The White House event for middle-school students will "highlight the President's commitment to science, engineering and math education as the foundation of this nation's global technological and economic leadership," according to a White House statement.Cirque du Soleil founder takes off for International Space Station bearing red noses for astronauts
Guy Laliberté, the Canadian circus billionaire who founded Cirque du Soleil, officially became the first clown in space this morning when he blasted off for the International Space Station.
A Soyuz capsule carrying Laliberté and two astronauts lifted off on schedule from the Baikonur launch facility atop a Russian rocket.
Laliberté, the US astronaut Jeffrey Williams and the Russian cosmonaut Maxim Surayev got a rousing send-off from friends and family at the Russian launch facility on the Kazakh steppe. They are expected to arrive at the orbital outpost on Friday.
Laliberté, 50, plans to help publicise the world's growing shortage of clean water. But he's also doing his best to make the trip fun. The entertainer donned a bulbous red clown nose before boarding the capsule and brought several of the novelty noses for his crewmates.
Laliberté, who plans to spend 12 days in space, paid $35m (£22m) for his flight. He has a 95% stake in Cirque du Soleil, a circus arts and theatre performance company that turned 25 this year.
The entertainment tycoon has said he will try to persuade his fellow spacemen to don red clown noses.
Laliberté may be one of the last private visitors to the space station for several years as Nasa retires its shuttle programme and turns to the Russian space agency to ferry US astronauts to the orbiting lab, crowding out places for tourists.
Eric Anderson, the chief executive officer of Space Adventures, said his company would try to make sure at least three tourists could visit the space station each year, despite the shuttle's scheduled retirement.
"I keep hearing that space tourism is ending and it never seems to be true," Anderson told the Associated Press.
One way to keep the programme alive would be to increase the number of Russian Soyuz missions, Anderson said.
So we will have to rely upon the Russians to get our astronauts into space when we retire the shuttles. And then....?"It could happen almost any time now. We now have the technological capability to identify Earth-like planets around the smallest stars."
David Latham -Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
To date, Planet hunters have spotted more than 300 planets beyond our solar system, but the vast majority are hot, Jupiter-sized planets that would dwarf the Earth and are almost certainly lifeless.
A few weeks ago, the first rocky planet was found outside solar system, but the surface temperature is far too hot to sustain life. The planet, called CoRoT-7b, is the first planet beyond our solar system with a proven density similar to Earth's, astronomers say. Most known exoplanets are large gas giants like Jupiter.
The tiny planet was discovered orbiting a star slightly smaller and cooler than our sun, about 500 light-years away. As the planet passed in front of its star, it eclipsed a small portion of the star's light, causing a dip in brightness.
Astronomers may be on the brink of discovering a second Earth-like planet, a find that would add fresh impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life. Astronomers from six major centers, including NASA, Harvard and the University of Colorado, agreed at a conference last year that advances in technology suggest scientists are on the verge of being able to detect the presence of small, rocky planets, much like our own, around distant stars for the first time. The planets are considered the most likely habitats for extraterrestrial life.
Venus, Saturn, and Mercury grab the attention in the dawn sky for much of the month, congregating low in the east. Venus, the "morning star," is the brightest of the three. Saturn passes Mercury early in the month, and Venus later on. The Moon joins them on the 16th. Mars is climbing higher and growing a little brighter as we head through the first full month of autumn. And some of the familiar constellations of autumn climb into good view, including W-shaped Cassiopeia in the northeast and V-shaped Taurus in the east.
