2011- New Challenges and Hope

The discovery of the first Earth twin, the rise of robot avatars and major leaps forward for commercial space flight are just some of the developments that will define 2011 - or will they?
 Last year, we used this slot to preview the stories we were most looking forward to in 2010. Some happened: the first cells with synthetic genomes were created and there is now a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. Others... not so much. Even the first of NASA's shuttles to be scheduled for retirement failed to make its final flight.

This year we decided to take prediction science a step further, by enlisting the powers of Samuel Arbesman, who works on computational approaches to the study of science at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He is pioneering ways to employ scientometrics - a field that attempts to measure scientific progress - to make predictions about when new discoveries will occur. In September, he famously used the properties of known alien worlds to predict that the first life-friendly exoplanet had a 50 per cent chance of being found before May 2011; such a planet showed up a few weeks later.
We asked Arbesman to apply similar methods to a list of breakthroughs we thought might happen in 2011. He whittled this down to four that lent themselves to his methods, and attempted to calculate the probability of each one occurring in the next 12 months.
In the articles below you can gauge these predictions for yourself, along with four more stories that we reckon have a good chance of defining 2011.

Earth's doppelganger

Like meeting an estranged twin you didn't know you had, Earthlings will thrill at finding their planetary double. To predict the timing of this momentous occasion, we turned to a measure of "Earth-like-ness" devised earlier this year by one of us (Arbesman), along with Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. This "habitability index" is based on estimates of a planet's average temperature and size. "Hot Jupiters", searingly hot worlds that orbit their hosts in just days, score close to zero, while one with similar properties to Earth would get a value of 1.
In September, plotting the index of each planet against the date of its discovery and extrapolating the resulting curves predicted that an Earth-like planet would be found by May 2011. Two weeks later, such a planet - Gliese 581 g - was spotted although the detection is awaiting further confirmation.Exoplanet-hunting may get a boost in February, when NASA's Kepler telescope is set to release a flood of data. Even if Earth's twin doesn't emerge then, there are plenty of other exoplanet searches that could spot it too. Samuel Arbesman and Rachel Courtland

The internet Boom

The internet will be weaving its way around the world for decades, but will there be fewer new users in 2011 than there were in 2010? The internet is already considered so important in Finland, Spain and Estonia that access is a legal right. And the list of online possibilities keeps on growing. In 2010, the launch of Apple's iPad and other touchscreen computers made surfing more fun and intuitive, while several smartphone operating systems, especially Google's Android, took off, extending the mobile net's reach.

The Electric car

Gentlemen - and women - plug in your engines. This will be the year of the electric car. No, seriously. After seemingly endless testing, technical hiccups and plain reluctance on the part of manufacturers to move electric vehicles from the concept phase to the showroom, it's finally happening. A fleet of new cars powered by the plug instead of the pump will take to the road in 2011.
Leading the charge is the Chevy Volt. With a 16-kilowatt-hour battery and a 110-kilowatt (149-horsepower) electric motor, it can go 60 kilometres on a single charge, plenty for commuting and weekend grocery runs. Critics point out that a 1.4-litre gasoline engine kicks in when the battery runs down, making the Volt a mere hybrid rather than a fully fledged electric car.

A new Hope Stem Cell

Human embryonic stem cells have inspired hope and loathing in almost equal measure. Next year hESCs could prove their worth, thanks to trials of two very different treatments.HESCs are unique in their ability to form all 200 tissues of the human body. In principle, cells derived from them could regenerate almost any tissue or organ. But because they come from embryos that are later destroyed, their use is controversial. To pacify the opposition the stem cells need to live up to expectation.
Within weeks, surgeons will inject retinal cells derived from hESCs into the eye of an individual with Stargardt's macular dystrophy, in the hope of delaying or preventing blindness, says Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is developing the treatment. Eleven more patients are due to be injected in 2011. Any improvements in vision should be obvious and could take as little as six weeks to emerge.
The eye, however, is something of a special case. Insulated from the immune system, cells there are less likely to be rejected than in other parts of the body. To find out whether hESCs have broader therapeutic potential, we need to look to another, more ambitious trial.In October, a paralysed person received a spinal injection of hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Ten more patients are due to receive cells in 2011. The stem cells should repair damaged nerves and prompt the growth of new ones, says Geron of Menlo Park, California, which is developing this treatment.
Unlike the ACT trial, the benefits may take longer to show themselves. If the spinal cells do no more than show they are safe, this will be an important milestone. Also in the pipeline are therapies to restore sight in people with age-related macular degeneration and blood cells for use in transfusions.

Private Space Taxies

PRIVATE companies have been promising for years that they can slash the cost of space travel, breaking the government monopoly on space flight and opening up the final frontier to the rest of us. At long last these efforts may be bearing fruit.On 8 December, the California-based firm SpaceX launched its Dragon capsule into orbit and safely parachuted it into the ocean - the first time a private company has achieved the feat.
Under a contract signed with NASA in 2008, the Dragon capsule will carry cargo to the International Space Station. SpaceX founder Elon Musk hopes it will eventually be permitted to carry astronauts as well.
NASA, facing the retirement of the shuttle fleet in 2011, is actively encouraging the development of private space taxis. In 2010 alone it distributed $50 million to private space firms, including SpaceX, and Congress is considering spending hundreds of millions more in 2011.
So what do we have to look forward to in 2011? SpaceX plans two more demonstration flights, the first of which will likely blast off mid-year and is expected to fly within a few kilometres of the ISS. The second would actually dock with the station, marking another first for a non-governmental spacecraft.
Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by airline mogul Richard Branson, is also set to take some giant leaps forward in 2011

