Well they’re not moon shoes, but a new device called the iShoe developed by an MIT graduate student may have your grandmother channeling her inner astronaut.

Lieberman demonstrates how sensors on the iShoe insole can diagnose balance problems.

That’s because Erez Lieberman and researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology are designing new sensory insoles that may soon help doctors diagnose balance problems in senior citizens before major falls occur.

It’s based on a technology astronauts now use every time they return to earth, and one that Lieberman himself helped develop while an intern at NASA.

“The problem NASA faces is that the altered-gravity environment of spaceflight messes with the astronaut’s sense of balance,” says Lieberman, “[This technology] is currently being used to evaluate astronaut balance after return from zero-G.”

Lieberman and the iShoe team are now testing a new version of the technology; one that can help the elderly by analyzing pressure distribution on their feet.

“If we flag the existence of the problem early, a doctor or physical therapist can come in and make a better determination of the causes,” says Lieberman, “We can detect all kinds of effects. If a patient closes their eyes, our insole will know.”

With more than 250,000 Americans breaking their hips each year during major falls and 1-in-4 dying within a year of their injury, the device would be a welcome help to doctors, patients, and their families. In fact, it was his grandmother’s death after a fall that first inspired Lieberman to apply the NASA technology to senior citizens.

In the future, Lieberman hopes that iShoe will be equipped with technology that would help correct a patient’s balance issue as it occurs. It could even sound an alert when a fall occurs.

“Eventually we hope to provide subtle auditory and vibrational cues which will help the person adjust their balance. These cues will help them stand up straight and walk around confidently,” Lieberman says.

The iShoe team expects their product to be on the market with in two years.

– Julia Griffin, CNN Science & Technology

Scientists who focus their time on the Red Planet cheerfully call themselves “Martians”.  Well, it turns out these “Martians” know their turf well - and  have hit some pay dirt in the Arctic region of the Fourth Rock from the Sun. Mars Odyssey spotted the telltale signs of water ice beneath the surface from orbit a few years ago. It was that finding that helped the Martians choose a landing site for Phoenix.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University/SSV

And from the moment they touched down, they saw the tantalizing signs that the ice was there - just a few inches beneath the rusty regolith. The dozen pulsed rocket thrusters cleared off a spot that was clearly white. Could it be ice? No way to dig right beneath Phoenix - but the once the arm and shovel got to work making some shallow trenches, it didn’t take long to find that white subsurface once again.

But was it the cool find Principal Investigator Peter Smith and his team at the University of Arizona had hoped for? Or was it something else?

But then something telling happened. Some dice-sized white crumbs disappeared from one of the trenches over the course of a few days. What could or would disappear like that?

You guessed it. Water ice. It doesn’t melt there (way too cold for that), but it does sublimate (go straight from solid to gas) in the wispy atmosphere of Mars.

So now the team just has to grab some of those “dice” before they sublimate - and toss them into the oven on Phoenix’ deck - and see what is inside. Could there be some organic material frozen inside? If so, that would be a big piece of evidence that there was (or maybe even is) life on Mars. I guess it all comes down to a roll of the “dice”.

- Miles O’Brien/CNN Space Correspondent

Discovery glided to a perfect landing under blue skies at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida today.    Commander Mark Kelly put her down right on the center line of Runway 15 at the Shuttle Landing Facility, wrapping up a 5,332,723 million mile journey that began on May 31.  During their two week visit to space, they installed the main component of the Japanese Kibo Laboratory onto the orbiting outpost.

This was:

-the 123rd shuttle flight

-the 35th flight of Discovery

-the 26th shuttle mission to the International Space Station

-the 10th post post-Columbia mission

-The 98th post-Challenger mission

-There will be 10 more missions before the fleet is retired in 2010

Mark your calendars for the next shuttle mission, currently targeted to launch October 8.  Astronauts will pay a final visit to the Hubble Space Telescope to switch out stabiizing gyroscopes and install  some new instruments that will hopefully keep the Hubble operational into the next decade.

–Kate Tobin, Sr. Producer, CNN Science & Tech

Discovery will be coming home to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:15am Eastern time this morning.

Entry Flight Director Richard Jones has just given the “go for deorbit burn” call…meaning the Discovery astronauts will fire the engines at 10:10am Eastern this morning to slow the the spacecraft for atmospheric re-entry.  The approach path will bring it over the Pacific Ocean, the Yucatan Penninsula, the Gulf of Mexico, Naples, Florida, Lake Okechobee, and then into the KSC region.  The plan is for Commander Kelly to land on Runway 15 at the Shuttle Landing Facility.  Miles O’Brien talked to Kelly about it, and, all things being equal, Kelly prefers that runway.   That approach involves a series of left turns, which provide the pilot with better visibility coming in.

Miles will be covering the landing live on CNN starting about 11:10am — tune in and join us!

–Kate Tobin, Sr. Producer, CNN Science & Tech

Scientists running the Phoenix Mars Lander mission are starting to sift through new data being sent back to earth from soil samples the craft has scooped from the Martian surface. At a briefing today, mission managers said they’re getting twice the amount of data as they expected.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University/SSV

They’re especially excited by the “bright material” exposed on the Martian surface as the Phoenix scooped up soil.

The image at right shows the material in two trenches dug by the scoop (the trench on the left is dubbed “Dodo” and the one on the right is “Goldilocks”). The material appears to be ice, but some scientists say it could be a salt layer. Over the next few days, they’ll start scraping off samples of the “bright material “and placing them in the Phoenix’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) and microscope to determine the answer.

