Eideard

The International Space Station can be seen as a small object in upper left of this image of the moon in the early evening Jan. 4 in the skies over the Houston area flying at an altitude of 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). The space station can occasionally be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars.

I would love to visit either.

One of the display booths

The intelligence operative sits in a leather club chair, laptop open, one floor below the Hilton Kuala Lumpur’s convention rooms, scanning the airwaves for spies. In the salons above him, merchants of electronic interception demonstrate their gear to government agents who have descended on the Malaysian capital in early December for the Wiretapper’s Ball, as this surveillance industry trade show is called.

As he tries to detect hacker threats lurking in the wireless networks, the man who helps manage a Southeast Asian country’s Internet security says there’s reason for paranoia. The wares on offer include products that secretly access your Web cam, turn your cell phone into a location-tracking device, recognize your voice, mine your e-mail for anti-government sentiment and listen to supposedly secure Skype calls.

He isn’t alone watching his back at this cyber-arms bazaar, whose real name is ISS World.

For three days, attendees digging into dim sum fret about losing trade secrets to hackers, or falling prey to phone interception by rival spies. They also get a tiny taste of what they’ve unleashed on the outside world, where their products have become weapons in the hands of regimes that use the gear to track and torture dissidents…

Business is booming, with annual revenue of $3 billion to $5 billion growing as much as 20 percent a year, ISS organizer Jerry Lucas estimates…

Lucas, whose conference company TeleStrategies, Inc., is based in McLean, Virginia, makes the point that his marketplace serves police who conduct criminal investigations and intelligence services that prevent terror attacks. Virtually every communications network in the world includes wiretapping for prosecutors, or location tracking to rescue people in emergencies. And customers at ISS also include phone company executives…

“These guys can be your base station,” Lucas says.

RTFA. Long, detailed, the sort of complex dissection Bloomberg offers to business clients – and in the process offers the rest of the world a glance inside the dealings of a segment of the business world premised upon spying. Spying on you or me, spying wherever there is a profit to be acquired in information, cash or strategic outlook. Honesty, human rights and history have nothing to do with the process.

A piece of space debris narrowly missed the International Space Station on Tuesday in a rare incident that forced the six-member crew to scramble to their rescue craft, space agency officials said.

The high-speed object hurtled toward the orbiting lab and likely missed it by just 1,100 feet. The crew moved to shelter inside two Soyuz spacecraft 18 minutes before the debris was expected to pass, NASA said.

“It was probably the closest object that has actually come by the space station,” said the US space agency’s associate administrator for space operations, Bill Gerstenmaier. “We didn’t have any information that it was coming until it was very, very close…”

They spent about half an hour in the Russian space capsules and then went back to their regular day…

Space experts say such events are only becoming more frequent as the amount of waste — from nuts and bolts to rocket parts — is on the rise due to everything from basic wear and tear to controversial military testing.

Millions of chunks of metal, plastic and glass are whirling round Earth, the garbage left from 4,600 launches in 54 years of space exploration.

The collision risk is low, but the junk travels at such high speed that even a tiny shard can cripple a satellite costing tens of millions of dollars…

The ISS is currently manned by three Russians, two Americans and a Japanese astronaut…The crew usually stays for six-month stretches aboard the space station.

Phew! Ultra-high-speed impact even with a small object is worse than being shot. In the vacuum of space it’s easily deadly.

Astronauts have taken a spectacular nighttime picture of Italy from the Cupola observation deck of the International Space Station.

The image looks north over Sicily and the “boot” of Italy. The Mediterranean Sea dominates the foreground.

The domed Cupola is attached to the underside of the station and is used to control robots working on its exterior.

Its amazing views also mean it has become a popular place for astronauts to relax and gaze over Earth.

Wow! You’d have a tough time getting me back to work.

Returning home after a year-and-a-half

Bacteria taken from cliffs at Beer on the South Coast have shown themselves to be hardy space travellers.

The bugs were put on the exterior of the space station to see how they would cope in the hostile conditions that exist above the Earth’s atmosphere. And when scientists inspected the microbes a year and a half later, they found many were still alive.

These survivors are now thriving in a laboratory at the Open University (OU) in Milton Keynes.

The experiment is part of a quest to find microbes that could be useful to future astronauts who venture beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the rest of the Solar System…

The Beer microbes were placed on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Technology Exposure Facility, a collection of experimental boxes at the end of the International Space Station’s (ISS) Columbus Laboratory.

The bacteria were sent up still sitting on, and in, small chunks of cliff rock. They would have been exposed to extreme ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, and dramatic shifts in temperature. All the water in the limestone would also have boiled away into the vacuum of space.

Quite how they managed to come through their 553-day ordeal is now being investigated.

Bacterial spores have been known to endure several years in orbit but this is the longest any cells of cyanobacteria, or photosynthesising microbes, have been seen to survive in space.

“The ones we have are related to Antarctic species but they’re also generally quite well-known in hot deserts. So, as well as the colony-forming habit, I suspect they’ve got quite good DNA-repair processes, too…”

“We could send up the spores of known ‘extremophiles’ and we can be pretty sure they will survive because we know already they’re really resistant,” Dr Olsson-Francis told BBC News.

“Whereas in this case, we just used a community to select for these organisms. These are just everyday organisms that live on the coast in Beer in Devon and they can survive in space.”

Yet another species that travels better than human beings. Give them little nano-robot-brains and they might yet achieve something beyond our solar system.

Send for us when they’re ready for company.

NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

The name “Colbert” beat out NASA’s four suggested options in the space agency’s effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.

NASA’s mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report,” to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes.

NASA still reserves the right to choose an, uh, appropriate name.

A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS). Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.

The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games. Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.

The laptops infected with the virus were used to run nutritional programs and let the astronauts periodically send e-mail back to Earth.

The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection.

On what planet did they develop their security? Surely, not on spam-ridden Earth?

Thanks, K B