Archaeologists, historians, and governments take great care to preserve human history across the globe, protecting monuments of our civilizations and traces of our origins. Even what may seem, at first, like the detritus of existence—footprints left millions of years ago, the contents of well-preserved wastebins—can serve as tangible, informative links to the past.

Now, scientists and officials are working preserve some of humanity’s best-known footprints, left by a giant leap for mankind, by extending those same sorts of historical protections to the Apollo missions’ lunar landing sites. The tricky part is, many such protections require that a site be on the territory of a state or nation—and the US government can’t claim sovereignty over any part of the moon, and doesn’t want to appear as though it’s trying to. But NASA and the New Mexico and California state governments have gotten onboard with the effort to safeguard the sites, spearheaded by New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary. A NASA panel recently issued recommendations for protecting the sites that suggest future explorers give a wide berth to the astronautical artifacts left behind, Kenneth Chang reports at the New York Times:

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Satellite radar data showed two wave fronts combining into a doubly tall tsunami off the coast of Japan on March 11.

The tsunami that spawned by the 9.0 earthquake off Japan this March was a disaster of massive proportions, reaching heights of over 130 feet in some areas and traveling up to six miles inland in others. Scientists at NASA and Ohio State University have now found another factor, beyond the sheer strength of the quake, that made the tsunami so ferocious: It started out as two separate walls of waves that combined to form one taller, more powerful “merging tsunami.”

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Put ‘er here, R2.

Fans of intergalactic exploration both real and fictional, rejoice: Future NASA missions may incorporate tractor beams, lasers that can pick up objects at a distance. “We’re caught in a tractor beam and it’s pulling us in!” is a long way off, but NASA has just awarded a team of scientists $100,000 to explore three different methods of trapping objects with laser light and reeling them in.

Dust, rather than Corellian light freighters, are the objects in question: the hope is to use tractor beam tech to collect atmospheric particles or grab dust from a planet’s surface without resorting to using a drill, as the Mars rovers have. And indeed, one of the three methods—optical tweezers—has been used by biologists for decades to hold microscopic particles, including viruses and bacteria, in place for experiments.

The challenge will be developing techniques that will work in all the different environments that an exploratory craft might explore. Optical tweezers won’t work in the vacuum of space, for example, but could be useful on a planet with an atmosphere. The other techniques, which use solenoid beams and Bessel beams, could work at a variety of distances and perhaps without an atmosphere—the NASA team will spend the next decade or so exploring how they might be developed and incorporated.

Concept image courtesy Dr. Paul Stysley via NASA

What’s the News: For the first time, astronomers have found molecular oxygen, which makes up about 20 percent of our air on Earth, in space. Using the large telescope aboard the Herschel Space Observatory, a team of researchers from the European Space Agency and NASA detected the simple molecule in a star-forming region of the Orion Nebula, located about 1,500 light-years from Earth. This takes astronomers one step closer to discovering where all of the oxygen in space is hiding.

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What’s the News: On Friday, after five years of deliberation over 100 candidates, NASA announced its choice of landing site for Curiosity, the next Mars rover: Gale crater, a massive pit with a three-mile-high mound in its center.  The mission’s primary goal is to assess whether conditions suitable for microbial life ever existed on the Red Planet; Gale was selected over the three other finalists in part because its mountain promises access to layered sediments extending deep into the Martian past.

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Today, weather permitting, the last space shuttle will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Watch the launch live here at NASA TV.

For live tweets, follow @NASAKennedy and the journalists on the ground: Alan Boyle (@b0yle), Dave Mosher (@DaveMosher), and Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) are a good start, and for from-a-distance commentary, follow Phil Plait at @badastronomer.

What’s the News: NASA’s considering launching a boat from Earth, hurling it 746 million miles through space, and plopping it onto one of the minus-290 degrees Fahrenheit methane oceans of Titan. This mission to Saturn’s largest moon would the first of its kind to probe an alien ocean and—depending on the weather conditions—could be the first spacecraft to witness extraterrestrial rain. If the proposed mission beats out two other finalists, it could launch within the next five years. “Titan is an endpoint [in] exploring … the limits to life in our solar system,” project leader Ellen Stofan told New Scientist. “We’re going to be looking for patterns in abundances of compounds to look for evidence for more complex or interesting reactions.”

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What’s the News: Astronomers have known for a while that white dwarfs can sometimes ignite in massive explosions known as Type Ia supernovae, but they haven’t been sure what pulls the trigger. One theory says that the explosion occurs when two white dwarfs merge into each other, while an opposing theory says that it happens when a single white dwarf pulls material from a Sun-like companion star. Using the Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have discovered an arc-shaped material emitting X-rays in the Tycho supernova that gives hints about the supernova’s origin. “This stripped stellar material was the missing piece of the puzzle for arguing that Tycho’s supernova was triggered in a binary with a normal stellar companion,” says Fangjun Lu. “We now seem to have found this piece.”

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What’s the News: In long space flights, such as a mission to Mars, astronauts will have more time during which they could get injured or sick. And the same apparently goes for the medicine aboard spaceships: According to a NASA-funded study, medicines degrade faster in space than they do on Earth. As the researchers conclude in their paper, “this information can facilitate research for the development of space-hardy pharmaceuticals and packaging technologies.”