The soil sample scooped from “Goldilocks” was sprinkled into TEGA for analysis. (The sample itself was nicknamed “Baby Bear” — I’m sensing a theme here.) It yielded the first microscopic images of Martian soil sent back by Phoenix. The image below and to the right is the first soil sample studied aboard a Mars lander since the Viking missions of the 1970s, and it’s the highest resolution image ever seen of Martian soil. It shows the soil sprinkled on a silicone substrate. Closer examination reveals particles with a green tinge, possibly indicating the mineral olivine.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Mission managers say they’ll have more detailed analyses of the soil from TEGA next week.

Diane Hawkins-Cox, senior producer, CNN Sci-Tech Unit

Let’s say you see a star where there wasn’t one five minutes ago.  And it’s moving.   And it’s definitely not a plane.  

You may be looking at the International Space Station, or, after its docking today (Monday), the Space Shuttle and ISS together.

NASA operates a site that can show you the location of the two  — and when you might be able to catch a fleeting glimpse of them from your own yard:  Just add clear skies, darkness, and a relative absence of bright city lights

The ISS Viewing Schedule comes with an applet where you can enter your location or ZIP code, and you’ll get the time and date of when to look, along with the location in the sky of where to look.    The next one for my home outside Atlanta is June 3 at 10:51pm.

Peter Dykstra   Executive Producer   CNN Science and Tech

The Discovery crew is on a mission to repair perhaps the most famous commode in the solar system. They are carrying a 35 lbs pump that provides the suction necessary to remove liquid waste - and separate out gases. The pump in the station’s sole toilet failed more than a week ago. The toilet is part of the Russian made living module called Zvezda. The crew installed one spare and it failed. Put in the second spare (same manufacturer lot number) and it failed as well. The Russians then gave another pump (from another lot) to a NASA employee who carried it in a diplomatic pouch from Moscow to Orlando - drove to the Cape and loaded it onto Discovery in the wee hours of Thursday morning. The fact that two spares failed is kind of odd. But put that together with the seriously odd things that have happened on the last two Soyuz landings (malfunctions led to a backup landing mode that amounts to a pretty scary 9-G ride back from space) and you have to wonder what is happening with Russian space manufacturing. I asked NASA Administrator Mike Griffin if he has any idea what is going on with the Russian hardware - particularly the Soyuz.

“They are honestly perplexed as they should be,” said Griffin, “but they are admitting they are perplexed as they dig into it they are not covering anything up – there is no obvious change that we or they can spot.”

Girffin says the Russians are being very open about the whole investigation and have allowed a NASA observer to sit in as they do their work.

Miles O’Brien/Space Correspodent

This is a big milestone for the space station program. The Japanese built Kibo laboratory will greatly add to the scientific potential of the station. So far, the station has not generated much good science. It takes two people just to run this 900,000 lbs orbiting ship - leaving only one person to mind the lab. Kibo lays the (way-above-the) ground work for doubling the crew size of the station from 3 to 6 next year.

“If you have got a crew of six,” Griffin told me, “four of those people can be involved in doing research which is why we are building it in the first place.”

-Miles O’Brien/Space Correspondent

Nice to hear from all the foamologists out there. For the record, at least five pieces of foam fell off the external fuel tank at about 3:30 after liftoff.

This is outside the zone of “aerodynamic concern” about foam. That is NASAese for the simple fact that stage of the ride uphill, the shuttle is in some very thin air indeed. The result: the foam does not accelerate significantly as it breaks free of the tank - and thus does not pose a serious risk of breaching the orbiter’s thermal protection system. That said, engineers will be poring over that imagery, along with high resolution still images and video of the tank shot by the crew after it separates from the orbiter. Those images will tell the team much more about the size of the pieces that broke free. On docking day (Monday), Discovery will perform the now standard rotational pitch maneuver (RPM) - or back flip - to allow the station crew to snap some high resolution still images of the tiles. If there is any damage to the tiles, they will likely see it then. Later in the mission, they will attach an extension to the shuttle robot arm - and give the hard to see spots a good look-see. So bottom line here: unlikely the falling foam is a problem - and even if so, there is little doubt the shuttle team will see it. If there is damage, they will need to determine if it is serious enough to attempt some sort of repair.

Miles O’Brien/Space Correspondent

The most talked about cargo on the shuttle Discovery?

There’s that billion dollar Japanese laboratory…

The spare parts for the toilet…

And Buzz Lightyear!

Buzz in space: talk about product placement!

And depending on whether you’re a Japanese scientist, a space station crewmember tired of dealing with a primitive potty, or the PR folks at Walt Disney World… the order may vary.

The Japanese lab, known as Kibo, will be the nerve center of a scientific outpost that’s been in the works for years. Eventually, researchers will be able to work in five different experiment modules, focusing on everything from cell biology to fluid physics.

Far less scientifically exotic, but ever so necessary in this orbiting home away from home, a gas-liquid separator, urine collector bags, filters and other hardware to fix an only partially functioning toilet in the Zvezda service module.

And one of the goofier objects to hitch a ride on a shuttle (with an important educational component, of course) is a foot tall Buzz Lightyear action figure.

Astronaut and moonwalker Buzz Aldrin shows his lighter side in a video counseling young Buzz Lightyear about what it’s like flying in space. Catch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PsOB3flufQ

Lightyear will try to get kids interested in the space program, and especially in math and science. And of course, encourage them to check out a new ride called Toy Story Mania! at both Walt Disney World in Orlando and Disneyland in California. The younger and smaller Buzz is scheduled to spend several months on the International Space Station, and return to Walt Disney World later this year.

A few sports items are also making the journey.

Among them, according to NASA: One of Lance Armstrong’s yellow jerseys from the Tour de France bicycle race, a backup jersey that New York Giants’ Eli Manning took to the Super Bowl, and the last jersey baseball’s Craig Biggio wore in a game. (He played for the Houston Astros, OF COURSE!)

Marsha Walton, CNN science and technology producer at the Kennedy Space Center