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Straight ahead on "Our World" ... NASA's latest steps toward a return to the Moon... America's threatened bird species ... and heartbreak and your heart:
GLASSMAN: "After heart attack, depression increases the risk that you'll die [by] 350 percent. It is as strong a risk factor as the strongest single medical risk factor."
Those stories, worrying about black holes, a year-end guide to some hot consumer electronics, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
On Wednesday, NASA announced the award of the last major contract for the Ares I rocket, part of the next-generation system that will carry humans into space after the shuttle fleet is retired in a few years.
The Ares rocket and the Orion crew capsule that it will blast into space are part of the U.S. space agency's Constellation program aimed at sending astronauts back to the Moon and then to Mars.
The target date for a moon landing is 2020, almost 50 years since the last Apollo astronauts visited the moon.
Although the general outlines of the mission are shaping up, NASA still hasn't decided whether the Orion spacecraft will return to an ocean spashdown, as American spacecraft did in the 1960s and '70s, or end their mission on dry land, as the Soviets have done.
"The simple answer is, we have not picked a landing mode for the Orion yet. Both options are still on the table."
NASA Associate Administrator Rick Gilbrech told reporters there are plusses and minuses in both approaches. Constellation program manager Jeff Hanley says the first test flights will land in water until they are confident that the guidance system is sufficiently reliable and accurate for a pinpoint landing.
HANLEY: "If you're going to land on land eventually, you want to be able to have proven the guidance system fairly robustly, because the consequences of landing short [of your target] in the Western United States ? in other words, landing in the mountains or landing on San Francisco ? the consequences are pretty grim."
As that suggests, flying to the Moon, let alone Mars, is something that NASA plans to do step-by-step, including flights to the International Space Station some five years before attempting to land on the Moon.
NASA is taking an incremental approach to human space exploration ? much as it did in the 1960s, first with the Mercury, then Gemini, and then Apollo manned spaceflight programs ? starting now with the International Space Station, the ISS, but moving more slowly because NASA today lacks the Cold War-fueled budget of the Apollo era.
HANLEY: "If you look at that whole program, from Mercury on through the Apollo program, it was an incremental buildup in capability. That's exactly what we're doing here. ISS is our Mercury for going to Mars. Lunar outpost is our Gemini. And of course, going to Mars is the ultimate Apollo for this generation. The challenge is how to do it on budgets that Apollo didn't have to deal with."
As it plans to send humans to the Moon, NASA isn't forgetting robotic exploration. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is set to launch in about a year to study and measure the Moon from orbit. Riding on the same rocket will be another unmanned mission called LCROSS, or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. The two-ton upper stage of the rocket it arrived on will crash into a crater near the moon's south pole, and the LCROSS satellite will fly through the material that is ejected, studying the lunar soil and looking for signs of water.
MUSIC: Ray Brown, Monty Alexander & Russell Malone ? "Fly Me to the Moon"
Time again to reach into the Our World mailbag to answer a listener science question.
We have an email from Uchenna Ezeani in Jos City, in Nigeria who wants to know about black holes. Specifically he's wondering about the possibility of a black hole destroying Earth.
As if we didn't have enough things to worry about.
Well anyway, to help us learn more about black holes we have James Trefil, a physics professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Thanks for joining us today, professor.
TREFIL: "My pleasure."
Q: Before we get to the destruction of our planet, let's back up a bit. What is a black hole?