Astronomy Events and Space Launches in 2011

2 January – Conjunction between Jupiter and Uranus at 13:41 UTC, with Jupiter 34 minutes of arc to the south; the third conjunction of a triple Conjunction.
4 January – Partial Solar Eclipse visible over most of Europe, the Arabian peninsula, North Africa, and Western Asia.
3 February - Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-133 Launch, Lunch Time-1:37 am EDT
18 March – NASA's MESSENGER Spaceraft is scheduled to arrive in orbit around Mercury.
18 March – NASA's Pluto probe New Horions will cross the orbit of Uranus, after a five-year journey. This will be faster than Voyager-2, which took eight years.
01 April – Space shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134 Launch. Launch Time 3:15 am EDT . The Space Shuttle will undertake its final mission before retirement.
Pakistan will launch its first space satellite.
May - Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and Mars all visible within a roughly 6° area of sky.
1 June – Partial solar eclipse in the Arctic.
15 June – Total Lunar Eclipse, mainly visible in Africa, India, and the Middle East.
July - The Dawn Spaceraft is scheduled to arrive at the dwarf planet Vesta during July. The exact date remains uncertain.
1 July – Partial Solar Eclipse off the coast of Antarctica.
10 July – Neptune completes its first full orbit since its discovery in 1846
15 July – The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the second Dragon spacecraft, called Dragon C2. The mission will demonstrate proximity operations during an approach within 6 miles of the International Space Station.
05 August – First Mission to Jupiter NASA's Juno spacecraft will launch at 12:10 pm to 1:40 pm EDT. Juno will investigate the giant planet's formation, evolution and structure from an elliptical orbit. Mission Juno will reach Jupiter in 2016
15 August – The comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova will pass within 0.0601AU about 8,995,100 km of Earth
08 September – NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission will launch at 8:35 am - 9:14 am EDT. GRAIL includes two spacecraft in lunar orbit to study the moon's interior and thermal evolution.
08 October – The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the third Dragon spacecraft, called Dragon C3 to resupply missions to the International Space Station.
25 November – Partial Solar Eclipse in Antarctica.
25 November – NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will launch at 10:21 am from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. Mars Science Laboratory mission is the Curiosity rover, which will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life and to determine the planet's habitability.
07 December – Dragon C4 will be the fourth rocket launched by SpaceX. This mission will be the first operational cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station
10 December – Total Lunar Eclipse, visible mainly in Asia, Australia and Alaska.
25 December - Russia's flagship planetary mission, Phobos-Grunt will launch. Phobos-Grunt Mission's key goal is landing on the surface of the Martian moon Phobos and returning its soil samples back to Earth.
- Predicted Solar Maximum also predicted by other research groups for 2012
- China’s permanent space station, will be launched anytime this year. The craft, an orbiting laboratory known in Mandarin as Tiangong-1, would initially serve as a docking station for other spacecraft.

A water world 40 Light Year away !

The extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, GJ 1214b was discovered last year orbiting a dim, red star about 40 light-years from Earth. The planet is about 2.7 times larger than Earth and about 6.5 times more massive.
Based on the planet's density, astronomers estimate that GJ 1214b would be about three-quarters water with a solid core and an atmosphere—not unlike Earth. But it seems the similarities stop there. The planet is so close to its star that any water would be turned to vapor, and the atmosphere should be so thick that the pressure would be immense.
Now new measurements show that GJ 1214b's atmosphere is made of either dense, ultrahot steam or a noxious, cloudy haze of hydrogen. "Either way, it would be unpleasant if you were there," said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study.

Starlight Carries Chemical Imprints
Astronomers were able to "sample" the planet's atmosphere by watching the world pass in front of its host star, as seen from Earth.Using the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope in Chile, the team captured the light filtered around the edges of the planet when the world was blocking the star."That light has imprinted on it the signature of chemicals in the atmosphere," said study leader Jacob Bean of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Similar measurements have revealed gases such as hydrogen and sodium in the atmospheres of so-called hot Jupiters, exoplanets that are more massive than our gas giants but that orbit very close to their host stars.This is the first time, however, that astronomers have been able to analyze the atmosphere of an Earth-size planet.

Planet Has "Noxious Soup" or Steamy Blanket?
The data show that GJ 1214b's atmosphere isn't, as previously theorized, a puffy, cloud-free layer of mainly hydrogen gas. Instead the atmosphere appears to block a significant amount of light, the team reports in this week's issue of the journal Nature. For such an atmosphere to be made mostly of hydrogen, it must be topped by a thick layer of clouds like the atmosphere of Venus.
If that's the scenario, "it would make the atmospheres around the worst oil refineries look absolutely pristine," UC Santa Cruz's Laughlin said. Light that does filter through the haze would trigger chemical reactions in the hydrogen gas, creating a "noxious soup of stuff" near the planet's surface.
However, based on the new data, it's also possible that GJ 1214b's atmosphere is a dense blanket of hot water vapor, aka steam. In that case, "it would be the most unique exoplanet we've found so far," study leader Bean said. "We have nothing like that in our solar system."