The impactors that pummeled the Earth and moon nearly 4 billion years ago were primarily asteroids, a new study of lunar rocks collected by Apollo astronauts suggests.

During a short stretch of time about 3.9 billion years ago, impactors bombarded our planet and the moon at a much higher rate than they do today, dramatically reshaping the surfaces of both bodies. Scientists have long wondered just what these impactors were — asteroids, comets, a mixture of the two or, perhaps, pieces of a destroyed protoplanet.

Now, a study of ancient moon rocks brought back to Earth by Apollo 16 astronauts in 1972 has identified the most likely culprit.

“Our results provide evidence that asteroid collisions were responsible for delivering material to the moon at the end of the basin-forming epoch,” said lead author Katherine Joy of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. [ The Greatest Lunar Crashes Ever ]

Analyzing moon rocks

Joy and her colleagues examined a set of lunar rocks called regolith breccias. In five of these breccias, which consolidated into rock between 3.8 billion and 3.4 billion years ago, they found fragments of long-ago impactors.

The team analyzed 30 such fragments with scanning electron microscope and electron microprobe techniques. They determined that these ancient rock pieces strongly resemble carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, whose parent bodies are a certain type of asteroid.

Further, they found that the fragments were much more uniform than lunar meteorite pieces from more recent times (from 3.4 billion years ago to the present). This suggests that the space rocks hammering the moon and Earth long ago were different — and far less diverse — than the more modern impactors.

While the ancient impactor diversity is relatively low, all of the pieces do not appear to come from the same body, Joy said. So at the moment, the evidence does not point toward a broken-up protoplanet as the single cause of the great “ lunar cataclysm.”

Researchers will keep analyzing lunar rocks to try to get to the bottom of just what happened in our cosmic neighborhood 3.9 billion years ago.

“Further studies of lunar samples from other landing sites, and identification of further projectile types, will enable us to statistically assess the diversity of impacting bodies,” Joy told Space.com via email.

Joy and her colleagues reported their results Thursday in the journal Science.

Sparking life on Earth?

The new study doesn’t address what may have caused the increased bombardment rate 3.9 billion years ago. But other researchers have proposed a possible mechanism — the movement of giant planets long ago.

The Nice model — so named because its developers were affiliated with the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in the French city of Nice — postulates that our solar system’s giant planets formed relatively close together, then migrated to their present locations due to gravitational perturbations.

These movements shook up the solar system considerably, the idea goes. They led to the formation of the Oort Cloud — the faraway repository of comets — for example, and destabilized the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

“Collisions increased throughout the solar system; asteroids crashed into one another, large bodies hit the moon and formed the large basins, and tens of thousands of large bodies struck Earth and Mars,” Alan Rubin of UCLA writes in a companion piece to the new study, which appears in the same issue of Science.

This ancient bombardment — seemingly such a destructive series of events — may have brought the seeds of life to Earth, or somehow helped it get a foothold on our planet.

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“Because the earliest isotopic evidence for life comes from 3.85 billion-year-old terrestrial sedimentary rocks, it seems plausible that this bombardment also influenced the origin of life on Earth,” Rubin writes.

You can follow Space.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow Space.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom  and on Facebook.

• Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz
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• Photos: Our Changing Moon

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An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station early Thursday, kicking off a four-month stay aboard the orbiting laboratory.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Joe Acaba and cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin docked with the space station at 12:36 a.m. ET Thursday as the two spacecraft soared 249 miles above the border between Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

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“Everything went very smoothly, very well,” Padalka radioed the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Mission Control Center in Moscow just after docking. 

For Acaba, the docking came as a welcome birthday present to mark his 45th birthday, NASA commentator Rob Navias said.

The three spacefliers were due to float into the orbiting lab’s hatch overnight, bringing the station back up to its full crew of six. Their fellow Expedition 31 crew members — NASA’s Don Pettit, Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko — have had the $100 billion orbiting complex to themselves since April 27.

