile gadget software crafted by US technology colossus Microsoft.

A total of 427.4 million mobile phones were shipped in the final months of 2011 in a 6.1 percent increase from the same quarter a year earlier, IDC said.

IDC warned that the growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 was weaker than the 9.3 percent seen in the prior three-month period of the year.

"The introduction of high-growth products such as the iPhone 4S, which shipped in the fourth quarter, bolstered smartphone growth," Restivo said.

"Yet overall market growth fell to its lowest point since the third quarter of 2009 when the global economic recession was in full bloom."

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST Voronezh, Russia (RIA Novosti) Feb 06, 2012 - The crash of Russia's Meridian communication satellite late last year was caused by the destruction of one of the Soyuz-2 carrier rocket's engines, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, said on Tuesday.

"An inter-agency commission has concluded that the reason was an early opening of the combustion section of the rocket's third stage," Popovkin said during a meeting dedicated to Russia's space industry development.

As a result, he said, the combustion section has "virtually burned through."

The Meridian satellite was launched from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia on board the Soyuz-2 carrier rocket on December 23, 2011. The satellite fell to earth just minutes after take-off, marking another blow for Russia's troubled space industry, which has experienced a number of launch mishaps over the last year.

Meridian-series communication satellites are used for both civilian and military purposes.

They are designed to provide communication between vessels, airplanes and coastal stations on the ground, as well as to expand a network of satellite communications in the northern regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East.

These satellites are designed to replace the older Molniya-series.

The Soyuz-2 is an upgraded version of the Soyuz rocket, which has been a workhorse of Russia's manned and unmanned space programs since the 1960s.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:34 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D