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• We at DISCOVER have always loved the terrifying specter of zombie animals controlled by menacing wasps, worms, and barnacles. This week there’s a new terror on the loose: Four newly found fungi that grow stalks right through the head of zombie ants in the Brazilian rainforest.
• No glory for Glory: The NASA climate mission we covered last week—which was to study the interaction of the sun’s radiation, aerosols, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—ended in failure as it did not reach orbit in its launch attempt today.
• It’s not Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, but a paleontologist’s research suggests that the story of North American survival long ago may have been bison v. mammoth. Eric Scott says the influx of bison from Eurasia may have doomed the saber-tooth cat, mammoth, and other megafauna that couldn’t compete.
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• While modeling plasma flows deep inside the sun, scientists may have found an explanation for why some sunspots cycles (like the most recent one) are weaker than others. “It’s the flow speed during the cycle before that seems to dictate the number of sunspots. Having a fast flow from the poles while a cycle is ramping up, followed by a slow flow during its decline, results in a very deep minimum.”
• Risky business: In defending President Obama’s vision for space exploration that relies upon commercial space companies, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says the country must “become unafraid of exploration. We need to become unafraid of risks.”
• Bad timing: Just as Apple unveils its new iPad—and Steve Jobs uses the opportunity to gloat about his company’s superiority in apps compared to Google’s Android system—Google had to take 21 apps off the Android Market because they were infected with malware.
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• Materials violence: NASA will use a million pounds of force to crush a 20-foot-tall aluminum-lithium rocket fuel tank outfitted with sensors (all in the name of science, of course). The idea is to test out how modern composite materials buckle under incredible pressure, in the hope of finding out where the weaknesses might be.
• Real-life forensic science is rarely as easy or glamorous as its TV counterpart. Actual blood spatter experts, for example, don’t operate with quite the ease of the title character in “Dexter.” But a new study proposes a way to use simple trigonometry to calculate not only the point of origin for blood but also the height above the ground, which previously couldn’t be determined.
• You knew this day would come: The United States has approved the first deepwater offshore drilling permit given out since the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
• As strong as metal and as moldable as plastic: Yale scientist Jan Schroers’ new super-alloys.
• Half of adult males may be carrying the human papillomavirus (HPV), according to a study in The Lancet. It often lingers quietly but is transmitted sexually and is the cause of most cervical cancers in women.
• “Strictly speaking, there should be no blue whales.” So begins DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer as he explores the curious question of why blue whales, with so many more cells than human beings and so many chances for those cells to go wrong, are not killed by cancer at an astounding rate.

Image: NASA

For NASA, this was a week of launches and lack of launches. The space shuttle Discovery successfully blasted off yesterday on its final mission, but NASA’s climate-watching Glory satellite, which was scheduled to launch on Wednesday, is still stuck on the ground.

With an estimated 40,000 viewers at the Kennedy Space Center, Discovery launched at 4:53:24 p.m. ET on Thursday. Its crew of six is bound for the International Space Station, after four months of delay due to fuel tank repairs.

“Discovery now making one last reach for the stars,” the Mission Control commentator said once the shuttle cleared the launch tower. [CBS News]

Also on board is the first ever space-bound humanoid robot: Robonaut 2, or R2. This robot resembles a human from the waist up, and may eventually take on tedious chores and complete station repairs that are too dangerous for humans. At it entered space the robot tweeted (via its earthly handlers): “I’m in space! HELLO UNIVERSE!!!”

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Starting this week, NASA will have a new eye in the sky to better sort out the way that greenhouse gases, air pollution, and solar activity interact to affect the climate of our planet. The Glory satellite, currently set to launch on Friday, will spy on changes both in our atmosphere and in the sun.

Its main job will be to study fine airborne particles known as aerosols. Smaller than the diameter of a human hair, these specks can move great distances across the globe and are largely responsible for hazy skies. [The New York Times]

Greenhouse gases and their contribution to climate change have been the subject of much research, of course, but aerosols remain murkier. Climate scientist James Hansen, a member of the Glory team, says researchers must use an uncertainty range for modeling aerosols that’s three to four times greater than what they use with greenhouse gases, simply because the contribution of aerosols is much less understood.

The Glory mission will, if all goes according to plan, collect data on the micro-physical, chemical and optical properties of aerosols using two instruments—an Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (ARS) and a Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM)—that will monitor the climate system and provide new data for scientists working on the issue of climate change. The APS will collect visible and near-infrared data scattered from aerosols and clouds and the TIM, mounted on a special track that allows it move independent of the satellite, should record total electromagnetic radiation given off by the sun that hits the top of Earth’s atmosphere. [The Atlantic]

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With the space shuttles soon bound for retirement homes, NASA is dreaming up the future of U.S. human space flight. Recently, NASA has divulged its interest in two new gadgets: rockets launched via lasers and reusable, manned, deep-space crafts. Now, all the agency needs is a plan to get more money from the government to actually build these things.

The lasers (or possibly microwaves) would be ground-based, and would shoot through the air to energize a rocket’s heat exchanger; elevating the rocket’s fuel to over 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit would give it more thrust.

“The objective is to reduce the cost of getting into space. The way this rocket works, it has a more energetic propulsive system than one where you have fuel and oxidizer that release energy,” Carnegie Mellon University’s Kevin Parkin, head of the Microwave Thermal Rocket project at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. [Discovery News]

Although the laser-powered rocket system would be expensive to build, it would reduce launch costs in the long haul.

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