Acaba, Padalka and Revin launched Monday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They were originally scheduled to blast off on March 29, but a botched pressure test cracked their Soyuz capsule, causing a six-week delay while another spacecraft was readied. [See Spectacular Soyuz Launch Photos]

A four-month space stay

The three new arrivals will live and work aboard the space station for four months, returning to Earth in mid-September. All will serve as flight engineers under Kononenko, the commander of the Expedition 31 mission.

Kononenko, Pettit and Kuipers boarded the orbiting lab in late December and are scheduled to depart on July 1.

Acaba has visited the station once before, on the space shuttle Discovery’s STS-119 mission in 2009. But that flight lasted just 13 days, so a long-duration stay in orbit will be a new experience for him. He said he’s really looking forward to helping advance our knowledge of how to live and work for long periods off the planet.

“There’s still a lot we don’t know about living in space, so for me personally and professionally it’s really neat to be part of that and know that you’re kind of contributing in a small way,” Acaba said in a pre-flight interview with NASA officials.

Living aboard the station will be even more novel for Revin, who had never been to space before Monday’s launch. In contrast, Padalka is an experienced spaceflier with two long stints on the station under his belt. He will become commander of the station’s new Expedition 32 mission when Kononenko, Pettit and Kuipers leave in July.

Dragon’s flight coming

The six astronauts will get to witness a historic event very soon, if all goes according to plan. The private spaceflight company SpaceX plans to launch its robotic Dragon capsule toward the station this Saturday.

The flight is a demonstration mission, to see if Dragon and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket are ready to begin a series of 12 contracted unmanned supply runs for NASA. If the test mission succeeds, it will mark the first time a private vehicle has ever docked with the orbiting lab.

If all goes well, Dragon’s first bona fide cargo mission could launch later this year, SpaceX officials have said.

You can follow Space.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow Space.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom  and on Facebook.

• Quiz: The Reality of Life in Orbit
• Gallery: SpaceX’s 1st Mission to Space Station – How It Works
• 50 Great Russian Rocket Launch Photos

© 2012 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

Students’ science experiments are about to make history, launching to space on the first attempt by a U.S. commercial company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.

And like many other historic space projects, the students’ payloads packed on board SpaceX’s Dragon capsule have their own specially-designed mission emblems, which are also flying to the orbiting laboratory.

Set to launch before dawn on Saturday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the students’ experiments, along with other cargo, will fly with SpaceX’s Dragon unmanned cargo craft as it tries to do what only government-owned vehicles have accomplished to date: approach and link-up with the space station. If successful, the mission will symbolize a sea change in the way the United States approaches space travel, with SpaceX and other companies vying to take cargo and crew members to orbiting complex.

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If the Dragon reaches orbit atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and passes a series of approach and maneuvering tests in the vicinity of the station, then NASA will give the go for the outpost’s crew to use the space station’s robotic arm to capture the capsule and berth it on the station. [ Photos: SpaceX Poised for Historic Dragon Launch ]

Should that happen, then the 15 experiments comprising “Aquarius” — the name given to the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education’s Student Spaceflight Experiments Program Mission 1 to the space station — will be among the first payloads delivered to the station on a commercial cargo craft.

The competition among students to fly experiments was stiff, as was the contest to design their mission patches. A total of 779 student teams submitted proposals for the 15 science slots and nearly 5,000 students offered 2,299 insignia ideas from which just 22 were chosen.

There be (no) Dragons

Ironically, none of the almost two dozen student mission patches that were selected to fly depict the vehicle that their experiments are riding on.

Aquarius, which utilizes liquid mixing tube assemblies that function similar to commercial glow sticks, follows two similar student flight opportunities arranged by NanoRacks LLC on NASA’s final two space shuttle missions. Further, Aquarius was first slated to fly on a Soyuz spacecraft.

When the students’ experiments were re-manifested, they went from launching on the Russian rocket to the SpaceX Dragon.

The Soyuz and space shuttle appear on quite a few of the patch designs, as do more rudimentary rockets, but the Dragon’s gumdrop shape is nowhere to be found. Many of the emblems do however, feature the International Space Station as their destination.

The designs, which range from crayon-colored creations to computer-assisted drawings, also include representations of the Earth, moon and Mars and the American flag.

