NASA's last space shuttle mission will be delayed until November so scientists can adapt a $2 billion particle detector for an extended life aboard the International Space Station

NASA’s last space shuttle mission will be delayed until November so scientists can adapt a $2 billion particle detector for an extended life aboard the International Space Station, officials said Monday.Three more shuttle flights remain and the space agency had planned to close out the program by September 30 with a final mission by shuttle Discovery to resupply the orbital outpost.That mission now moves ahead of shuttle Endeavour’s launch with the Alpha Magnetic Spectometer, a 16-nation project overseen by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”It became clear that (Endeavour) could not fly in July like was on the manifest,” said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring.

AMS, which is designed to look for antimatter particles and other exotic forms of matter in space, had been set to fly in July. But with the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the space station program until at least 2020, scientists decided to switch the detector’s cryogenically cooled superconducting magnet, estimated to last three years, to a permanent magnet that would last 10 to 18 years.

“We began thinking about this at the end of last year and the beginning of January when people were talking about the space station going to 2020 and beyond,” Ting said in an interview.”I began to realize that we’d have a museum piece.”

Dumping AMS’ liquid helium-cooled magnet cuts the device’s power to bend the path of charged cosmic particles as they pass through five different types of detectors. But Ting says adding more precision detectors and the extra years in orbit more than compensates for that.The replacement magnet, which flew in a prototype AMS during a 1998 shuttle mission, was taken out of clean room storage in Germany and tested. No degradation was found and it is scheduled to arrive at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — in Geneva where the AMS is being assembled this week.

Delaying the last shuttle flight will give the 6,000 to 8,000 workers at the Kennedy Space Center preparing for layoffs a short reprieve.

Obama’s budget request for NASA for the year beginning October 1, which still must be approved by Congress, includes $600 million to keep the program going until the end of the year if necessary to accommodate technical or weather-related delays.The schedule change is not expected to affect the final planned flight of shuttle Atlantis, targeted for liftoff on May 14 to deliver a Russian docking port to the station.(Reuters)

SYDNEY Energy giant PetroChina Co. Ltd. has pulled out of a $40 billion deal to buy natural gas from a project off Australia

SYDNEY Energy giant PetroChina Co. Ltd. has pulled out of a $40 billion deal to buy natural gas from a project off Australia, leaving Woodside Petroleum Ltd. looking for new customers.Reasons for letting the preliminary agreement lapse were not given, but analysts said Tuesday it was probably because PetroChina had become dissatisfied with the cost in the two years since the deal was signed.Woodside informed Australia’s stock exchange on Monday that an early stage agreement for the Browse Basin liquefied natural gas project off Western Australia state had not been settled by a Dec. 31 deadline and had now lapsed.A spokesman for PetroChina Ltd. in Beijing, Liu Weijiang, said on Tuesday he had no information on the deal and asked a reporter to call again later.Under the September 2007 agreement, PetroChina would potentially buy up to three million metric tons (3.3 million tons) of LNG per year from the project for up to 20 years.At the time, it was one of Australia’s largest export deals with an estimated worth of AU$45 billion ($40 billion).Since then, deals between prospective developers of the massive gas reserves on Australia’s so-called Northwest Shelf and customers have accelerated, with companies in China, Japan and South Korea signing on to multibillion dollar, two-decade agreements last year.The lapse of the PetroChina deal means that the terms, including price, for a large chunk of the Brown Basin gas are once again fully open to negotiation.

“The deal was good at the time, but in the past two years things have been changing rapidly,” said Peter Kopetz, energy analyst with Western Australia-based State One Stockbroking.PetroChina would probably look for other sources of gas, said Yang Wei, an oil industry analyst at Guotai Junan Securities in Shanghai.”I think it’s probably that the price is not right. It’s too expensive,” he said.PetroChina in August reached a $41 billion deal to buy natural gas from another project in the same region, that is being developed by Chevron.Chinese energy companies have signed a multibillion-dollar string of deals to import oil and gas from the Gulf, Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere to feed the demands of the country’s rapidly growing economy.Woodside had hoped the Browse project would be in production by 2012, but the company said Monday this timeline was no longer realistic, and a final investment decision by partners including Woodside, Chevron, BHP Billiton and Royal Dutch Shell would not be made until mid-2012.

