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SpaceX cargo flight had engine 'anomaly'

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Oct. 8 (UPI) -- U.S. company SpaceX confirmed Monday an "anomaly on one first-stage engine" in the otherwise successful launch of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.

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"Approximately one minute and 19 seconds into last night's launch, the Falcon 9 rocket detected an anomaly on one first-stage engine. Initial data suggests that one of the rocket's nine Merlin engines, Engine 1, lost pressure suddenly and an engine shutdown command was issued," SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., said in a statement emailed to PC Magazine.

The private space company's spaceship is headed toward the International Space Station after rocketing into space in a first-time contract with NASA.

Slowed-down video of the launch showed what looked to be material falling off the rocket after a visible flare-up, but SpaceX attributed the debris to "panels designed to relieve pressure within the engine bay [that] were ejected to protect the stage and other engines."

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"We know the engine did not explode, because we continued to receive data from it," SpaceX said. "Our review of flight data indicates that neither the rocket stage nor any of the other eight engines were negatively affected by this event."

The crewless Dragon cargo spacecraft in the SpaceX CRS-1 mission is scheduled to reach the low-Earth-orbit space station about 7:22 a.m. Wednesday.

A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on schedule, lifted a capsule called Dragon that contains about half-ton of food, clothing, equipment and science experiments, including 23 designed and built by students.

The student projects include one from Santa Monica, Calif., middle-school students who want to know if Silly Putty has different properties in the weightlessness of space than it does on Earth.

Silly Putty displays unusual physical properties. It bounces but breaks when given a sharp blow and also can flow like a liquid. It was first created by accident during U.S. research World War II to find rubber substitutes.

The Dragon cargo also includes a freezer that can store laboratory samples at temperatures as low as 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ice cream is included in the freezer, a rare treat for space crews, CBS News reported.

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If all goes as planned, U.S. astronaut and station commander Sunita Williams, a U.S. Navy officer who holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman, and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, who grew up in New Jersey, will to grab the Dragon with the lab's robot arm and maneuver it to a berthing.

The station crew will then unload the equipment and supplies. As they do, the astronauts plan to load the capsule with nearly a ton of no-longer-needed gear and experiment samples that previously had no way of getting back to Earth.

The Dragon is designed to make round trips to and from the space station so that components and experiment samples can be transported back to Earth for the first time since U.S. space shuttles stopped flying last year.

Sunday's launching was the first of a dozen SpaceX flights under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA.

The craft is scheduled to return to Earth near the end of the month, with splashdown about 250 miles off the coast of Southern California.


Prehistoric spider attack frozen in time

CORVALLIS, Ore., Oct. 8 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers have found what they say is the only fossil ever discovered of a spider attacking prey caught in its web, a 100 million-year-old "snapshot."

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In an engagement frozen in time, the extraordinarily rare fossils of the spider and its prey, a wasp, are entombed in a piece of amber, Oregon State University reported Monday.

"This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it," said OSU zoology Professor George Poinar Jr., a world expert on insects trapped in amber.

"This was a male wasp that suddenly found itself trapped in a spider web," Poinar said. "This was the wasp's worst nightmare, and it never ended. The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked, when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them."

An actual attack by a spider on its prey caught in a web has never before been documented as a fossil, the researchers said.

Both the spider and the wasp belong to species that are now extinct, they said.


Duckbill dinosaurs called 'super-grazers'

NEW YORK, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- Duckbill dinosaurs had plant-pulverizing teeth more advanced than even cows, horses and other well-known modern grazers, U.S. paleontologists say.

In the first study to ever recover material properties from fossilized teeth, scientists examined the jaws of duckbill dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, which were the dominant plant-eaters in the Late Cretaceous about 85 million years ago, the American Museum of Natural History reported.

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They discovered hadrosaurids actually had six types of dental tissues -- four more than reptiles and two more than modern expert mammal grinders such as horses, cows and elephants.

"We were stunned to find that the mechanical properties of the teeth were preserved after 70 million years of fossilization," said lead author Gregory Erickson, a biology professor at Florida State University, who described hadrosaurids as "walking pulp mills."

Their broad jaws bearing as many as 1,400 teeth suggest hadrosaurids evolved the most advanced grinding capacity known in vertebrate animals, the researchers said.

"Their complex dentition could have played a major role in keeping them on the planet for nearly 35 million years," American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Mark Norell said.


NASA celebrates first Mars rover scoop

PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 8 (UPI) -- NASA scientists say they are celebrating the Mars Curiosity rover's first collection of martian soil to be analyzed for a possible history of microbial life.

The first scoop of dirt, although a simple action, is a "huge milestone" in the Curiosity mission, deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada told the Los Angeles Times Monday.

"There was a lot of clapping yesterday, probably the most since landing, when we saw a nice full pile of soil in the scoop," Vasavada said. "It looks and acts a lot like baking flour. And just like any baker, we shook the scoop to make sure we had a nice level spoonful. This also mixes up the soil for us, to ensure a good analysis."

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The rover is at a spot in Mars' Gale Crater called Rocknest, and on Sunday work on collecting a sample was initiated from a "nice pile of soil," Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said.

"Curiosity then scuffed the soil with her wheel to confirm its depth and compactness," he said. "After some additional images and chemical data cleared the soil for scooping, the team sent up commands to scoop."

Postings on the @MarsCuriosityTwitter account, which are phrased from the rover's point of view, tweeted Sunday: "So excited to dig in! One scoop of regolith ripple, coming right up!"

Monday morning, there was a new tweet: "Here's the scoop: I like my regolith shaken!"

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