One of the emblems does include a falcon, but rather than represent the rocket that is launching the Dragon capsule, the Falcon 9, the depiction of the bird is borrowed from the school’s mascot.

Like the experiments they represent, the patches hail from student teams spread across the U.S.. Selected patches symbolize schools in California, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio and Texas.

Two tickets, round trip

The students’ experiments range in focus from the effects of microgravity on bacteria to the speed of wine making — fermentation — in space. Other experiments examine the growth of fish and spiders in weightlessness and the use of cacti excretions to purify water.

The Aquarius package will stay in space for just under six weeks before coming back to Earth on Soyuz TMA-03M, the same spacecraft returning three space station crew members on July 1.

The students’ patches will also make the round trip, and will be embossed with a certification stating that they flew in space.

Each school community was invited to design and fly two mission patches. The emblems had to measure 4-inches by 4-inches and could only be produced on paper.

The Dragon that is bringing the experiments and patches to space will make its own return to Earth about a month earlier. Assuming a May 22 berthing with the station, its re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean is expected on May 31.

Follow collectSPACE on Facebook and Twitter @ collectSPACE and editor Robert Pearlman @ robertpearlman. Copyright 2012 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

• Quiz: How Well Do You Know SpaceX’s Dragon Spaceship?
• Gallery: SpaceX’s 1st Mission to Space Station – How It Works
• NewSpace: The Orbital Industrial Revolution

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A small, faint asteroid will be coming into view this week, and lucky skywatchers with the right tools could catch a glimpse of the space rock.

In the first few years of the 19th century, astronomers discovered four new bodies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Three of these asteroids, Ceres, Pallas and Vesta, were fairly large objects, measuring between 592 and 319 miles across.

The fourth asteroid, Juno, was much smaller and fainter. It was discovered by the German astronomer Karl Harding in 1804.

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Irregular in shape, Juno measures 199 by 166 by 124 miles with an average diameter of 145 miles. This makes Juno about the size of the state of Maine.

At its brightest, Juno is only magnitude 7.4, which is much too faint to be visible with the unaided eye. Astronomers use magnitude to determine how bright objects appear in the night sky. Essentially, the lower the magnitude, the bright something will appear. [ Skywatching Maps, Charts and Books ]

This week, Juno will arrive at a point opposite the sun, in what astronomers call “opposition.” But since the asteroid will be only magnitude 9.8, conditions are not favorable.

This is because Juno has one of the most eccentric orbits of any of the large asteroids. At its closest (perihelion), Juno is only twice as far from the sun as the Earth. At its farthest (aphelion) it is 3.4 times farther from the sun than Earth. This week’s opposition finds it close to aphelion, which was on May 8.

At magnitude 9.8, Juno will be a challenging object to see using binoculars, but should be easily visible in most telescopes, provided viewing conditions are good. However because of its tiny size, it will look like a star-like point of light in even the largest telescopes.

If Juno looks just like a star, how will you know if you’ve seen it? Make a sketch of the field and check again the next night or even the next hour. Juno will have moved detectably. This is exactly the way that astronomers detect new asteroids and comets: by their movement.

On Sunday night, Juno will be nicely framed by two fairly bright stars, Yed Prior in Ophiuchus and Mu Serpentis in the western part of the only two-part constellation, Serpens.

Ophiuchus was in the news recently when some astrologers decided to add it to the 12 zodiac constellations. Astronomers found this amusing because they had recognized Ophiuchus as a large and important constellation for thousands of years. In fact, the sun, moon, and planets spend far more time in Ophiuchus than they do in Scorpius next door.

Ophiuchus is known as “the serpent bearer” also called Asclepius in roman mythology, the father of medicine. Early physicians used snake venom in some of their treatments, so Asclepius is depicted holding a severed snake: head in one hand, tail in the other.

These two halves of Serpens are known as Serpens Caput and Serpens Cauda. Juno is located between Mu, the southernmost star in Serpens Caput, and Yed Prior (Delta Ophiuchi), the westernmost star in Ophiuchus.

Be sure to also take a look at Venus, which should appear low in the northwest just after sunset. Venus is dropping rapidly towards the sun, heading for its transit on June 5 and 6. Even in modest binoculars you can clearly see Venus as a tiny crescent, backlit by the sun.