Woodside said an agreement for CPC Corporation Taiwan to buy up to three million metric tons (3.3 million tons) of LNG per year for up to 20 years from the Browse project was still in place, and the company was looking for more customers.”Woodside remains in ongoing discussions with other Asia-Pacific LNG customers in relation to potential sales from its portfolio of Australian LNG developments, including the Browse project,” Woodside said in a statement.Woodside shares closed just shy of 1 percent higher on Tuesday at AU$47.97.(AP)

G.M. to Decide Saab’s Fate Next Week

DETROIT  General Motors said it could decide next week to close its Saab Automobile unit after the Swedish company that planned to buy the brand backed out.It was the third time in less than two months that a sale of a G.M. brand has been called off, reflecting the difficulty of selling underperforming divisions in the midst of a global sales slump.G.M. said on Tuesday that its board planned to determine next week what to do with Saab. Closing the brand, as G.M. initially planned to do if it could not find a buyer, is a strong possibility, two people with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the board had not made its decision.

The other options for G.M. are to seek another buyer or keep Saab, though both those steps are considered less likely.

When Penske Automotive terminated its deal to buy Saturn in September, G.M. immediately announced that the brand and its dealerships would close.Koenigsegg, which agreed to buy Saab in June, issued a statement attributing its decision to G.M.’s moving too slowly.“The time factor has always been critical for our strategy to breathe new life into the company,” Koenigsegg said. “Unfortunately, delays in closing this acquisition have resulted in risks and uncertainties that prevent us from successfully implementing the new Saab business plan.”Officials at G.M, who were caught off-guard by the deal’s collapse, denied responsibility. “We negotiated in good faith and we met all our timing obligations under the agreement,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Renee Rashid-Merem, said.

“We’re obviously very disappointed with the decision to pull out of the Saab purchase,” G.M.’s chief executive, Fritz Henderson, said in a statement.Three weeks ago, G.M. backed out of a deal to sell its European operations, Adam Opel, to a Canadian parts supplier and Russian bank.It has a tentative deal to sell Hummer to a Chinese industrial machinery manufacturer, but the Chinese government has not given its approval.Meanwhile, the Ford Motor Company spent nearly a year shopping around its Swedish brand, Volvo, before entering into exclusive talks with the Chinese carmaker Geely last month.

John Casesa, an auto analyst with the firm Casesa Shapiro Group, said the collapse of the Saab and Saturn deals was more a symptom of the state of the automobile industry than of any missteps by G.M.“Saab is a weak brand in a market where there are no buyers,” Mr. Casesa said. “Car companies are in no mood to buy anything and financial sponsors aren’t able to buy anything. Saab wouldn’t be an easy sale in a good market.”Saab, which filed for bankruptcy protection in Sweden in February, has been a perennial money-loser and is among G.M.’s smallest brands, with sales of 93,000 vehicles worldwide last year.

It is on pace to sell fewer than 10,000 vehicles in the United States this year.Closing Saab would cost G.M. considerably less than it is spending to shut down Saturn, analysts said, and failing to sell Saab is not expected to affect G.M.’s post-bankruptcy recovery.G.M. paid $600 million for half of Saab in 1990 and $125 million for the rest in 2000. Terms of the deal with Koenigsegg have not been revealed, but it was contingent on $600 million of financing from the European Investment Bank and Swedish government guarantees.Joran Hagglund, the Swedish secretary of state for industry, said on Tuesday that it was too early to know if it was the end of the line for Saab, but he said that there was no chance of the government stepping in.David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris.