4 (UPI) -- The European Space Agency says its Rosetta spacecraft has started visually tracking its first target asteroid to determine its orbit with more accuracy.
The ESA said Rosetta started the optical navigation process Monday at a distance of about 15 million miles from the target asteroid called Steins. The optical tracking is to continue until Sept. 4, when the spacecraft will be approximately 590,000 miles from the asteroid.
"The orbit of Steins, with which Rosetta will rendezvous on Sept. 5, closing to a distance of 800 kilometers (500 miles), is only known thanks to ground observations, but not yet with the accuracy we would like for the close fly-by," said Gerhard Schwehm, ESA's Rosetta mission manager. "We will be able to use the first data set for the trajectory correction maneuver planned for mid-August."
Schwehm said that for the first three weeks of the tracking, Rosetta will image Steins twice a week and then, starting Aug. 25, it will take images daily until Sept. 4.
The ESA said the optical navigation follows a series of active check-outs of Rosetta's scientific instrumentation, which began July 5 and ended Sunday.
Study: Schizophrenia is price of evolution
LEIPZIG, Germany, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- British, German and Chinese researchers say they've determined schizophrenia is an unfortunate consequence of the rapid evolution of the human brain.
The researchers, led by Philipp Khaitovich of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined the brains of humans with and without schizophrenia and compared them with chimpanzee and rhesus macaque brains.
Khaitovich said the scientists searched for differences in metabolite concentrations and the expression of genetic instructions in order to identify "molecular mechanisms involved in the evolution of human cognitive abilities."
He said they found the genes and metabolites altered in schizophrenia, especially those related to energy metabolism, are those that rapidly changed during evolution.
"Our new research suggests schizophrenia is a by-product of the increased metabolic demands brought about during human brain evolution. Our brains are unique among all species in their enormous metabolic demand. If we can explain how our brains sustain such a tremendous metabolic flow, we will have a much better chance to understand how the brain works and why it sometimes breaks," he added.
The study appears in the journal Genome Biology.