This article was provided to SPACE.com by Starry Night Education, the leader in space science curriculum solutions. Follow Starry Night on Twitter @StarryNightEdu .

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Observations of next month’s historic Venus transit may eventually help astronomers spot and study alien planets circling faraway stars, one prominent researcher says.

On June 5, Venus will cross the face of the sun from Earth’s perspective — the last time it will do so for 105 years. But the upcoming Venus transit of the sun is more than just a rare skywatching treat; it’s also a great opportunity to hone our techniques for hunting down and characterizing alien planets.

“We’re trying to do as much as we can to use the transit of Venus to understand exoplanets and their atmospheres,” Jay Pasachoff of Williams College told Space.com.

Pasachoff wrote a commentary in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, which appeared online Wednesday, detailing the research opportunities the Venus transit provides. [ The 2012 Venus Transit: Complete Coverage ]

Searching for exoplanets

Looking for transits is one of the most productive ways to find alien planets. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, for example, has detected roughly 2,300 exoplanet candidates using this method, which flags the telltale dips in a star’s brightness caused by a transiting planet.

The vast majority of these potential planets still need to be confirmed, but Kepler scientists estimate that at least 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

One potential issue with the transit method is that brightness dips can be caused by a variety of factors other than light-blocking planets. For instance, dark patches known as starspots — akin to the sometimes massive sunspots seen on our own sun — can reduce a star’s luminosity slightly.

Next month’s Venus transit comes during an active period in the sun’s 11-year activity cycle, and it’s likely that some sunspots will darken the solar surface on June 5. So the transit could give astronomers practice in picking up a planet’s signal around a spotty, variable star, Pasachoff said.

The last Venus transit, in 2004, didn’t offer that opportunity, since it occurred during a quiescent phase in the solar cycle when the sun’s face was largely spot-free. (Venus transits occur in pairs eight years apart, but these dual events happen less than once per century.) [ Venus Transit of 2004: 51 Amazing Photos ]

Characterizing planets

Venus’ trek across the solar disk may also eventually help researchers better understand exoplanets and their atmospheres, Pasachoff said.

For starters, careful study of the transit will allow astronomers to calculate Venus’ diameter, which is already known. By comparing the two numbers, scientists may get a better idea of how accurately this technique can be used to estimate exoplanet sizes.

Further, scientists who train their instruments on the transit can learn a great deal about the nature and composition of Venus’ thick atmosphere. Because researchers already know quite a bit about Venus’ air, the transit could serve as a sort of calibration exercise for future exoplanet studies.

Pasachoff and his colleagues are planning to do some work of this sort. To look for carbon dioxide, a major component of Venus’ atmosphere, they’ll put a new filter over a massive spectrograph at the National Solar Observatory in New Mexico.

“This will provide a unique, detailed spectrographic study of a relatively well-known atmosphere during a transit, which we can compare to studies of unknown exoplanet atmospheres,” Pasachoff writes in the Nature commentary.

And it’s not as if scientists know all there is to know about Venus’ air. Pasachoff is working with researchers around the world to observe the transit with multiple instruments, in an effort to learn more about the nature and evolution of Earth’s hellishly hot “sister planet.”

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“We can use this in liaison with the data coming from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express (spacecraft) to understand an intermediate level of Venus’ atmosphere better than we can from the spacecraft alone, or from the transit alone,” Pasachoff told Space.com.

A call to action

Pasachoff’s commentary in Nature is essentially a call to action. He’s urging his colleagues to take full advantage of the Venus transit, even if they’re not exactly sure how useful their data will end up being.

“It is too soon to know exactly how the study of transits in our solar system will help us to interpret observations of distant exoplanets, but transits are so rare that to squander these opportunities would be a crime,” Pasachoff writes.

“We owe it to future astronomers — especially those who will observe the next transit of Venus, in 2117 — to collect as much data as possible,” he adds. “One never knows what will prove vital to future research.”

Some other astronomers apparently feel the same way. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, for example, will watch the seven-hour transit, partly to calibrate some of its instruments and partly to learn more about Venus’ atmosphere.

And NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope will observe the transit too, albeit indirectly. Because Hubble is too sensitive to be pointed anywhere near the sun, it will use the moon as a mirror, studying light that bounces off Earth’s nearest neighbor. The goal is to determine the makeup of Venus’ atmosphere, testing out a technique that astronomers could use to study far-off exoplanets.

You can follow Space.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow Space.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom  and on Facebook.

• Photos: Astrophotographers Track 2004 Transit of Venus
• Venus Transit: Amazing Zoom From Planet’s Surface to Earth | Animated Video
• Skywatching Books, Maps and Charts

© 2012 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

Stars like our sun can release “superflares,” explosions of up to 10,000 times more energy than the solar flares seen from our sun, researchers say.

However, it looks unlikely that our sun currently has superflares, scientists added.

Astronomers have previously detected superflares from a variety of star types, which release bursts that have 10 to 10,000 times more energy than the largest solar flare ever detected from our sun. Scientists wanted to know how common these outbursts might be from stars like the sun — those with masses and temperatures similar to our star. Even normal solar flares can damage satellites, endanger astronauts and wreak havoc on electrical grids on Earth, suggesting that superflares might be catastrophic to life on Earth.

Until now, few superflares have been detected from sunlike stars. This rarity has hampered detailed analysis of what might cause them to happen. Now, with NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite, researchers have a way to analyze many sunlike stars at once. The scientists monitored about 83,000 sunlike stars over 120 days and detected 365 superflares from 148 of the stars, each lasting one to 12 hours.

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Slowly rotating solar-type stars were responsible for only 101 of the superflares seen in the sample. This suggests that slowly whirling stars like our sun have superflares much less often than rapidly spinning ones. [ Video: No Chance of Superflares Destroying Earth in 2012 ]

Somewhat regular fluctuations in the brightness of the superflaring stars hints they all possess large starspots, much larger than the sunspots seen on our sun. This suggests they are caused by magnetic activity of the stars, just as solar flares are linked with sunspots and solar magnetic activity. Rapidly spinning stars are expected to experience more magnetic activity than slower-whirling ones, which likely explains why they have more superflares.

Scientists had thought superflares of sunlike stars were caused by magnetic interactions between the stars and so-called hot Jupiters — gas giant planets orbiting extraordinarily near their stars, at a tenth or less of the distance of Mercury from our sun. However, the researchers found that no hot Jupiters were discovered around any of the superflaring stars they studied, suggesting that superflares from sunlike stars are actually only rarely linked with hot Jupiters.

On average, sunlike stars appear to release superflares 100 times stronger than any known solar flare about once every 800 years, and flares 1,000 times stronger than solar flares about every 5,000 years, researchers estimated. Still, that might not mean that a superflare 100 times stronger than any known solar flare really happens every 800 years — for instance, a sunlike star might release 100 superflares in 10 years, but then no more for another 79,990 years, which would still produce the same average, said study lead author Hiroyuki Maehara, an astronomer at Kyoto University in Japan.

The researchers noted there is no historical record of superflares from our sun in the past 2,000 years, and strong evidence indicates that there has not been one in the past billion years. “Most superflare stars have large starspots, but the present sun does not,” Maehara explained. “Further studies are necessary to understand why and how such large starspots are formed on solar-type stars, and whether our sun can produce superflares.”

To know whether superflares happen on the sun, “we need detailed observations — for example, high-resolution spectroscopy — of superflare stars, which allow us to know whether superflare stars are really similar to our sun,” Maehara told Space.com.

The scientists detailed their findings online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Follow Space.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

• Solar Showdown: How Well Do You Know Our Sun?
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When a former American schoolteacher, a veteran Russian space station commander, and a rookie Russian cosmonaut launched toward the International Space Station Monday, their fiery blastoff was not without a touch of irony: The trio rode a pillar of flame into orbit while carrying a toy mascot known for promoting fire safety.

NASA astronaut Joe Acaba and cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin launched with Smokey Bear, a toy of the mascot used by the U.S. Forest Service to promote awareness of the dangers of human-started fires. The astronaut and cosmonauts lifted off atop a Russian Soyuz TMA-04M at 11:01 p.m. EDT from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch began the crew’s four-month stay in space.

Flying — and floating — above the crewmates’ heads was the small Smokey toy, continuing a Russian custom for the crew to select a talisman and “zero-g indicator” to hang from the spacecraft’s control panel. The toy began to float once they reached orbit, providing a visual clue that they were weightless and safely in space.

Traditionally, the Soyuz’s Russian commander provides the doll, often chosen by a child, but for this flight, the honor was turned over to the American aboard. [Photos: Soyuz Rocket's Spectacular Launch]

“Gennady’s been very gracious and offered us new fliers the opportunity to fly the talisman,” Acaba said. A veteran of a 2009 space shuttle mission to the space station, this was Acaba’s first launch on a Russian rocket and his first time serving as a station flight engineer.

Acaba’s choice of mascot — Smokey Bear — drew questions in Russia but was very recognizable back in the United States.

Smokey goes to space

The small brown bear doll with Smokey’s iconic campaign hat and blue jeans was presented to Acaba by a friend.

“It was a gift that was given to me by a friend of mine who works for the U.S. Forest Service,” Acaba said during a pre-flight press conference. An avid outdoorsman, Acaba holds degrees in geology and served as an environmental education awareness promoter while in the Peace Corps.

“Smokey is a very famous icon in the United States,” he said in a reply to a Russian journalist, who asked about the meaning behind Smokey. “He’s been around since the 1940s and tries to remind us about what the problems are when you have human-caused fires and tries to remind us to protect the environment as well as we can.” [Photos: Wildfires Seen From Space]

Smokey is the center of the longest running public service campaign in U.S. history, according to a spokesperson for the Ad Council, which created the character in 1944 for the U.S. Forest Service.

Smokey is perhaps best known for his catchphrase, “Only you can prevent wildfires.”

“Smokey’s message is as relevant today as it was in 1944 and we’re continuing to work with the U.S. Forest Service to identify innovative and engaging ways to help all Americans understand their role in wildfire prevention,” the Ad Council’s vice president for public relations and social media Ellyn Fisher told collectSpace.com. “A partnership with NASA to get Smokey to outer space would continue to elevate the conversation and we would be thrilled.”

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According to Fisher, this is the first time Smokey Bear has flown in space, although a patch featuring the mascot was lofted with a weather balloon payload to 100,000 feet (30,480 meters) in May 2011.

Although Smokey Bear is an American character, Acaba’s Russian commander agreed with the selection.

“I supported Joe in this decision,” Padalka said.

Presents and counted for

According to Fisher, Smokey will celebrate his birthday in space. The Forest Service mascot will turn 68 on Aug. 9.

The bear is not the only crew member though, celebrating his birthday while in orbit.

Acaba will turn 45 on Thursday, on the same day he and his two Soyuz TMA-04M crewmates will dock their spacecraft and come aboard the space station. The link up is targeted for 12:38 a.m. EDT.

A month later, the Expedition 31 crew will celebrate double birthdays. Both Padalka and commander Oleg Kononenko were born on June 21, in 1958 and 1964 respectively.

Revin, as the only TMA-04M crew member whose birthday preceded their launch (it was in January), packed presents for his colleagues.

“it was my duty to bring some birthday gifts for them,” he said. “I hope to make a pleasant surprise. I hope they will find these presents useful during their flight. I also hope these presents of mine will lift their spirits a bit.”

“You’ll find out what kind of birthday gifts I am carrying via (Mission Control) MCC-Moscow — they’ll report about that — when the dates come,” Revin added.

As for himself, Revin chose to bring a small but symbolic stuffed doll.

“I know my comrades take small souvenirs with them and I’m taking a small kangaroo,” the first-time flier said. “We all know that kangaroos hop, they jump, they leap forward, (and) so this is kind of a leap forward for me.”

Follow collectSpace on Facebook  and Twitter @collectSpace and editor Robert Pearlman @robertpearlman. Copyright 2012 collectSpace.com. All rights reserved.

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